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Altering Consciousness

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Altering Consciousness
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Volume 1: History, Culture, and the Humanities

Etzel Cardena 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 Cardena and Michael
Winkelman, editors.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780313383083 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN 9780313383090 (ebook)
1. Consciousness. I. Cardena, Etzel. II. Winkelman, Michael.
BF311.C2773 2011
154.4dc22
2010054086
ISBN: 9780313383083
EISBN: 9780313383090
15 14 13 12 11

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

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Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface: Extending Our Knowledge of Consciousness
Charles T. Tart
Chapter 1

Altering Consciousness: Setting Up the Stage

Etzel Cardena

Chapter 2

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness:

The Integrative Mode of Consciousness
Michael Winkelman

vii
ix
1

23

Part I: Historical Perspectives

Chapter 3

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from

Prehistory to Late Antiquity
Yulia Ustinova

45

Chapter 4

Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness

73
in the Christian Western Tradition
Moshe Sluhovsky

Chapter 5

Altered Consciousness from the Age of Enlightenment

Through Mid20th Century
Etzel Cardena and Carlos S. Alvarado

Chapter 6

89

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness:

113
A 50-Year Retrospective
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

Michael Winkelman

159

Chapter 9

Altered Consciousness in Society

Charles Whitehead

181

Chapter 10 Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness in

Contemporary Counterculture
Graham St John

203

Part III: The Humanities

Chapter 11 Altered Consciousness in Philosophy
Jennifer M. Windt

229

Chapter 12 Altered Consciousness in Religion

Antoon Geels

255

Chapter 13 Colored Inklings: Altered States of Consciousness

and Literature
Wendy E. Cousins

277

Chapter 14 Altered Consciousness in Performance: West and East 301

Phillip B. Zarrilli
Chapter 15 Altered Consciousness and Modern Art
Mark Levy
Chapter 16 Time Is the Key: Music and Altered States
of Consciousness
Jorg C. Fachner
About the Editors
Advisory Board
About the Contributors
Index

327

355

377
379
381
385

Acknowledgments

We want to acknowledge rst 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 rst-rate intellects who laid the groundwork for integrating the insights
of alterations of consciousness into our views of reality. Among the founders of modern psychology and anthropology there were notables such as
William James and Andrew Lang who articulated and incorporated alterations of consciousness into their theories of human mind and behavior.
Even during the decades-long exile of consciousness by behaviorism,
some brave souls dared to engage in research on altered states, among
them Stanley Krippner, Arnold Ludwig, Robert Ornstein, and Jerome
Singer in psychology, E. E. Evans-Wentz, Erika Bourguignon, Michael
Harner, Joseph Long, and Charles Laughlin in anthropology, and Albert
Hofmann in pharmacology. Among those who helped to point out the
importance of studying alterations of consciousness as a basic element of
human experience, the leading gure in establishing them as a legitimate
area of scientic inquiry was Charles T. Tart, an erstwhile engineering student turned psychologist.
Our two volumes are dedicated to these and the many other pioneers
of inquiry into consciousness who provided the foundations for the perspectives developed here. We thank Debbie Carvalko, the senior acquisitions editor who made Altering Consciousness possible, and our many
contributors, without whom these volumes would not have seen the light
of day. We especially would like to thank Julie Beischel, Cheryl Fracasso,

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 extraordinary images of Remedios Varo in our covers, and of Judith Go mez del
Campo, who made it happen.

Dedications
Michael dedicates these volumes to the next generation of investigators
who will take the foundations of a multidisciplinary science of altered consciousness described here and produce a more comprehensive
paradigm for understanding these inherent aspects and potentials
of human nature.
Etzel dedicates Altering Consciousness to:
My dear departed, Ma (May Buelna de Cardena), Blueberry, and Ninnifer, whose living presence will accompany me to my dying breath.
And to my beloved princesa holandesa Sophie:
. . . somos mas que dos piezas de rompecabezas, le dijo la arena al
mar, somos algo nuevo y distinto.

Preface: Extending Our

Knowledge of
Consciousness
Charles T. Tart
Some people have called me the father of altered states research, correctly or not, so let me play that role to introduce this very important Altering Consciousness set, hopefully entertaining you with a recollection of the
early history of studying altered states while making some methodological
points and adding some bits of history.
Theres 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 nds his somewhat tipsy neighbor
crawling around on hands and knees under a streetlamp, earnestly searching for something.
What are you looking for?
My house key.
Oh, Ill help. So our protagonist gets down on hands and knees and
searches too, but is unable to nd 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.

Ive 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, scientically rigorous studies here in the light cast by ordinary consciousness. Most of our colleagues are here in the lamplight of

Preface

normal consciousness and we support, approve of, and reward each

other. But, funny thing, we have this nagging feeling we havent actually
gotten into some houses. . . .
When I was a child I had vivid dreams, mostly pleasant and interesting, sometimes nightmarish, occasionally lucid. What was this strange
world I was experiencing? Why was it so different from my ordinary waking world? I learned to y in my dreams, for example, and it was really
neat! At rst I had to run and ap 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 didnt 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, Im in graduate school. I want to do my
masters and doctoral experiments on dreams, but my advisors discourage
me. Behaviorism is still riding high, dreams are subjective, unscientic,
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 Skinners elaborate
renaming of aspects of behavior. Those clinical psychologists and Freudians were doing things in those alleys some of the time, of course, but
they didnt get much respect in the pure, upper reaches of scientic psychology. If there was a door to a house back in that alley, who wanted to
unlock it, leading down, as it were, to a basement of perverted sexual
impulses and animal aggression and craziness? Maybe neurotics and psychotics and their helpers had to go there, but not us mature, smart, welladjusted scientic psychologists!
The prevailing intellectual philosophy didnt help, either. I kept reading
everything I could nd on dreamsI was always a stubborn studentand
read an English philosophers book (Malcolm, 1959) that logically proved
that dreams didnt exist. This was one dark alley we didnt need to worry
about! Malcolms logic was so impressive I had nightmares about it all night
long. There was logic saying no dark alley, no lost keys, there was experience
beating up on me over how stupid logic can get.
Then a kind of conceptual and political miracle occurred! Aserinsky
and Kleitman (Aserinsky, 1953) found distinctive brain wave changes in
sleep with accompanying rapid eye movements (REMs), from which
awakenings produced almost 100 percent dream recall. Voila`! The dream
is now no longer subjective and unscientic, its a brain state! Its real! All
of us good psychologists bow down and worship when the brain is
invoked, because physiology is so much more real and scientic than
our derivative eld, psychology. Ive never felt that, as a psychologist, Im

Preface

doing inferior scientic 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 masters and doctoral work on
using posthypnotic suggestion to inuence the content and process of
nocturnal dreaming (Tart, 1966, 1967a).
Ive always loved psychology. As soon as I started reading in it as an
undergraduate and in graduate school, I was fascinated by the detailed
mapping going on under the bright streetlamp of ordinary consciousness.
I did begin to notice, though, that the great bulk of psychological effects
seemed to be of pretty small magnitude, a 4 percent shift in mean performance, signicant at the .05 level, two-tailed in one study, a 10 percent
shift signicant 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 couldnt do much with them, but the patterns and statistical analyses were intellectually exciting. I was an idea junkie from
childhood on, I could get off on these kinds of ndings. But where was
the big, important stuff?
Graduate school was done; time for more training doing a postdoc.
I had already been offered one at the Menninger Foundation with psychologist Gardner Murphy, whom I had personally met through some
mutual interests about what was happening in those dark alleys. Murphy
was a former president of the American Psychological Association, and
normally this would have been a prestigious postdoc. But he and his wife
had recently published a book on Asian psychology (Murphy, 1968). My
graduate school advisors were horried! 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 scientic psychologists, but Asian psychology? Yoga? Meditation?
We knew all that stuff was delusional and probably psychotic, crazy practices done by little people who sat cross-legged in the mudand had no
scientic training at all! And Menninger? That was a psychiatric organization heavily involved in psychoanalysis, that dark alley of suspicious character. So my advisors saved me. A few quick phone calls, the Old Boy
network in action, and I had a more attractive postdoc in California, where
the light was much brighter.
Indeed, very much brighter, as California was now a major center of
the Psychedelic Revolution! And it was already too late to keep me from
beyond-the-establishment inuences. While still in graduate school,
where I was quartered in the basement of the psychiatry department, they
had the EEG machines I needed for my dream (oops, I mean stage 1-REM
state verbal report) studies. One of the psychiatrists, Martin Keeler, was

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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 streetlamp of ordinary consciousness cast on the consensus consciousness sidewalk, and I got some powerful glimpses of the potential heights of human
experience as well as the depths. I wrote about what I learned from psychedelic experiences some years later (Tart, 1983).
My California postdoc was with Ernest Hilgard, another former American
Psychological Association president, and a real gentleman and scholar. His
laboratory at Stanford was devoted to doing hypnosis research thoroughly
and carefully, systematically exploring one of those dark alleys, as it were,
and Hilgard and colleagues work considerably advanced the eld. Some
of it was like the bulk of mainstream psychological research, 10 percent
changes in, say, hypnotizability with age. Other parts of it were standardized and routine, you got used to them, but really incredible. I spend
10 minutes hypnotizing a talented student with a standard procedure,
for example, reading a script really, and a few minutes later I tell him for
a minute that he cant smell anything, all sense of smell is gone, and then
I tell him, See, you cant smell, Ill hold a bottle of something with an odor
under your nose, you take a good sniff to see that you cant smell anything. What I hold 1 inch under his nostrils is a bottle of household
ammonia. He takes a deep sniff and shows no reaction! I ask if he smelled
anything, he says no. Be very careful if you try this at home: The smell is not
only powerful, its quite painful!
All this from talking to someone for a few minutes, reading a standardized script, no special hypnotic powers or the like on my part . . . For really talented volunteers, we used chemical lab ammonia that was 10 times
as strong.
My years of hypnosis research also repeatedly exposed me to the blindness commitment to particular methodological approaches could bring. In
my 2 years with Hilgard, for instance, a big question in the eld was
whether hypnosis was something special, an altered state of consciousness
(ASC), or just various degrees of ordinary suggestibility without any special alteration of consciousness. A partial but straightforward approach
to studying this was to either hypnotize volunteers or not and then give
them a standardized suggestibility test: Would the hypnotized people be
more suggestible? A colleague and I found considerable bias in doing such

Preface

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 dened as someone who had gone through
the standardized induction procedure; a nonhypnotized subject was
someone who had not been given that induction procedure.
Yet anyone who has ever worked with hypnosis knows that some people are only mildly responsive or not at all responsive to an induction procedure. Its also clear that some highly hypnotizable subjects can slip into
hypnosis in the course of suggestibility testing, without a formal induction
procedure. Thus the idea that one group was hypnotized and the other
was not became silly. The so-called hypnotized group contained lots of
people who were not hypnotized at all or only slightly, the so-called nonhypnotized group contained some people who were hypnotized to various
degrees. What a way to wipe out real differences! Etzel Cardena in his
introduction discusses the problem of equating an ASC with the presence
of an induction procedure, and makes this same point. I cant emphasize
enough how important it is! An altered state of consciousness must be assessed
by reported or observed signicant changes in the quality of a persons consciousness. We are psychologists and should not be ashamed, as behaviorists would have us be, to observe and study consciousness.
I would like to think this fallacious equating of induction processes
with the presence of ASCs was widely recognized and is now of only
historical interest, but, alas . . . To illustrate, I was recently sent a manuscript to review that, from its title and text, was supposed to be about
studying the effects of the psychomanteum on ESP test results. The term
psychomanteum was recently introduced by philosopher Raymond Moody
(Moody, 1992) to refer to ritual practices in classical ancient Greece. After
days of ritual preparation, including prayers and sacrices to the gods and
various rituals with the ofciating priests, often in special dark, underground temples, a person was brought into a special chamber. The chamber was very dimly lit, and from a balcony you looked down into the
smooth, mirror-like surface of a huge vat of oil. You were looking at a mirror that reected only the vague, darkened ceiling above it. The goal was
to see and hear an apparition of some deceased person to nd out important information. The cult was apparently widespread in classical Greece
but eventually suppressed.
Moody created a modern version where he would spend half a day or
more with a client who wanted to contact a deceased person that they

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Preface

had unnished business with. After exploring the many psychological

aspects of this, the client entered a dimly lit room where a large, tilted mirror in front of a comfortable lounge chair showed only a vague image
of the dark ceiling and was left there for half an hour or more. Many of
Moodys clients (more properly participants, since he was developing this
psychomanteum technique) experienced visual and auditory apparitions
and often felt they had indeed made signicant contact with the deceased
and learned important information or resolved unnished business. One
of my colleagues at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Arthur
Hastings, has developed Moodys psychomanteum procedure into a
vehicle for grief counseling, with excellent results (Hastings et al., 2002),
but, like Moodys procedure, there was signicant 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 Moodys
or the ancient Greeks . . . there was no psychological preparation to make
this special, to create a psychological set about visions or the like. My main
criticism of the manuscript was that it should be called a study of the
effects of sitting in a dimly lit room, not a psychomanteum study. Similarly, studies that claim to be studies of ASCs should provide evidence that
their assessments showed that an ASC had actually been experienced by a
particular individual, not just assume it had happened because an induction procedure was used.
Down an alley, open a certain door with a certain key, the hypnosis
key, and enormously powerful effects can occur. Often during our various
experiments, or in hypnosis research I later did at my own laboratory at
UC Davis, I would wonder, Why is psychology focused almost exclusively on all those little effects when such powerful ones can be easily
evoked? Research on hypnosis or psychedelics was but a tiny, tiny fraction of the effort in the eld of psychology and was largely ignored or
looked upon with suspicion. There was nothing wrong with rening our
knowledge of the conventional, of course, but not at the expense of ignoring other aspects of mind that were important.
My own research efforts were focused on exploring the nature of hypnosis, especially very deep hypnosis, and its potential uses to deliberately
control nocturnal dream content (Tart, 1965a, 1965b, 1966; Tart & Dick,
1970), and it was easy to keep extending and rening that work. Indeed,
two of my former students, Etzel Carden a and Helen Crawford, later
became leading investigators of hypnosis. But by the late 60s I had become

Preface

well aware that dreams and hypnosis were part of the much larger spectrum of signicant 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 didnt. There wasnt that much research
material to begin with, and it was widely scattered, a lot in places most
psychologists would never come across it, such as the basic discovery
material on lucid dreams that originally appeared in the Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research (van Eeden, 1913).
In the ASC book, I reprinted several articles each about general aspects
of ASCs, the hypnagogic state, dream consciousness, meditation, hypnosis, minor psychedelics like marijuana and major psychedelics like LSD,
mescaline and psilocybin, and some beginning psychophysiological studies of ASCs. But, as I said, in spite of intensive effort in searching widely in
the literature, there often wasnt much to nd. 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 nd 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 scientic psychologists knew all that meditation
and spiritual stuff was delusional and probably psychotic, crazy practices
done by little people who sat cross-legged in the mud. And then an article
was published in that so-prestigious journal Science (Wallace, 1970) that
showed there were physiological correlates of meditation. All of a sudden,
politically speaking, just like with dreams, meditation became real and a
legitimate topic of research. Now there are more than a thousand research
studies of meditation, although most are, from my perspective, still too
elementary, showing meditation is good for relieving stress-related problems but not yet really addressing the deeper psychological and spiritual
issues it was designed to shed light on.
Returning to my Altered States anthology, its publication was timely
and it became a bestseller for a scientic book, often serving as the textbook for courses on ASCs that now could be taught since they had a text,
and helping to stimulate research in some areas. The Altered States book is
more than 40 years old now, though, and Im very pleased these two

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Preface

volumes will replace it with much more extensive, sophisticated, and upto-date material. New research after the publication of ASCs has been
uneven, though.
For example, one of the most promising lines, research on the psychological and transpersonal effects of psychedelic drugs and their therapeutic value when used properly, had been showing great promise, although it
was still in its infancy. Such research was essentially stopped by the hysteria over drugs and the so-called war on drugs in the 70s. Studies biased
toward showing negative effects of psychedelics, which could justify the
governments position, got funded. In terms of long-term benet, 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 Ive
always valued physical and physiological ndings and contributed a little
to them myself (Tart, 1963, 1967b), I regret the effect it has had on making more phenomenologically oriented, psychological research a poor
stepchild. As I said above, I dont subscribe to the bias that anything
physical or physiological is automatically more important, real, and scientic than the psychological, and I wish my colleagues were more sensitive to the assumptions and biases in a too-materialistic approach. Indeed,
I sometimes tease my physical science colleagues by changing the usual
distinction between the hard and soft sciences by talking about the
hard and easy sciences. The physical sciences are easy; what happens
is pretty independent of the nature and mood of the scientists doing the
research, but psychology is hard because of all the biases that can creep
in. Subjects are smart, sensitive problem solvers, and many psychologists have unrecognized hopes, fears, and biases of their own that participants pick up on, to complicate things. In the 70s it looked like we were
going to really tackle problems of experimenter bias (Rosenthal, 1963,
1966) and demand characteristics (Orne, 1962), but interest quickly disappeared. I would argue it was repressed, as we have too much investment
in our status of being objective scientists, but thats too broad an issue to
go off into here, except to note that being in ASCs will sometimes make
ones biases clearand if we want to think about possible parapsychological contributions to experimenter effects, it gets really complex (Tart,
2010a).
One of my last major contributionsperhaps a mistake, perhaps
prematureto ASC research was my proposal for the creation of

Preface

state-specic sciences. Im hoping that the information provided by these

two excellent volumes will stimulate work in that direction, but we shall
see. I proposed that science (observation, theorizing, predicting, and testing, sharing all steps with colleagues, for gradual improvement in the way
our understandings t actual phenomena) could be done in some ASCs, as
well as in our ordinary, consensus consciousness. That we could explore
in those dark alleys, as well as under the bright light of ordinary consciousness. The result would be multiple, complementary kinds of understandings, based on the state-specic, 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 scientic 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 rst 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 couldnt possibly do science in any ASCs! I recognized the names of
some quite prominent scientists in this rst camp. Those in the second
camp said the idea was plausible, were enthusiastic about it, and said lets
get on with extending our knowledge by developing state-specic
sciences.
Judging by names I recognized and ranks and titles (e.g., full versus
assistant professors), the rst 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 xed
in their thinking. Being old now, its obviously true in many cases as I
can see it in myself, even though most people think Im very openminded. The most interesting letter to the editor, or rather pair of letters,
came from a psychiatrist who was doing consciousness research. His rst
letter put him in the rst camp, the idea of doing science in an ASC was
dumb and crazy. A week later, though, he wrote that while he was personally embarrassed to be writing again, his scientic integrity compelled
him to. He had been in an ASC the day before, had thought about my
state-specic 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 couldnt
have hoped for a nicer and clearer illustration of my proposal.

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Was I right about the need to develop state-specic 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?
Its much too soon to venture an answer, as almost nothing has been done
along those lines. To mention the two lines of research that are relevant, as
I noted in a later revision of the proposal (Tart, 1998), some lucid dreamers have begun making more systematic observations within lucid dreams
and communicating about them in their ordinary waking state, so possibilities are interesting there. Some mathematicians Ive corresponded
with have made me think that some aspects of mathematics work are a
state-specic science: You have to be in some kind of ASC to really have
certain kinds of mathematical insights and understand what colleagues
are talking about, even though, as with lucid dreams, the sharing with colleagues has to be done in ordinary consciousness, for better or worse. In
both cases the sharing in ordinary consciousness tends to make people
assume that the original thinking was done in ordinary consciousness
rather than in an ASC.
One of my hopes for these two volumes is that interest in and research
on ASCs will be promoted so intensively that we will move on to trying to
develop state-specic sciences and then will nd out whether they are
indeed useful supplements to knowledge or an interesting idea that
doesnt really work. Also, self-study of your own reaction to the idea of
doing science in ASCs may be quite revealing of hopes, fears, and biases.
I made one major attempt to construct a grand theory of states of consciousness, ordinary or altered, in the 1970s (Tart, 1975).1 I was dissatised with the few attempts Id seen by then (and those since then), as they
tended to greatly oversimplify the phenomena of consciousness to get an
apparently straightforward and simple theory. My approach was a systems
approach, based on my earlier work as a radio engineer and contemporary
biological and engineering approaches to life. I was not afraid of complexity per se. The so-called rule of Occams 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 theyd already read it. Friends
have teased me ever since that, in accordance with the common custom with sequels of
lms, I should have called it Son of Altered States, or Altered States Strikes Back . . . . ;-)

Preface

consciousness, changed their functioning, and had what I considered useful analyses of general principles for inducing and maintaining altered
states. It did not catch on, though, ignored in the desire for simplicity
and/or the hope that physiologists would soon explain consciousness
and all its aspects in terms of brain functioning. Its 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-specic sciences are probably my nal conceptual contributions to consciousness studies, as I expect to devote the rest of my
career to promoting the idea of developing evidence-based spiritualities
(Tart, 2010b, in press).
So, dear reader, I expect much new richness in our understanding of
consciousness and ASCs from the contributors to these two volumes
and from you. Weve made some great discoveries in the bright lamplight
of ordinary consciousness, and were ready to venture further into the
darker byways and lanes, the hidden houses of the mind, where Im certain some important discoveries await, discoveries that will complement
and greatly broaden ordinary consciousness psychology. And we might
discover that being in our ordinary state of mind (what Ive called consensus consciousness to remind us that its a product of socialization, not just
natural) is indeed, as in the old story, a kind of tipsiness, of intoxication
with beliefs and norms that is not the whole picture of reality it believes
itself to be.

References
Aserinsky, E. K. N. (1953). Regularly occurring periods of eye motility and concomitant phenomena during sleep. Science, 118, 273274.
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, 211227.
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, 83121.
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, 776783.

xix

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Preface

Rosenthal, R. (1963). On the social psychology of the psychological experiment:

The experimenters hypothesis as unintended determinant of experimental
results. American Scientist, 51, 268283.
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, 8192.
Tart, C. (1965a). The hypnotic dream: Methodological problems and a review of
the literature. Psychological Bulletin, 63, 8799.
Tart, C. (1965b). Toward the experimental control of dreaming: A review of the
literature. Psychological Bulletin, 64, 8192.
Tart, C. (1966). Some effects of posthypnotic suggestion on the process of dreaming. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 14, 3046.
Tart, C. (1967a). The control of nocturnal dreaming by means of posthypnotic
suggestion. International Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 184189.
Tart, C. (1967b). Patterns of basal skin resistance during sleep. Psychophysiology,
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Tart, C. (1969). Altered states of consciousness: A book of readings. New York:
Wiley.
Tart, C. (1972). States of consciousness and state-specic sciences. Science, 176,
12031210.
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 reections
(pp. 223233). New York: Human Sciences Press.
Tart, C. (1998). Investigating altered states of consciousness on their own terms:
A proposal for the creation of state-specic sciences. Ciencia e Cultura, Journal
of the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science, 50(2/3), 103116.
Tart, C. (2010a). Reections on the experimenter problem in parapsychology.
Journal of Parapsychology, 74, 313.
Tart, C. (2010b). Toward evidence-based spirituality. Journal of Parapsychology,
74, 3160.
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, 304315.
Troffer, S. T., & Tart, C. (1964). Experimenter bias in hypnotist performance. Science, 145, 13301331.
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Wallace, R. K. (1970). Physiological effects of transcendental meditation. Science,
167, 751754.

CHAPTER 1

Altering Consciousness:
Setting Up the Stage1
Etzel Cardena
Whats 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 neuroscientic issues of
waking consciousness and perhaps a few pathological states while maintaining a safe distance from the implications of ASC to the nature of
consciousness and our apprehension of reality. These volumes aim to
address that imbalance.
Current discussions of consciousness have mostly ignored the fact that
we transit among different states of consciousness even while being
awake, that these states exhibit differing congurations of cognition,
emotion, physiology, and behavior, and that what is postulated about one
state may not apply to others. As I have argued elsewhere (Cardena, 2009),
1

This chapter beneted from the lucid and loving suggestions of Sophie Reijman.
The standard abbreviation in this volume for altered states of consciousness both in singular and plural is ASC. Also note that to help cross-reference other relevant chapters in
the two-volume set there are editorial square brackets [ ] throughout the chapters.

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 dening ones terms and, from that perspective, the
study of consciousness in general has been fairly unwise. One of the most
confusing aspects in the literature on consciousness is that different concepts
of the term are used often without any seeming awareness of their distinctions (cf. Natsoulas, 1983). Thus, writers may speak about the problem of
consciousness when, in fact, there are many problems, including the hard
problem of the relationship between qualia and neurological processes, but
also the integration of different sources of information into an experiential
unity, personal identity across time, and so on (Natsoulas, 1981). Lack of
agreement as to what different authors actually mean when using the term consciousness seems to be more the rule than the exception, but there is nothing
to prevent discussion and organized research into aspects of consciousness
denoted by a given, specic usage of that term (Velmans, 2009, p. 142).
Throughout these volumes we will be using the terms altering consciousness (which emphasizes not only altered phenomenology but also the
procedures to bring it about), altered consciousness, and altered states of
consciousness because they have become the most recognizable and used
cognates. At the same time, I agree with Bunges (1980) warning that to
speak literally of states of consciousness reies 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 eld 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 conveniences sake.
Ludwig described an ASC as
any mental state(s), induced by various physiological, psychological, or
pharmacological maneuvers or agents, which can be recognized subjectively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the

Altering Consciousness

individual) as representing a sufcient deviation in subjective experience of

psychological functioning from certain general norms for that individual
during alert, waking consciousness. (1966, p. 225)

Tart further elaborated this concept, describing a discrete state of consciousness as a unique, dynamic pattern or conguration 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 persons ordinary, baseline state. This
distinction was developed in the concept of anomalous experiences
(Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000), but ASC and anomalous experiences
are not synonymous concepts because although some anomalous experiences constitute the baseline state for some individuals (e.g., strong synesthetic experiences for synesthetes), they occur only, if at all, during an
ASC for the rest of us. Furthermore, anomalous experience is also used for
experiences that although not necessarily occurring in an ASC may nonetheless go against the current sociocultural norm such as experiences of
putative telepathy in a Western culture.
An alternative to ASC as a qualitative shift in an overall organization of
consciousness was offered by Fischer (1986), who proposed a cartography
of states of consciousness along a continuum of sympathetic/parasympathetic
intensity. Although this was a good rst step, Fischers understanding of
sympathetic/parasympathetic interactions is simplistic (cf. Berntson,
Cacioppo, & Quigley, 1993) and has had limited inuence in the eld [but
see Winkelman, this volume], whereas Tarts has had a much broader inuence on the theory and evaluation of ASC (e.g., Farthing, 1992; Pekala &
Cardena, 2000).
Despite its popularity, there is little doubt that Tarts denition of an
ASC is difcult to operationalize. For instance, what constitutes a
dynamic pattern or conguration, 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 denition on
the individuals experience, how can we study states such as coma in
which s/he may not even be able to report any experience (if there is one;
see Noirhomme & Laureys, Volume 2). In their recent Altered State Theory
of Hypnosis, Kallio and Revonsuo (2003) sought to address these problems
and provide a new way of conceptualizing an ASC. However, their proposals are neither new nor do they solve the problem. They write that a state of
consciousness refers to background mechanisms outside the phenomenal

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 consciousness is by denition caused by brain mechanisms (see below), what
they propose is nothing new. Their background mechanisms could be
easily exchanged for dynamic pattern, and Tart (1975) distinguished
decades ago between the (phenomenal) contents of consciousness and
states of consciousness. Kallio and Revonsuo also reiterate the earlier,
although not credited, position (Natsoulas, 1983) that ASC create phenomenal contents of consciousness that misrepresent or create delusional
beliefs of the surrounding world and oneself (pp. 141142). This type
of nave realism is questionable (cf. Hoffman, 2009), and it completely
ignores one of the most interesting facts about hypnosis and similar procedures, namely that, up to an extent, committing to that delusional belief
may bring about experiential and physiological changes that no longer
make it delusional (Cardena & Beard, 1996). Furthermore, it assumes
that mystical and other states are delusional by denition, although that
is very much an open question (Wulff, 2000; see also Geels, this volume,
Beauregard, and Windt, Volume 2). The notion that the ordinary state
of consciousness is not at least partly delusional or incomplete is another
questionable assumption (Hoffman, 2009; Tart, 1975; see also Shear,
Volume 2). Mishara and Schwartz (Volume 2) propose a phenomenologically grounded approach to this issue in which ASC provide alternatives
to the natural but naive realism. This position, to me, is less biased and
more promising than that argued by Kallio and Revonsuo.
Kallio and Revonsuo (2003) also irt 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, dening consciousness as a brain function (or assuming that ordinary consciousness
is the state that provides us the best description of all of reality) begs the
question and brings about an unjustied 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 unspecied ASC, for instance the trance after a hypnotic
induction, or while listening to a beautiful piece of music, or while experiencing being possessed by another entity, or while becoming unresponsive
to others, or while fainting, and so on. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
described six different senses of trance, and many authors use the term to

Altering Consciousness

avoid having to actually dene what it is that they are describing either in
this or in other cultures (Cardena & 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 ones 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 at
or hiding them behind some vague concept.

Classifying ASC
Although some Eastern traditions developed sophisticated classications
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 rst systematic categorization of
alterations of consciousness developed by Plato (as discussed by his teacher
Socrates) in his Phaedrus (1961), where he postulated four different types of
manias, or states in which humans could be affected by a divinely inspired
form of madness: prophetic (the ability to see into the future, as in the
sibyls of the oracles in Greece), poetic (providing inspiration for artistic
and other forms of creation), initiatory (relevant to spiritual rituals), and
erotic (centered on transcendent love).
When the Christian tradition became dominant, it generally questioned
any form of direct experience of the divine and deemed it far more important to discern the putative provenance of the alterations of consciousness,
whether God or the Devil [see Sluhovsky, this volume]. Probably it was
not until the discussion of mesmeric/hypnotic depth levels during the the
18th and 19th centuries that a more descriptive classication of states of
consciousness was attempted in the West [see Cardena & Alvarado, this
volume]. By the end of the 19th century, a study of multiple consciousness,
dissociation, hypnosis, mediumship, and related phenomena was central to
the birth of clinical psychology (Ellenberger, 1970).
The early part of the 20th century was auspicious for the study of alterations of consciousness, not always cast within psychopathology. Probably

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 parapsychological phenomena. James was inuenced by his contemporary,
F. W. H. Myers, who developed a bold theory to account for ASC, psychopathology, and parapsychology (Kelly et al., 2007). Nonetheless, with the
double-barrel shotgun of radical behaviorism (which rejected consciousness altogether) in academia, and psychoanalysis (which was mostly interested in nonconscious causation) in clinical psychology, a systematic
consideration of ASC was stied for decades, with few exceptions.
Closer to our days, in a brief but very rich paper, Arnold Ludwig
(1966) reintroduced a serious discussion of the topic and summarized literature from various areas discussing the general characteristics of ASC,
how they are produced, and their functions. At about the same time,
Charles Theodore Tart edited an extremely inuential 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 lms as Ken Russells Altered States (1980), partly fueled by the
impact of psychedelic drug experimentation. Despite these attempts and
the interest in experientially exploring ASC and Eastern traditions during
the 1960s, it is fair to say that research on ASC has been by and large a
minimal and undervalued academic endeavor and current work on a science of consciousness has mostly ignored ASC.
The study of ASC currently is at a similar stage to where botany was
before Linnaeus proposed his taxonomy, namely a collection of interesting
observations lacking enough organization and integration to make theoretical and empirical sense of them. Some initial attempts have been made
to establish a classication (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 oversimplication. For instance, the theory of lowered frontal brain activity (Dietrich, 2003) may
account for a number of phenomena in ASC but cannot be the whole story
and does not explain the complex set of ndings even within the domain
of hypnosis (cf. Oakley, 2008; also Beauregard, Volume 2) or consciousness alterations in some disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder

Altering Consciousness

(Lanius et al., 2010). Nor do I agree with my coeditor that all ASC can be
neatly arranged into four modes [see Winkelman, this volume], one of
which is characterized by neurophysiological integration and synchronicity. In fact, as Noirhomme and Laureys show [see Volume 2], some of
the most synchronous brain states involve seizures and comas, and we
have evidence that mystical-type reports are related to reduced, not
increased, synchronicity (Cardena, Lehmann, Jonsson, Terhune, & Faber,
2007). I do agree with my coeditor, however, that a neurophenomenological approach matching careful phenomenological descriptions with neural functioning (cf. Lutz & Thompson, 2003) is very promising, as long
as it is not confused with the contemporary neurolatry in which clear
conceptualization takes second place to just nding some kind of increase
in neural activity somehow connected to some type of experience, disregarding a clear description of the state of consciousness evaluated and
the limitations of brain imaging (see Sanders, 2009). Whichever classication we eventually arrive at should be conceptually clear and offer justice
to the complexity of both mental and brain events. Hobson (2008) offers
promising insights in his careful comparison of waking and dreaming consciousness, although his three-variable model (AIM: activation, source of
input, and neuromodulation) is probably not yet complex enough for a
comprehensive taxonomy of ASC.

ASC Are Not the Same as Induction Procedures

In Altering Consciousness, contributors discuss natural or human-made
procedures to induce ASC along with the characteristics of the latter, but
other discussions of ASC conate qualitatively distinguishable states of
consciousness with induction procedures or techniques. Even in their
otherwise sophisticated paper, Vaitl and collaborators (2005) do not distinguish between alterations of consciousness (e.g., near-death experiences)
and psychological procedures that may have a striking, medium, mild, or
next to no effect in the state of consciousness of those exposed to them
(e.g., meditation, biofeedback). It is a common confusion in the hypnosis
literature to state that people were hypnotized, conating two different
phenomena. The rst, inarguable, is that a particular (hypnotic) procedure
that may or may not produce ASC was employed (Kirsch, 1994). The second, much more arguable, is that the people exposed to that procedure
entered into a hypnotic state of consciousness (see also Tart, 1975). One of
the problems with this use of the term is that some of the alterations in consciousness actually elicited by a hypnotic procedure may also be triggered

Altering Consciousness

by a very different context such as exposure to trauma (Cardena, 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 (Cardena, 1994). Consequently,
similar alterations of consciousness can be more fruitfully discussed under
the same rubric (say, state of consciousness, or anomalous experience X)
regardless of their antecedent induction procedures or events.
These remarks, however, should not be construed as implying that the
antecedents to an ASC are unimportant. It may be, as suggested with
regard to transcendent experiences (Zaehner, 1973), that their etiologies,
whether meditation or drugs, may have differential effects, but rather than
assuming that they do or do not, research on this issue is called for.
Another example of conceptual confusion when discussing an induction
procedure and taking it as an ASC is the undifferentiated literature on
meditation, which is not one but various sets of procedures [see also
Mishara & Schwartz, and Shear, this volume]. These procedures, depending on the individual personality and cognitive traits, the level of expertise,
the setting, and the specic technique used may effect nothing more than
a sore back and boredom for some people, and varying ASC for others
(e.g., Goleman, 1988).
With respect to this point, the research in hypnosis is very clear. For instance, a simple hypnotic induction with the suggestion to go into a deep
state of hypnosis produced noticeable effects in the phenomenology and
neurophysiology of individuals previously identied as high hypnotizables
but had little effect on low hypnotizables (Cardena et al., 2007). Furthermore,
there is a meaningful heterogeneity even among individuals who do respond
to a particular procedure such as hypnosis, which further qualies what can
be said about the effects of induction procedures even for those who respond
strongly to them (Terhune & Cardena, 2010). Finally, even in the absence of
a hypnotic induction procedure, responsive people may be affected even
when just asked to use their imagination (Hilgard & Tart, 1966). Rather than
assume that individuals do not experience ASC during a control procedure,
the researcher should evaluate what they actually experienced.

ASC Are Not Static Entities

A problem with the term ASC is that it seems to imply a state, a homogeneous and unchanging modality. This ignores the various changes occurring from one moment to the next and the fact that a dening characteristic
of consciousness is its constant change (James, 1890). There are important

Altering Consciousness

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 (Cardena, 2005; Davidson & Goleman, 1977).
Another important but under-researched topic is Tarts notion (1975)
that the transition between states of consciousness is characterized by transient cognitive and physiological disorganization. Observations of different
phenomena such as the transition from waking to sleep (Foulkes & Vogel,
1965), the changes between different alters in individuals with dissociative
identity disorder, erstwhile known as multiple personality (Putnam,
1988), and those between an ordinary or a spirit possessed-identity
(Cardena, 1989), support Tarts proposal. Shamanistic healers also describe
that their transition into an ASC becomes much smoother and more controllable with time (e.g., Cardena, 1991, Winkelman, this volume). The
dynamic properties of such transitions can be evaluated neurophysiologically according to both small changes within a state (i.e., EEG microstates;
Vaitl et al., 2005) and longer and more impactful transitions between states
(e.g., from being awake to going under anesthesia or going to sleep).
Besides transient alterations of consciousness, Western and Eastern
traditions have long posited more permanent changes in consciousness
under such terms as reaching enlightenment, sainthood, or kundalini. Such
change may come after long-term meditative or philosophical practice
(cf. Bakan, Merkur, & Weiss, 2009), or quite fortuitously (e.g., WrenLewis, 1988). Robert Forman has called a permanent or semipermanent
change a dualistic mystical state (Forman, 1999; also Geels, and Shear, this
volume). We need additional systematic inquiry into long-term effects of
ASC related to near-death, mystical, and drug experiences, and others
(cf. Cardena et al., 2000; Tart, 1991), along the lines of neurophysiological and psychological research on meditation (e.g., Cahn & Polich,
2006; Easterlin & Cardena, 19981999).

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
[Cardena & Alvarado, this volume]. Nonetheless, the study of ASC, alongside
with much of psychology (Bakan, 1973), has often confused aggregate
(i.e., asserting something presumably true only of the class as an aggregate)
with general (i.e., asserting something that is true of most or all of the members of that class) functions, disregarding important individual differences
in conscious experiencing. Even leaving aside for a moment exceptional cases
such as synesthetes, such basic processes as auditory perception reveal consistent and substantial individual differences (Deutsch, 1988). Various authors
have also documented that we differ dramatically in our experiences of
imagery and thought in the waking state, daydreaming, dreaming, hypnosis,
and other phenomena (Kunzendorf & Wallace, 2000).
Within modern psychology, it may have been Myers who rst discussed
differences in the propensity to experience ASC. An inuential personality
classication includes self-transcendence, or the propensity to experience
oneself as part of a larger unity, as a character trait (Cloninger, Przybeck, &
Svrakic, 1993). This construct has unique genotypic variance (Gillespie,
Cloninger, Heath, & Martin, 2003), and correlates moderately with hypnotizability, absorption, mental boundaries, and related constructs that have
been often associated with ASC (Cardena & Terhune, 2008). Relatedly, specic neurotransmitters and alleles have also been associated with hypnotizability (Lichtenberg, Bachner-Melman, Ebstein, & Crawford, 2004),
suggesting that from birth we may differ in the propensity to experience
ASC, a propensity that likely interacts with epigenetic factors, both benign
(e.g., play-acting in childhood) and toxic (e.g., traumatic events and failures
in attachment; see Granqvist, Reijman, and Cardena, Volume 2). To further
elucidate individual differences, research on trait(s) associated with the propensity to have ASC should look at the effect of their interaction with states
and induction procedures.
In addition to these differences, the same phenomenal event may
be interpreted in different ways, evidencing cultural (e.g., Pasricha &
Stevenson, 1986), and idiosyncratic variations. For instance, in the study
with hypnotic virtuosos mentioned earlier (Cardena, 2005), every participant had a spontaneous experience of a very bright light, but whereas for
some this light was experienced as a source of transcendent bliss (all the
good things), for others it was just a sudden brightening of their imaginal
experience. Finally, there is also some research showing that individual
biological rhythms are related to having more fantasy and being more

Altering Consciousness

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 lmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely
different . . . which probably somewhere have their eld of application and
adaptation. (p. 298)

The latter part of this quotation, mentioning the probable utility of

ASC, contrasts with mainstream views that have placed the ordinary waking state as the foremost state to apprehend reality and any other variations as departures, alterations, or aberrations from it (Natsoulas, 1983,
p. 51). (A pejorative interpretation of altered along these lines drove
Zinberg (1973) to propose the phrase alternate states of consciousness,
although this term is rarely used nowadays.)
That matters are not quite that simple has been proposed by a number
of religious and esoteric traditions that described our ordinary state as a
dark glass through which we seek to apprehend reality. Plato in The
Republic (1970) used the beautiful allegory of a cave in which chained people interpret shadows projected in a wall to be an accurate depiction of
reality. The image becomes crystal clear if we substitute biologically predisposed and idiosyncratic and culturally determined habits of perceiving
reality as the chains. Besides philosophy, we have current research that
supports, at least in broad terms, the image offered to us by Plato regarding our ordinary or waking consciousness. For instance, Ornstein (1986)
reviewed different strands of research and concluded that waking consciousness may be quite limited when events do not change or change
slowly. Hoffman (2009), a cognitive psychologist, has described how evolution may select for a modeling of reality that differs to an extent from
what is actually there. And these critiques of nave realism do not even
consider evidence from quantum physics and parapsychological research
suggesting that the fabric of reality may be quite different from how we
ordinarily experience it [see Luke, Volume 2].

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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 experience otherwise.
2 Considering their ubiquity, some of these experiences might be expected to
grant an evolutionary advantage.
3 The clinician needs to be able to distinguish dysfunctional experiences from
those that are just uncommon.
4 Some of these experiences (e.g. synesthesia) may developmentally precede
ordinary ones and thus may be required to explain the latter ones.
5 They help us understand the effects and limits of society and culture on experience.
6 Some of these experiences may provide long-lasting benets, including a
greater appreciation of life.
7 They suggest that the relationship of consciousness to reality may require a
substantial revision (Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000, pp. 1618).

Similarly, Putnam (2005) has argued that knowledge about states of

being is necessary to understand childhood development and variations
in psychopathology and Whitehead [this volume] discusses how ASC may
help social functions. As will be clearer from reading the various contributions to the volumes of Altering Consciousness, the history of humankind
(and consciousness of sentient beings in general) cannot be fully understood without seriously grappling with the biological and cultural importance of ASC and attempts to induce them. And, as will become evident
throughout the various contributions, not only psychology but also the
humanities, arts, biological, and social sciences must acknowledge a far
more central role to altering consciousness in their elds than has been
the case so far. I also hope that the multidisciplinary nature of Altering
Consciousness will reveal that we need the perspectives of the artist and the
experiencer as much as that of the scientist to gain a full understanding.
It is arguable whether the current work on ASC represents a kind of new
paradigm or just extensions of mainstream epistemology and methodology
into an area that has been mostly neglected and requires methodological
plurality and multidisciplinary integration, from the biochemical to the cultural (Kelly & Locke, 2009). Tarts (e.g., 1998, preface to this volume) call
for state-specic sciences, although still in need of further development,
would come closer to a more radical proposal than either a wholesale rejection of the current scientic methods (which many experients of ASC

Altering Consciousness

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
tting that the most inuential contemporary author on AC since William
James, Charles T. Tart, open the volumes with a preface in which he
describes how impoverished the psychological study of the topic was
before he stormed the academic bastion with his research and publications. I follow with this introduction in which I set the stage for the volumes that follow, trying to clarify unnecessary conceptual obfuscations
and calling for research on the topic that respects its complexity and does
not give short shrift to individual differences or the ever-changing nature
of conscious experience. The next introductory chapter is by Michael
Winkelman, who introduces his Integrative Model of Consciousness,
which ambitiously aims to integrate evolutionary, neurophysiological,
and anthropological views on a model of ASC.
The historical section opens with a scholarship tour de force by Yulia
Ustinova, who covers an enormous historical and geographical terrain
from prehistory to late antiquity. She includes her fascinating account of
how caves have been associated with the induction of ASC not only among
prehistoric groups but also among the classical Greeks (Ustinova, 2009).
The next contribution is by Moshe Sluhovsky who, following his
acclaimed book (2007), surveys the Western medieval mental landscape,
underlining how some of the best minds of their time tried to make sense
of the unusual alterations of consciousness and behavior they observed,
trying to discern whether their source was divine or diabolic. Besides the
mostly spontaneous phenomena studied by Sluhovsky, the Medieval Ages
also included a serious study of a number of techniques that would currently fall under the umbrella of meditation (Baier, 2009).
Although the Age of Enlightenment diminished the overbearing
inuence of the Church, the discernment problem did not go away but
underwent a transformation so that ASC tied to mesmerism/hypnosis and

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Altering Consciousness

spiritualism were variously interpreted as being caused by cosmic forces,

other selves, or mere sociocultural inuences, as my chapter with Carlos
Alvarado describes. The historical section concludes with a comprehensive
50-year overview of the scientic study of ASC by Julie Beischel, Adam Rock,
and another immense gure in the eld, Stan Krippner.
The next section looks at AC in non-Western groups. Jonathan Shear
integrates and makes sense of various Eastern traditions regarding the possibility of achieving a higher state of consciousness characterized by pure
being or potentiality, also experienced spontaneously by high hypnotizables in a secular setting (see Cardena, 2005). Michael Winkelman, who
has already written a number of foundational works in this area, provides
an authoritative discussion of shamanism and altered consciousness. In
his chapter Charles Whitehead surveys a vast cross-cultural landscape
and unveils how what we consider ordinary consciousness is partly the
end product of a number of cultural choices that are rarely recognized,
much less questioned, and how cultures differ in their attitudes toward
ASC. This section concludes with the work of Graham St John, who illustrates how young and countercultural groups are adopting ancient and
new technologies to alter their states of consciousness and propose new
models of the self. That these explorations carry risks beyond the potential
dangers of drug use and abuse is borne by criticisms of the unthinking
embrace of current technologies (Lanier, 2010; Smith, 2010).
This volume concludes with chapters on the intrinsic link between the
humanities and AC. Jennifer Windt summarizes various ways in which
philosophical discourse and ASC can cross-pollinate each other above and
beyond the current philosophical interest in consciousness at large. The
chapter by Antoon Geels illustrates that visionary and other religious experiences are not only of historical interest but life-changing events for many
of our contemporary brethren. The elegantly written chapter on ASC and
literature by Wendy Cousins shows how central human endeavors such as
literature remain incoherent until one takes altered consciousness into consideration. Literature has often heeded Rimbauds call for a dere`glement de
tous les sens (derangement of the senses), whether through the experience
of receiving a bout of inspiration (that Manguel, 2004, claims underlies
the origin of my favorite short story by Borges, Las Ruinas Circulares, which
can be read as a parable on consciousness and reality), or in the deliberate
use of shamanic, meditative, and hypnotic techniques, as in the case of
the exceptional poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (cf. Middlebrook,
2004), not to mention the use of alcohol and other psychoactive drugs by
many other writers.

Altering Consciousness

In the next chapter, the scholar, director, and performer Phillip B.

Zarrilli reveals how an attempt to alter ones consciousness and attain a
more intense presence is a central part of various Western and Eastern acting traditions. I was particularly happy to see that he includes in his survey
the Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales in Mexico, where I rst 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 Nicolas Nunez and his life and theatre accomplice, Helena Guardia,
throughout all these years). Mark Levy discusses the connection between
AC and the visual arts, focusing on painters and sculptors who have deliberately sought to alter their ordinary state through shamanic and meditative
techniques, among other procedures. He also discusses the SpanishMexican artist Remedios Varo, two of whose paintings are on the covers
of these volumes and whose exquisite depictions of other worlds were
inuenced by her dreams and esoteric practices (Ruy Sanchez, Arcq, Engel,
Moreno Villareal, et al., 2008). Finally, Jorg Fachner gives a nuanced analysis of why music has been a constant companion in the attempts to alter
ones 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 lms,
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 lm The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari by
Robert Wiene, dealing with both hypnosis and madness, and the 1932
lm Vampyr by Carl Theodor Dreyer, in which the dream and waking lives
of the protagonist Allan Gray are intermixed, various surrealist lms and
LAnnee dernie`re a` Marienbad, the 1961 masterpiece by Alain Resnais,
which has been interpreted as the world as seen in a dream or from a
schizophrenic mind. More recently, besides the obvious reference of Ken
Russells 1980 lm Altered States, are the lms by David Lynch, a long-time
meditator who evidently likes to mess around with his audiences 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 Aronofskys 1998 lm Pi, a sojourn through

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Altering Consciousness

metaphysical madness, and Christopher Nolans 2010 lm Inception, a

multilayered portrayal of lucid dreaming.
Seeking to do justice to both the rst- and third-person perspectives on
consciousness, as well as the different understanding granted to us by the
sciences and the humanities, I will close this introduction with the exuberant La Prosa del Observatorio (The Prose of the Observatory, 1972) of Julio
Cortazar. 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 ah, pulso de astros y anguilas, anillo de Moebius de una gura del mundo donde la conciliacion es posible, donde anverso y reverso
cesaran de desgarrarse, donde el hombre podra ocupar su puesto en esa
jubilosa danza que alguna vez llamaremos realidad.
(To deeply inhale an air that is lifes bridge and caress . . . but the open
remains there, pulse of stars and eels, Moebiuss ring of a gure of the world
where conciliation is possible, where front and back will stop tearing each
other apart and humanity may take its place in that joyous dance that we
will at some point call reality.)

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CHAPTER 2

A Paradigm for Understanding

Altered Consciousness:
The Integrative Mode of
Consciousness
Michael Winkelman
Ritual alterations of consciousness are a virtual universal of human
cultures, reecting a basic human drive generally considered of central
importance to religion and spiritual practices. Cross-cultural perspectives
show both similarities in the experiences of altered consciousness (AC)
that implicate biological factors as the basis for similarities across cultures,
time, and space, as well as cultural differences in the manifestations of
these potentials that implicate social factors. Individual and group experiences of altered consciousness may vary in many ways, but it is commonalities and recurrent patterns, rather than unique differences, that are crucial
to understanding AC.
This introduction reviews evidence for the universal manifestation of
altered consciousness. This universal manifestation is not well explained
in the classic paradigms of altered states of consciousness that emphasize
their individual nature. In contrast, a biological approach to consciousness
helps to situate altered consciousness within human nature. This perspective provides a foundation for an approach that characterizes AC in terms
of an integrative mode of consciousness that reects systemic features of brain
functioning. This integrative mode of consciousness is typied in theta
wave patterns that synchronize the frontal cortex with discharges from
lower brain structures. This integration of ancient brain functions into
the frontal cortex explains many of the key features of AC.

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Altering Consciousness

Culture, Science, and Altered Consciousness

Institutionalized procedures for ritually altering consciousness are found
in virtually all societies (Bourguignon, 1968; Winkelman, 1992), reecting
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 ight, possession, enlightenment, and
others. As Whitehead points out in Volume 1, culture fundamentally inuences how our capacities are developed. Some cultures extol these experiences
while others vilify and block access to them. Laughlin, McManus, and dAquili
(1992) characterized cultural differences in relating to the alteration of consciousness as ranging from monophasic cultures, which institutionally value
only waking consciousness, to polyphasic void cultures, which encourage
exploration of phases of consciousness beyond phenomenal reality.
Most cultures have traditions designed to enhance the availability of
altered consciousness such as those produced in shamanic and meditative
traditions. In contrast, the dominant cultural ethos of Indo-European societies generally ignores them or subjects those who seek them to pathologization, social marginalization, or persecution. Some cultures believe that
altering consciousness provides a variety of adaptive advantages through
development of a more objective perception of the external world in
recognizing the illusory and constructed nature of ordinary perception.
For example, many cultures have viewed some drugs as entheogens,
sacred substances that produce a contact with the divine (e.g., Ratsch,
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 reect a
biological basis and its inevitable expression in human experience. Such
a biological basis indicates that we should be able to provide a scientic
explanation of these persistent and signicant human phenomena.

Situating Altered Consciousness within Science

The scientic status of studies of altered consciousness has a doubly
stigmatized positionrst, by being about consciousness, a eld that still
struggles for general scientic recognition, and second, by being marked
as something altered. In spite of many scientic and other inquiries, one

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness

might legitimately claim that we still do not have a science of altered consciousness.
Scientic elds, as conceptualized by the historian and philosopher of
science Thomas Kuhn (1970) in his now classic The Structure of Scientic
Revolutions, have regular features called paradigms that guide research
and provide general modes of explanation. In his Postscript1969 Kuhn
(1970, p. 175) claried 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 eld and frameworks for most research; and
2) exemplars, an element of the disciplinary matrix, dened as concrete models
used for solutions to research problems.

The main elements of the disciplinary matrix include:

1) symbolic generalizations (exemplied in mathematical expressions, formulas
and laws);
2) metaphysics, analogies, and metaphors that provide acceptable models and
explanations;
3) values (e.g., criteria for research and evaluation of theories); and
4) exemplars (paradigms), the concrete problem solutions used to solve the
puzzles confronting the discipline (e.g., use of hydraulic models for explaining electricity, wind, crowds, etc.).

Altered Consciousness within Paradigmatic Frameworks

As is typical of the social sciences in general, consciousness studies are
not characterized by the uniformity and agreement typical of paradigms of
the physical sciences; rather, theoretical diversity and heterodoxy reecting 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 scientic community as a result of common education and training. The diversity of scientic disciplines that study consciousness precludes the uniformity that a
paradigm presumes.
Kuhn proposed that competing schools of thought characterize scientic elds in a preparadigm period, suggesting that consciousness studies
are in a preparadigmatic period. The study of consciousness and AC does
not have accepted symbolic generalizations or laws. Consciousness studies

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in general do not share a metaphysics; instead, one might contend that

diametrically opposed metaphysics are found, ranging from strictly
materialist, reductionist, and dismissive perspectives to idealist and spiritual systems of explanation. Consciousness studies have no core set of values, with extreme disciplinary diversity and competing camps (e.g.,
qualitative vs. quantitative approaches). Metaphysical and methodological
diversity produces a similar diversity in the exemplars used to elucidate
consciousness. These range from strictly descriptive and phenomenological approaches to more systematic cross-cultural concepts (e.g., soul
ight and out-of-body experiences), to strictly materialist approaches
exemplied in using brain imaging as a measure of consciousness.

Paradigm Shifts in Science

Consciousness studies and AC may nonetheless be elucidated by
Kuhns models. A central feature of Kuhns model is the occurrence of scientic revolutions that lead to radically new ways of understanding. Scientic revolutions associated with the impacts of Copernicus, Darwin, and
Einstein involved abandoning one way of viewing the world in favor of a
new incompatible approach that rejected many prior elements and concepts. Kuhn noted these are relatively rare occurrences, but that they are
key to advances in science. Kuhn proposed that signicant changes in scientic elds are characterized by a succession of paradigms (exemplars)
involving a reinterpretation of the elements of the disciplinary matrix.
Kuhn characterized scientic revolutions as reinterpretations, a new way
of seeing relationships among theories, concepts, and laws that involve
changes in the meaning of concepts. For instance, in the shift in
astronomy from the geocentric to the heliocentric model of the solar system, the elements (the sun, planets, moons, and asteroids) remained the
same although there were changes in relationships among them and the
laws and models that explain their behavior.
Scientic revolutions are not the outcome of normal science but of
impediments to normal science produced by anomalies, ndings that are
in contradiction to normal expectation. Anomalies play central roles in the
development of science. Anomalies are ndings that provide counterexamples to the assumptions of the dominant paradigm and are generally key elements in the development of new theoretical frameworks. These crises
produced by anomalies are the prerequisite to fundamental inventions of
theory (Kuhn, 1977, p. 208), producing a scientic revolution in the development of a new exemplar for the disciplinary matrix [see Beischel, Rock, &
Krippner, this volume].

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness

Altered Consciousness as an Anomaly

Studies of both ordinary consciousness and AC have produced ndings that are anomalies for the dominant materialist assumptions of the
physical sciences. But these anomalies have few central roles in any major
eld of scientic inquiry, with the very question of consciousness seen by
some as falling outside of scientic inquiry altogether. Anomalies of
altered consciousness are generally seen as exceptions that are best dismissed as distorted data rather than novel ndings.
Why have these disjunctures between consciousness studies and the rest
of science not provoked a scientic revolution? Kuhn noted that anomalies
must impede the work of normal science and that the signicance 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 reects a signicant source of these
ndings 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 scientic 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 scientic revolutions, considering them to be
ordinary science. Scientic revolutions are rather modest affairs in
Kuhns (1970) clarications, the change in the exemplars with other
aspects of the disciplinary matrix (values and metaphysic and symbolic
generalizations) remaining the same; the ndings of the past are maintained. Popper (1972) argued for a more thorough revision of the bases
of science in ideological revolutions in which the fundamental assumptions
of the paradigm and theories of science are altered.
In assessing the role of AC within the broader psychology of consciousness, a paramount question is whether such ndings constitute a
scientic 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 eld of consciousness studies to a unanimity of opinion that would create a common paradigm, nor have the anomalies demanded major changes in metaphysics, methodology, and values of

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other scientic disciplines that are the hallmark of ideological revolutions.

Whatever claims studies of AC have for fomenting scientic or ideological
revolutions, they remain unrealized, perhaps simply premature for a eld
still in its infancy.
Nonetheless, Kuhn also emphasized that during the preparadigmatic
period, the community shares paradigmatic elements. In our contributions here, I foresee the emergence of a paradigm for the study of AC that
may bring the signicance of these phenomena to the forefront of other
scientic disciplines. Below I propose a model of AC that constitutes a
neurophenomenological paradigm linking biological features and phenomenological experiences.

A Reconceptualization of ASC: The Integrative Mode of Consciousness

The concept of altered states of consciousness (ASC) as a topic for
legitimate scientic inquiry emerged in the 1960s. A central gure contributing to this emerging eld was Charles Tart (e.g., 1975, 1977). His inuential books and edited volumes contributed to the formation of an implicit
paradigm of ASC that has persisted for decades. This paradigmatic framework for AC was explicitly linked to waking consciousness.
Tart dened states of consciousness (SoC) as conditions that differ qualitatively from others by the presence of conditions or characteristics absent in
other states. SoC represent how people judge usual alterations in experience
and are identied by the individuals assessment of patterns of experience.
Different SoC are determined by personal signicance. Tart (1977) conceptualized ASC in terms of differences from the baseline state of consciousness, an active stable overall patterning of psychological functions that,
via multiple (feedback) stabilization relationships among the parts making
it up, maintains its identity in spite of environmental changes (p. 192).
The ASC paradigm takes the ordinary aspects of consciousness as the framework for conceptualizing the signicant aspects of altered consciousness.
The personal signicance 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 signicant about ASC is not simply that they have personal
signicance but that they have a signicance 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
gure signicantly in this paradigm of ASC. But Tarts pioneering work
also pointed to the reality of altered consciousness that involves something

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness

transcendental, a set of signicant human conditions that must be understood with respect to their own intrinsic properties. Tarts (1972) concept
of state-specic sciences foreshadowed the perspective suggested below
that characterizes AC in epistemological terms, as specic forms of knowing (also see Winkelman, 2010).
To understand altered consciousness requires a framework that goes
beyond personal signicance 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 reect common underlying biological structures.
These biologically structured foundations are discussed as modes of consciousness. A mode of consciousness is a biologically based functional system of organismic operation that reects conditions of homeostatic
balance among brain subsystems to meet global organismic needs (see
Winkelman, 2010, for discussion and details). Different modes of consciousness are revealed in the congruencies in the primary daily patterns
of variation in behavior and experiences of humans and other animals.
We share with other animals the daily cycles of sleep and waking, with
homologous brain structures responsible for these patterns. Similarly,
humans share the dream mode of consciousness with most mammals.
Their presence in other animals indicates the transcendent nature of these
human modes of consciousness. In addition, humans experience altered
consciousness, conceptualized here as the integrative mode of consciousness. Although learning and cultural factors produce variance in these
modes of consciousness in humans, their similar patterns crossculturally (and across species) reect underlying biological functions and
organismic functions and needs:
Waking: learning, adaptation, and food and other survival needs;
Deep sleep: recuperative functions, regeneration, and growth;
Dreaming (REM sleep): memory integration and consolidation and psychosocial
adaptation; and
Integrative: psychodynamic growth and social and psychological integration.

These modes are so basic to organismic operation that they are functionally wired in multiple ways into brain structures, as illustrated in the brains

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control of dreaming. No single region of the brain is entirely responsible for

the initiation of REM sleep, and dreaming persists or re-emerges even after
excising the supposed dream areas (Graham, 1990; also see Alkire & Miller,
2005; Hobson, 2005; and Kokoszka & Wallace, Volume 2, for general neural correlates of sleep and dreams).
Tarts baseline and altered states of consciousness correspond to the
waking and integrative modes of consciousness, respectively. Because
SoCs differ in terms of personal signicance 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 specic characteristics determined by the social, cultural, and psychological effects rather than by the
strictly biological needs. Different states of consciousness are found within
each of the modes of consciousnesssleep, dreaming, waking, and integrative. During the modes of deep sleep and dreams, a variety of SoC
may emerge, including pathological states such as somnambulism, nocturnal automatisms, sleep drunkenness, sleep terrors, and also normal
states such as hypnagogic and hypnopompic transitions between being
awake and being asleep. The integrative mode of consciousness includes
various SoC (e.g., soul ight, 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 reect similar brain responses.
Common mechanisms involve manipulation of the autonomic nervous
system through extensive ergotropic (sympathetic) activation leading to a
collapse into a trophotropic (parasympathetic) dominant state with a
slowing of the brain wave discharges into a more synchronized and coherent pattern (see Winkelman, 2010, for review). Altered consciousness episodes are also characterized by an integration of the various levels of the
brain. This integration is manifested in entrainment of the frontal cortex
by highly coherent and synchronized slow-wave discharges emanating
from the limbic system and related lower-brain structures. These entrainments may occur at a variety of frequencies, but two predominant patterns
are synchronized slow-wave theta bands (36 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

reected in their production by a wide variety of natural agents (i.e., psychedelic drugs) and ritual procedures (i.e., trauma, extreme fasting, and
exertion) that elicit these brain wave patterns.
This paradigm of integrative consciousness originates in the work of
Mandell (1980), who suggested that physiological mechanisms underlying transcendent states are based in a common neurochemical
pathway-involving the temporal lobe. Many agents and procedures result
in a loss of serotonin inhibition to the hippocampal cells, producing an
increase in cell activity and the manifestation of hippocampal-septal
slow-wave EEG activity (alpha, delta, and especially theta) that imposes a
synchronous slow-wave pattern across the lobes. Mandell suggested that
the neurobiological basis underlying transcendent states, including their
ineffable and religious components, involves a biogenic aminetemporal-lobe limbic neurology . . . the mesolimbic serotonergic pathway
that extends from the median raphe nucleus in the mesencephalon, coexistent with part of the mesencephalic reticular formation regulating arousal
. . . to the septum and hippocampus (pp. 381, 390). This produces hypersynchronous discharges across the hippocampal-septal-reticular-raphe
circuit, which links the R(reptilian) complex and paleomammalian brain.
Agents and procedures that invoke this pattern include hallucinogens,
amphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, polypeptide opiates, long-distance running, hunger, thirst, sleep loss, auditory stimuli such as drumming and
chanting, sensory deprivation, dream states, meditation, and a variety of
psychophysiological imbalances or sensitivities resulting from injury,
trauma, disease, or hereditarily transmitted nervous system conditions (see
Winkelman, 2010, for review).
The underlying psychobiology of many forms of AC involves this
response based in the serotonergic connections between the limbic system
and brain stem regions [see Presti and various chapters on psychoactive
drugs, Volume 2]. While dopamine mechanisms are also involved, serotonin has a signicant role as a neuromodulator that regulates the activities
of many other neurotransmitter systems.Mandell proposed that the hippocampus is the focal point of the mechanisms that reduce the inhibitory
serotonin regulation of temporal lobe limbic function. The loss of inhibitory regulation by serotonin results in a reduction or loss of the gating
of emotional response and an enhancement of dopamine circuitry. This
loss of gating combined with hippocampal-septal-discharges results
in an emotional ooding or ecstasy (cf. Mandell 1980, p. 400). The
hippocampal-septal system is an association area involved in the formation and the mediation of memory and emotions. The synchronous patterns originating in the hippocampal-septal-reticular raphe circuits

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Altering Consciousness

reect linkages of the attentional mechanisms in the behavioral brain

regions (reticular formation) and the emotional brain. These synchronous
electrical discharges propagate up the major axon bundles from the base
of the brain into the frontal cortex, integrating activity from ancient levels
of the brain into the frontal lobes.

Psychedelics and Cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical Feedback Loops

This paradigm of integration as a generic feature underlying AC is illustrated by Vollenweiders (1998) research on the mechanisms of action of
psychedelics on the major cortical loops. The frontal-subcortical circuits
provide one of the principal organizational networks of the brain involving neuronal linkages and feedback loops of the cortical areas of the frontal brain with the thalamus of the brain stem region (Cummings, 1993).
These loops unite specic regions of the frontal cortex with lower brain
regions, specically the basal ganglia, substantia nigra, and the thalamus.
These circuits are central to brainbehavioral relationships, mediating
motor activity and eye movement, as well as social actions, motivations,
and executive functions. Vollenweider attributes the consciousnessaltering properties of psychedelics to their selective effects on the brains
cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical feedback loops that link the information
gating systems of lower levels of the brain with the frontal cortex. These
loops are regulated by the thalamus, which limits the ascending information to the frontal cortex from the environment and body. Psychedelics
disable this disinhibition process; this increases access to the ow of information that is ordinarily inhibited, overwhelming the frontal cortex and
leading to an alteration of experience of self, other, environment, and the
internal world of psychological structures and projection.

Altered Consciousness as Dysregulation of the Prefrontal Cortex

The notion that alterations of consciousness involve a disruption of the
processes of the frontal cortex is elaborated by Dietrich (2003), who proposes that a variety of conditions of AC involve a temporary dysregulation
of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). He reviews psychological and neurological
studies on the effects of endurance running, dreaming, hypnosis, druginduced states, and meditation to illustrate their commonality in the disruption of the higher-order functions associated with the PFC. The
common effects of this disruption are manifested in the loss of the roles
of the frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex involved in highly integrated
aspects of neural information processing and higher cognitive functions.

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness

The downregulation of certain mental faculties from conscious awareness involves a subtraction of certain faculties or experiences, with a variety of different modules capable of being down-regulated, reducing
awareness to a lower condition within the hierarchy of conscious states.
Greater alterations of consciousness, such as those experienced in dreaming or out-of-body experiences (OBE), involve a greater amount of downregulation of prefrontal mediated capacities [see Dieguez & Blanke, Volume 2]. The different kinds of prefrontal capacities and different degrees
of deregulation provide for a variety of phenomenological alterations to
consciousness. The different agents and activities that lead to this dyseregulation do so in distinct ways that produce unique phenomenological
characteristics of religious experiences. Dietrich proposes that these different forms of hypofrontality involve a general principle of a hierarchical
and progressive disengagement with the more sophisticated cognitive
skills and levels of consciousness involving self-awareness and planning
(e.g., self-reection, sense of time, planning) being compromised rst, followed by lower-level systems. The dysregulation of the PFC allows a number of unusual self-experiences related to our more ancient brain
functions. Dietrich (2003) proposed that the lack of engagement of the
PFC results in the lack of certain frontal qualitieswillful action, selfawareness, the deliberate direction of attention, abstract and creative
thought, and planning. However, many alterations of consciousness, notably the shamanic soul journey and many meditative states, have those
properties, requiring explanation of how these capacities persist.

Meditation as Integrative and Dissociative Brain Dynamics

The integrative and dissociative or dysregulated brain dynamics of
AC are exemplied 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 conrms
that typical brain waves associated with meditation involve an increase in
alpha waves, which then decrease in frequency toward dominant theta
rhythms (Cahn & Polich, 2006; Takahashi et al., 2005). Hebert and
coworkers (2005) implicated alpha EEG during meditation as a form of
integration in the brain that leads to high-level cognitive processes.
These are the same basic systemic physiological principles underlying the
concept of the integrative mode of consciousness: enhanced synchronization

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of brain wave patterns. An additional level of meditation-induced integration

in the brain is reected in biphasic hypersynchronous high-frequency
gamma waves (3544 cps; see Lehmann et al., 2001; Lutz et al., 2004,
Vialatte et al., 2009). The presence of gamma in meditation is a direct conrmation 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
reect the integration of the principles of lower brain systems and their
imposition on the frontal cortex. This dissociation is specically seen in
meditation and hypnosis, as well as in more obviously dissociative conditions such as spirit possession [see Sluhovsky, this volume]. DAquili and
Newberg (1999) propose that mystical experience involves interference
with the normal functions of tertiary association areas, namely a deafferentation or functional cutting off of input into a structure. Deafferentation
results in a structure ring 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. DAquili and Newberg propose that deafferentation of limbic stimulation results in specic effects such as relaxation and profound quiescence,
ecstatic and blissful feelings, and a sense of pure space and obliteration of
the selfother 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 limbicfrontal integration characterized by theta
wave discharge patterns is illustrated by hypnosis (Crawford, 1994).
Highly hypnotizable people have attentional ltering mechanisms that
provide a concentration with a simultaneous dissociation of some cognitive features [see Cardena & Alvarado, this volume]. Crawford proposed
that hypnosis and its enhanced attention reect 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 individuals more efcient frontal limbic attentional
systems is the ability to disattend to extraneous stimuli, known as cognitive inhibition, which is associated with enhanced theta-wave production.

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness

Enhanced limbic frontal interaction characteristic of highly hypnotizable

individuals is a pattern of brain functioning that typies 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 reected in the highly susceptible hypnotic subjects
ability to engage an alternative reality that is demanded by a social relationship with the hypnotist, expressed in the concept of rapport that
reects the persons cooperation with the hypnotist. This feature of hypnotic susceptibility also exemplies integration, epitomized in the ability
to subject oneself to the theory of mind manifested by others in complying
with the requests of the hypnotist. This lower-level brain control is illustrated by highly hypnotic subjects greater efciency in implementing the
strategies suggested by others (the hypnotist) while having a general
inability to voluntarily alter their own strategic performance, a predominance of paleomammalian brain functions over the frontal cortex (also
see Jamieson, 2007; Jamieson & Woody 2007; Ray, 2007).
Hypnosis shifts the interaction between the frontal and limbic systems
to the latters evolved capacities for processing of survival-related information and feelings (Woody & Szechtman, 2007), allowing social feelings to
take precedence over the sensory world in dictating behavior. Hypnotic
susceptibility engages the motivational systems that manage social hierarchy, with the individual accepting a subordinate position and the imposition of the will of a dominant other. Highly susceptible hypnotic subjects
experience a dominance of the limbic structures in an enhanced orientation to the emotional/motivation engagement with the hypnotist, reecting the survival value of the evolved capacity to subordinate the
individuals personal perceptions and behaviors to the wishes of the leader.
This reects 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 reects the basic features of the model of the integrative mode of
consciousness, where lower-level structures impose their dynamics on
the overall functional outcomes. The model is supported by the state
approaches to hypnosis, which see it as engaging structures of consciousness and brain networks distinctive from those of waking consciousness.
In contrast to the orientation to the external sensory world, hypnosis and
SoC in the integrative mode of consciousness engage this imagined alternative that controls the body, including physiological responses, perceptions, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts.

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Spirit Possession as Integration and Dissociation

This interactive dynamic of integration and dissociation is illustrated in
the context of possession and dissociative disorders.Since dissociation is
by denition a lack of integration of psychological processes that normally
should be integrated (Cardena & Gleaves, 2003, p. 474), it would seem
that the dissociative interpretation of possession directly contradicts the
fundamental thesis of the integrative mode of consciousness. Without
question, possession involves some forms of dissociation and separation,
such as manifested in amnesia. But what do the symptoms or processes of
possession tell us about the functioning of the individual? These processes
of dissociation have been viewed as defense mechanisms to allow the integrated functioning of the emotional self in the face of self-destroying trauma.
Seligman and Kirmayer (2008) reviewed research on dissociation in
normal populations, where its similarities with pathological forms are
characterized positively in terms of an intense focus of attention, isolation
from the external environment, and absorption, particularly with internally generated thoughts and images such as daydreams. A dominant
hypothesis is that dissociation evolved as a mechanism to block awareness
and memories in order to escape the stress of interpersonal situations, for
example, protecting oneself from extreme emotional stimulation and associated autonomic arousal that comes from an attack or betrayal. The ability
of traumatic stress to block consolidation of conscious narrative memories
provides an explanation based on evolutionary adaptations. Distancing of
self and identity provides emotional numbing mechanisms that can inhibit
the ight-or-ght response, enabling a more objective search for survival
strategies rather than being driven by emotional fears. In order to seek solutions to pressing problems, certain information is compartmentalized,
kept out of consciousness, so that adaptive responses may be made.
Seligman and Kirmayer (2008) showed how we can reconcile the
adaptive paradigm of dissociation with the obvious nonadaptive pathological dimensions by examining how the social context interacts with
psychophysiological bases. Dissociation involves a regulation of attentional mechanisms that allow a selective suppression of perceptions and
memories and a reduction of physiological stress. In shamanistic rituals,
these traumatic dissociative experiences are addressed in processes that
allow the emergence of an integrated sense of self linked to others who
provide a variety of attachment functions for self integration. Sar and
Ozturk (2007) propose that dissociation involves a detachment of the
psychological self from the sociological self. In this dissociation, the sociological self becomes amplied. This sociological self, which functions in

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness

the interface between the individual and society, undergoes an accelerated

development as a consequence of trauma. This protective dissociation of
the psychological self allows for a reestablishment of connections between
the inner and outer world through the sociological self.
Social roles of possession exemplify this control, where higher-order
representations embodied in the personalities of possession spirits redirect
identity and behavior to adapt to varying social circumstances. Possession
must be seen in light of an extreme tendency to identify with idealized
social norms embodied in the social functions of the paleomammalian
brain.
Allison and Schwarz (1999) provide an understanding of the integration involved in the possessing other in the context of dissociative identity disorders and the operation of what they called an inner self helper,
a source of unconscious inner guidance. This personality structure of
these patients was aware of all of the multiple identities and had a greater
consciousness and control than did the ego. This inner helper also could
help and strengthen the ego in its struggles with the other personalities.
The inner self helper provides a psychological space for control, stability,
clarity, and self-understanding. Comstock (1991) emphasized the ability
of this structure to operate as an organizing force for the person. This
identity provides integrative potentials for the patient and processes of
therapeutic resolution of the dissociated aspects of the ego in the integration or psychological fusion of the personalities.

Common Denominators in Altered Consciousness

Frecska and Luna (2006) suggested that commonalities in techniques
that alter consciousness involve two opposite processes: overstressing the
frontal-prefrontal circuits of the coping mechanisms or dysregulating
them, pushing them below the functional range. They propose that the
resulting effect is the emergence of a direct intuitive information processing that replaces the ordinary perceptual-cognitive processing. Frecska
and Luna point to support for this model of integrative consciousness in:
(1) the nal common pathway of psychedelic drugs action in the thalamus; (2) the role of thalamic gamma synchronization in binding; (3) the
vertical organization of fronto-subcortico-thalamic feedback loops; and
(4) their relations to the horizontal layering of McLeans triune brain
model.
This perspective illustrates that integration and dissociation or deafferentation are complementary and co-dependent processes. Typical

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Altering Consciousness

alterations of consciousness occur with an enhanced integration of lower

brain processes that may simultaneously disengage other habitual processes of knowing. This also helps illustrate how AC constitutes a special
form of knowing.
Examination of these brain patterns of AC from the perspectives of
MacLeans (1990) model of the triune brain illustrates the elicitation of
the paleomentation and the emotio-mentation processes of lower brain
structures (R-complex and limbic brain) and their management of emotions, attachment, social relations and bonding, sense of self, and convictions about beliefs.Procedures and conditions that alter consciousness
have an intrinsic potential to produce an integration of information
processing between the R-complex and the limbic system, between the
limbic system and the frontal cortex, and between the hemispheres of
the cortex; hence the labeling as the integrative mode of consciousness.
A primary characteristic of integrative consciousness involves an
ascending integration of brain mechanisms, a limbic-system driving of
the frontal cortex that integrates the preconscious or unconscious functions and material into self-conscious awareness. Key physiological mechanisms underlying integrative forms of consciousness are found in
activation of the paleomammalian brain, specically the hippocampalseptal circuits, the hypothalamus, and related brain structures that regulate emotions (MacLean, 1990). These effects contribute to a second characteristic of integrative forms of consciousness, the ability to act on the
structures of earlier levels of consciousness by engaging operational structures of the unconscious and dissociated aspects of the self. This engagement allows a differential elicitation of specic 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, & dAquili, 1992; Winkelman, 2010) illustrate that alterations
of consciousness engage special forms of knowing. A prominent manifestation of altered consciousness involves imagetic representations known
as a presentational symbolism (Hunt, 1995). This system of visual symbolism provides knowledgeone might even say wisdombeyond that of
our rational language-based consciousness, exemplied in the out-ofbody experiences of shamans. Altered consciousness reects this early

A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness

level of symbolism through which we know the universe in ways much

like those of other animals through a variety of prelanguage structures
and processes of knowing. Altered consciousness involves special forms
of the integration of consciousness through an elevation of the preconscious processes of our ancient reptilian and paleomammalian brains.
These levels of consciousness produce key aspects of AC such as holistic
perceptions and intuition, special forms of preself-identication, nonverbal knowledge, and manifestations of intense emotional engagement and
detachment.

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PART I

Historical Perspectives

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CHAPTER 3

Consciousness Alteration
Practices in the West
from Prehistory to Late
Antiquity
Yulia Ustinova
Preliminary Remarks
In discussion of any personal experience, the account of the experience is
crucial. In the absence of rst-hand reports, a researcher may employ a
witnesss testimony. When studying the distant past, we usually have none
of these. Prehistory covers the period before the invention of writing.
Processes and events in prehistory can be determined on the basis of
archaeological evidence, while explanatory models provided by other
disciplines, such as anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, can broaden our understanding. Nonetheless, prehistoric humans
remain essentially mute, and their practices and experiences can only be
reconstructed with various degrees of probability. The invention of writing changes the situation, of course, but less dramatically than one would
wish. Texts from the Ancient Near East seldom focus on alterations of consciousness, and this meager information is often open to contradictory
interpretations. Even in a richly documented epoch, such as Classical
Antiquity, personal accounts of alteration of consciousness are very rare,
and we are dependent on abundant second-hand descriptions and passing
references concerning manipulation of consciousness.
Although ancient sources on altered states of consciousness in prehistory
and even in antiquity differ substantially from the records available by means
of modern science, this evidence is of crucial importance. Modern science
with its experimental approach exists only since the 16th century, and

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Altering Consciousness

psychology as a separate scientic discipline developed in the 19th century,

whereas Homo sapiens as a biological species has been present for about
150,000 years. To assert that a phenomenon is typically human rather than
limited to a certain culture or epoch, one requires data covering more than
recent history.
Rather than survey all the evidence on altered states of consciousness
from prehistory till late antiquity, my purpose is to discuss some remarkable
cases, which do not require minute analysis of their cultural context in order
to be appreciated. The discussion is focused on experiences proper, at the
expense of leaving aside testimonies emphasizing other aspects of manipulation of consciousness. In terms of geography, the Near East is regarded as a
part of the West because the Mediterranean world has always served as a
bridge between northern Europe and the Levant. Chronologically, the paper
covers the time span between the Upper Palaeolithic period (38,000 to 12,000
before present) and the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE.

Prehistory
Palaeolithic mind is notoriously elusive, even more so its transient
alterations. In the absence of a single recorded word, Stone Age people
can communicate with us by means of their art. Its most fascinating genre
is represented by paintings and engravings that were created in the depth
of subterranean caverns, featuring mostly animals and mysterious signs
and very rarely depicting humanlike gures (Figure 3.1). Many of these
murals are breathtakingly beautiful, for instance the panels in the famous
caves of Lascaux (ca. 17,000 before present) and Chauvet (ca. 30,000
before present) in France and Altamira (ca. 14,000 before present) in
Spain (Beltran, 1999; Chauvet, Brunel Deschamps, & Hillaire, 1995;
Lorblanchet, 1995; Ruspoli, 1986). What motivated a human being, Homo
sapiens like us, to clamber down, encumbered with lamps and pigments,
hundreds of meters into an enormously long and frightening cave, in
order to depict there animals and enigmatic signs? Using observations of
existing communities who create rock art, the San in southern Africa and
the Indians of the far west of North America, as well as neuropsychological
studies of various methods of manipulation of consciousness, D. LewisWilliams (2002) convincingly demonstrates that it was imagery of altered
states of consciousness that led the prehistoric painters to image making in
the depth of the caves. He argues that signs depicted inside many caves,
whether zigzags, grids, or dots, are modeled on geometric percepts that
often emerge at the outset of altered states of consciousness (entoptic or
phosphene forms). Proceeding further toward full-edged hallucinations,

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

Figure 3.1 Portion of a panel in the cave Les Trois Fre`res, ca 15,000 before present.
Lewis-Williams, 2002, ill. 44, p. 195. Reproduced by a kind permission of J. Clottes

many people experience mental vortex, a passage through a rotating dark

space that they dene 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. 81114). As a result of the identication of the vortex leading to the spirit world with caves and subterranean
passages, these natural features were regarded as entrances into the world

47

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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 experiences, mainly elements of a shamanic altered state (2009, esp. pp. 179207).
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. 218253).
Mind alteration practices persisted during more recent epochs. For instance, various patterns interpreted above as referring to entoptic phenomena occur in the art of the Neolithic period (10,000 to 5,000 before
present). Spirals are especially conspicuous in the decoration of several
European monumental burials, such as Newgrange and Knowth (Republic
of Ireland, 3600 to 3100 BCE) and Gavrinis (Brittany, France, ca. 3500 BCE,
Figure 3.2). The same pattern consistently appears in the drawings of
narcotic-induced visions by modern shamans and is explained by them as
designating doors or passages from one dimension to another. It is therefore
suggested that spiral motifs at the entrances and in the passages the Neolithic
tombs represented the fundamental form of vortex and symbolically indicated transitions between different realms of the cosmos (Lewis-Williams
& Pearce, 2005, pp. 250280).
In late prehistoric southern Levant, comparable experiences of its Chalcolithic inhabitants are suggested by relics from Tuleilat Ghassul and other
sites (ca. 45003500 BCE). The star fresco from Tuleilat Ghassul features a
variety of geometric motifs, along with mysterious beasts and grotesque
faces, probably masks (Figure 3.3). A set of similar paintings was discovered in another chamber of the building. These murals display a fascinating
mixture of entoptic signs, on the one hand, and attributes of shamanic
practice, such as masks and wands, on the other (Gilead, 2002).
Dance and music not only create collective experiences but can also lead
to ASC, especially when rhythmic music is combined with extensive motor
behavior. The origin of musical tradition is now condently dated back to
the Upper Palaeolithic1: The most ancient bird-bone nger-hole pipes, discovered at Geissenklosterle and Hohle Fels (Germany) and at Isturitz
(France), are dated to 35,00030,000 before present. These are sophisticated instruments with complex acoustic possibilities, designed to be played
two-handed. There can be no doubt that vocal and percussive music, as well
as dancing, anteceded the invention of these advanced instruments, which
1

Or perhaps even earlier; see Mithen, 2005.

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

Figure 3.2
the author.

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

presuppose pitch-organizing behavior of some kind. Such instruments as

drums and rattles were probably made of perishable materials that are not
present in the archaeological record (Conard, Malina, & Munzel, 2009;
DErrico et al., 2003, p. 3648). 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. 381382). Dancing
scenes are common in the art of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (eighth to fourth millennia BC; Garnkel,
2003). Given the cross-cultural distribution of ASC attained through dancing
and music, and the fact that music was performed during the Palaeolithic, it is
very probable that music and dancing were used for manipulation of consciousness as early as in prehistory [see Fachner, this volume].
One of the best-known ways to alter consciousness is the use of psychoactive plants. Hunters-gatherers of the Palaeolithic were familiar with lots

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Altering Consciousness

Figure 3.3 Fragments of the Tuleilat Ghassul frescoes: 15: 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 plants psychedelic properties could hardly remain unknown. Discoveries of opium
poppy capsules among objects accompanying the dead buried in Cueva
de los Murcielagos at Albunol in southern Spain provided undisputable evidence that opium was used there as intoxicant about 4200 BCE. Inhalation of
hemp (Cannabis sativa) is probably attested to by the nds of hemp seeds in
association with objects interpreted as incense burners in fourth- and thirdmillennia BCE Neolithic sites from Romania to South Russia (Kapoor, 1995,
p. 8; Merlin, 2003; Rudgley, 1993, pp. 2425; Sherratt, 1997, pp. 407411).
The population of temperate Neolithic Europe had no access to sugarrich substances allowing fermentation. Alcoholic beverages trace their origin
to the fourth millennium in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

The rst wine was perhaps produced by dates. Vine (Vitis vinifera) seems to
have been cultivated there by the end of the Neolithic period, and archaeological nds from Mesopotamia and Egypt illustrate brewing and drinking
of beer (Rudgley, 1993, p. 31; Sherratt, 1997, pp. 389419).2
Mind-altering agents in prehistoric societies were almost exclusively
used in religious contexts, as both archaeological record and comparative
anthropological material demonstrate. Medical and recreational uses
became divorced from the ritual only recently, when the modern distinction between sacred and secular emerged (Merlin, 2003, pp. 295296;
Sherratt, 1997, pp. 405407). In any case, there is no doubt that prehistoric humans manipulated their minds by use of psychoactive substances.
It is most probable that they also employed other techniques, such as sensory deprivation, and it is likely that experiences induced by various methods of alteration of consciousness are reected in the prehistoric art.

Protohistory
Protohistoric peoples differ from many other nonliterate societies in
the fact that the modern scholar does not nd them entirely silent. For instance, Iranian-speaking nomads and seminomads living in the Black Sea
area and Central Asia were neighbors, trade partners, enemies, or allies
of the Greeks, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and other literate peoples.
These peoples left texts that supply precious information on the lifestyle of
the barbarians, including their practices of consciousness alteration.
Herodotus, who wrote in the 5th century BCE, describes (4, 7375) 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 purication rite, performed
after funerals. Although he did not recognize the role of hemp as hallucinogen,
he faithfully recorded the technique. His account was corroborated when copper censers with hemp seeds, as well as stones and poles, were discovered in
burial mounds, dated to the 5th century BCE, erected in Siberia by another
subgroup of the Scythians and exceptionally well preserved because of the
perpetual frost (Rudenko, 1970). It is clear that various Iranian-speaking peoples used hallucinogens in their religious ceremonies, and Scythians of Europe
and Asia employed hemp, Cannabis sativa, as a psychoactive substance.
As to alcohol, the Celts and the Germans drank beer. The rst indisputable evidence of mead in temperate Europe dates to the rst millennium
2
However, A. Sherratt (1997, pp. 389419) infers drinking other kinds of intoxicating
beverages from the proliferation of ritual pots, especially beakers, in later Neolithic Europe.

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Altering Consciousness

BCE. At the same time, colonial contacts with the Classical world brought
wine to Gaul, Spain, and Scythia (Sherratt, 1997, pp. 394396).

Ancient Near East

Alteration of consciousness by means of drugs was well known in the
Ancient Middle East and attested to by archaeological and written sources.3
Juglets shaped as poppy capsules were commonly imported to Egypt from
Cyprus during the sixteenth through 14th centuries BCE. Chemical analysis
of the residue demonstrates that, at least in some cases, these vessels contained opium. Although references to opium in Egyptian medical texts mention its sedative and pain-killing powers only, it is scarcely possible that the
plants 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 owers and capsules in ritual scenes suggest (Emboden, 1978, 1979, p. 12; Merlin, 2003, pp. 305306).
Numerous artifacts featuring incised opium capsules attest to the popularity of the drug in the Minoan civilization that ourished 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. 2829, 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. 148152).
Alteration of consciousness in the Ancient Near East was sometimes
associated with prophecy giving. Direct communication with the gods
through mediums, among them ecstatics, or through visions and dreamvisions, is known among the Mari, Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians,
3

Although some experts assume that Sumerian and Assyrian texts contain references to
opium (e.g. Kapoor, 1995, pp. 14; Stuart, 2004, p. 77), others are much more cautious
in their reading (Krikorian, 1975). There is no unequivocal evidence on the use of opium
in these cultures.
4
The incisions show that the capsules were deprived of the sap in order to obtain the opiates.

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

although these methods seem to have played a minor role in these civilizations. Noteworthy are 18th century BCE Mari texts recording divine
messages delivered by male and female prophets, referred to either as
ecstatics or respondents. The former seemed to act spontaneously, as if
possessed by the spirits, whereas the latter were perhaps able to control
the spirits in order to obtain their message [other authors such as Rouget,
however, use enthusiasm to describe spirit possession (see also below) and
ecstasy to describe out-of-the-boy and visionary experiences].The mode of
revelation and the prophets 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 (Bottero, 1974, pp. 8993; Durand, 1997; Haldar, 1945, pp. 2129;
Nissinen, 2000; Overholt, 1986).
In ancient Israel of the monarchical period (ca. 1000586 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. 8284, 108112; Haldar, 1945, pp. 108126; Huffmon,
2000, pp. 6369; 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 840760 BCE, which states in its rst line that the pagan prophet
Balaam has seen the gods (van Kooten & van Ruiten, 2008). Although
groups of ecstatics, known as sons of the prophets or bands of prophets,
experienced collective alterations of consciousness (e.g. 1 Samuel 10: 5, 10;
19: 20, King James Version), normally the seer attained illumination individually. The revelation could comprise mental pictures of the future or
sights of the other world, such as encounters with divine councils, heavenly
armies, and awesome god-sent apparitions. Such gures as Samuel, Elijah,
and Elisha, combining the characteristics of sages, sorcerers, medicine
men, and seers, may be classied as belonging to the shamanistic type:
According to Kings 1 and 2, they multiplied oil, our, and other substances,
called re or water from the heavens, puried lands, healed leprosy, and
5

The historical books of the Old Testament received their denite 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. 1120; 2 Chronicles 34. 2228).

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Altering Consciousness

performed the supreme feat of resurrecting the dead (Aune, 1983, p. 83,
8687; Grabbe, 1995, p. 149). Elishas demise was no less miraculous than
his life: He was taken to heaven by a ery 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 Ezekiels multiple harrowing visions
of unearthly force, among them the following overwhelming experience
(Ezekiel 13):
The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest . . . and the
hand of the Lord was there upon him. And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a re 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 rmament 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 ndest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the
house of Israel . . . Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for
sweetness . . . Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I
shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears . . .
Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place. I heard also the
noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another . . . So
the spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I went in bitterness, in the
7
Cf. Sauls stripping off his clothes (1 Samuel 19. 224); Isaiah remaining naked for three
years (Isaiah 20. 3); Ezekiels austerities and magic (Ezekiel 45).

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

heat of my spirit; but the hand of the Lord was strong upon me. Then I
came to them of the captivity at Tel-abib . . . and remained there astonished
among them seven days.

This is a formidable description of a complex multistage experience that

comprises visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and kinesthetic hallucinations.
It starts as an apparition of a ery vortex, consisting of winged manlike
burning creatures that are elsewhere dened as cherubs (Ezekiel 10. 1622).
The vision is accompanied by the noise of their wings, and it grows into the
magnicent picture of the Lord enthroned and talking to the prophet. This
tremendous encounter leads Ezekiel to the next stage of his experience, the
feeling that the spirit entered him. Overridden with awe, he fell prostrated
before the god, but the spirit supported the prophet from the inside and forced
him to stand up and heed the words of the god. At this stage, two more feelings became involved in the hallucination: Ezekiel not only saw the scroll
given by the god but also felt its touch and sweet taste in his mouth. Until this
moment, the prophet felt that he remained in the same place where his experience started. Then suddenly the spirit lifted him into the air and he sensed
himself ying, the ery creatures surrounding him. After the return from his
ight, Ezekiel remained torpid for 7 days. Ezekiels intricate experience comprises hallucinations involving all his senses, or perhaps synesthesia with
one sensation altering into another, as well as possession by a spirit and an
out-of-body ight. 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 Platos Phaedrus (244A). In contrast, other kinds of madness
were expunged, either by purications or other religious means, or by
more rational methods. Plato further explains that the divine madness is
produced by a divinely wrought change in our customary social norms
(Phaedrus 265A) and states that there are four types of god-induced frenzy
or mania: prophetic, initiatory, poetic, and erotic (Dodds, 1973, p. 64).
Following Plato, we will survey some most remarkable cases of different
kinds of madness. In Greece, prophecy inspired directly by a divinity was
8
9

Merkabah literature, Sholem, 1987, pp. 1924.

This section of the paper is largely based on my book: Ustinova, 2009b.

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considered to be more ancient than the decipherment of signs and superior

to it. To gain inspiration, a mortal had to become possessed by a god, or to
have the god inside him- or herself (entheos): The seers or prophets served
as mediums, conveying superhuman knowledge by means of their bodies.
In the grip of the god, the medium could display a wide range of anomalous
behavior, from mere detachment and aloofness to violent paroxysms. These
mental states, which today would be referred to as ASC, were enthousiasmos
(divine possession) or mania (madness, frenzy) for the Greeks. Prophetic
utterances could be obtained in the sanctuaries of several gods, but Apollo
was considered the god of divination par excellence. In the four great oracular sanctuaries of Apollo, at Delphi in the Balkan Greece, and at Didyma,
Claros, and Patara in Asia Minor, oracles were given by a priest or a priestess
inspired by the god and speaking on the gods behalf (Burkert, 2005;
Flower, 2008; Heintz, 1997; Johnston, 2008; Johnston & Struck, 2005;
Rosenberger, 2001).The most intriguing question is how inspired divination was attained. By what techniques could an individual, whether a
free-lance seer or a prophetic priest in an established shrine, induce in
himself or herself the state of enthusiasm?
Methods of attaining enthousiasmos differed from sanctuary to sanctuary. For instance, at Claros the mantic session was held in a grotto, where
the medium drank the sacred water and sang the responses of the god
(Parke, 1985, pp. 219224; 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. 210219). In
Patara, the priestess was shut up in the temple with the god for a night
(Herodotus 1. 182). In Delphi, the most revered Greek oracle, prophecy
was delivered by a simple woman, known as the Pythia, who entered the
holy of holies, mounted her sacred tripod and, inspired by Apollo,
responded to the questions posed by inquirers. Recent geological discoveries in the area of Delphi have succeeded in demonstrating that under
the temple of Apollo occurred emissions of intoxicating gases. It is clear
now that at Delphi the inner sanctum was an articial grotto. There the
Pythia experienced an ASC, which was induced to a considerable extent
by inhalation of hydrocarbon gases emitted from the ssure in the bedrock
(Bowden, 2005, pp. 436; Johnston, 2008, pp. 3860; Parke & Wormell,
1956; Ustinova 2009a, pp. 275280; pp. 121153). In all these sanctuaries, the lifestyle of the mouthpiece of the god comprised seclusion,
purications, fasting, and other austerities, and indeed the strain of possession by the god. Oracles could be given on a limited number of days,
and even then the prophets faced serious health risks: Pliny notes

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

that drinking from the sacred pool at Claros inspires wonderful oracles
but shortens the life of the drinker (Pliny, Natural History 2. 232; Iamblichus, On the mysteries 3. 11). The life-shortening factor was most probably
not the sacred water alone but the way of life of the medium.
In contrast, in many oracular centers inquirers received the response directly
from the deity, who appeared to them in a dream or in a revelation. We are fortunate to have a unique account of an experience in such a sanctuary. Trophonius, whose oracle was in Lebadeia (Central Greece), was believed to have
vanished there beneath the earth and to live in a cave under a hill as an
oracular god. The oracle in Lebadeia already existed by the 6th century BCE
(Bonnechere, 2003; Schachter, 19811994, Volume 3; Ustinova, 2002).
The descent to Trophonius is described in detail by Pausanias, who
wrote his Description of Greece about 140 CE (Pausanias 9. 39). The preparation for the consultation took several days and included not only preliminary sacrices 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 articial circular hole,
several meters deep: The inquirer lay on the ground, and then he was
swiftly drawn into another hole, as if by an eddy. The inner space was perhaps a small recess at the bottom of the larger grotto, where only the feet of
the people entered, while they remained stretched out on the oor (Bonnechere, 2003, pp. 159163). 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. 3738, g. 2.
A feeling of passage through a rotating dark space dened 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. 2830; Siegel & Jarvik 1975; Merkur, 1989, pp. 136
137). Reclining position, like the one assumed by the consulters at the Trophonium, can
also trigger visions (Siegel, 1980, p. 925).

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priests. Only after this procedure was the suppliant, semiconscious and
paralyzed with terror, allowed to be taken away by his relatives.
The suppliants experience in this sanctuary is described in a dialogue entitled The Daimonion of Socrates by Plutarch, philosopher, biographer, and priest
at Delphi, who lived ca. 50120 CE. This is a fascinating account of the communication of a young Athenian named Timarchus, who spent 2 nights and a
day in the cave, in a world beyond normal experience (590B592F):
He said that on descending into the oracular crypt his rst 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 re, 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 rst 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 insignicant. The most substantial inference from Plutarchs
description is that an inquirer in the sanctuary of Trophonius lived
through an out-of-body experience: lack of awareness of the surroundings, passage through darkness to translucent and pure light, ight over
a magnicent country, visual and auditory hallucinations, mixture of joyfulness and awe when he heard voices that explained to him the mystery
of metempsychosis, and the nal gift of precognition that allowed the prediction of his imminent death. Unsurprisingly, Timarchus ASC was
accompanied by culturally patterned visions, reecting Greek religious

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

and philosophical ideas. The variance in the kind of hallucinations experienced in Trophoniuss 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 inuences
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, Plutarchs detailed account of the revelations experienced
in the cave of Trophonius is the exception to the rule; testimony on other
oracular centers consists of indirect allusions or brief hints as to ASC experienced by inquirers or personnel. However, we do know that entering
caves regularly occurs as a major requirement for a prophetic seance, 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. 53155.).
Initiatory madness, according to Plato, provides release from physical
ailment and troubles of the world: By purications and sacred rites, he
who has this madness is made safe for the present and the after time,
and for him who is rightly possessed of madness a release from present ills
is found (Phaedrus 244E). People engaged in these rites were called mystai
(singular, mystes), hence the English word mystery. These cults were individual and voluntary. In contrast to most cults in the Greek city-state,
which were focused on a group, from family to civic community, mystery
rites were about the individual only and inuenced his or her attitude to
life and death.
In the cause of the central ceremony, a great secret, unknown to the
public at large, was imparted to the mystai. The details of the eyeopening, life-changing disclosure of the ultimate secret were not to be
divulged; therefore, ancient authors provided but circumspect allusions
to mystery rites. In modern literature, Greek mysteries are usually
included in the category of initiations or passage rites, both terms designating rites that focus on introduction of a novice into a group of those
who already possess exclusive knowledge (Burkert, 1987).

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Aristotle stated that the purpose of initiations into mysteries is not to

learn anything, but rather to experience and to be inclined, that is to say,
to become t for the purpose (fr. 15 Rose). He obviously means a generic
mystery experience, disregarding particularities, such as divine patrons of
cults or places of ceremonies. Thus, the most important objective of the
Greek initiations was to make the participants live through a certain experience, and in order to attain it, they had to be inducted into a certain state
of mind. Aristotles phrase poses two main questions for the modern
reader. What was the nature of the experience? What methods were used
to make the initiated t for the purpose?
Mysteries were secret cults that were intended to bestow happiness in
this world and a better life in the hereafter on the mystai. They emerged to
a large extent as an alternative to the prevailing belief in grim postexistence
of the soul beneath the earth as a shadow deprived of consciousness and
will, as in the chilling picture painted by Homer in the Eleventh Song of
the Odyssey. Several mystery cults, among them the mysteries of Dionysus
discussed below, are known to have existed by the 6th century BCE, or perhaps even earlier (Burkert, 1987; Cosmopoulos, 2003; Scarpi, 2002). The
basic characteristics of the mystery cults remained constant throughout
the many centuries of their history, modications 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 dened as ersatz-death. Hints scattered through
the works of various authors indicate that the aim of the initiate was to attain
harmony and bliss by enduring death and learning not to fear it. The deeper
the feeling of death, the greater was the blessing. Plutarch compares mystery
initiations to death and continues with the following observations on mystery cults (On the Soul, Sandbach, 1967, fragment 178):
At rst 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

pious people; he observes the crowd of people living at this very time uninitiated and unpuried, who are driven together and trample each other in
deep mud and darkness, and continue in their fear of death, their evils
and their disbelief in the good things in the other world. Then in accordance with nature the soul stays engaged with the body in close union
thereafter.

If one had tried to think up a description of mystic experience as close

to near-death experience as possible, it is hard to imagine a more apt and
vivid account. An unending ight through the darkness, with a marvelous
light in its end, as well as all kinds of visions, happiness, and meetings
with kindly peoplewhat could be closer to the paradigmatic neardeath experience (Greyson, 2000; Moody, 1976)?
At the end of the passage cited above, Plutarch restates the ancient idea
that is attested to as early as in the 6th century BCE: Those who arrive in
Hades uninitiated will wallow in the mud, while those initiated will dwell
with the gods (Plato, Phaedo 69C). The same notion is repeated time and
again in the texts inscribed on gold tablets that accompanied initiates to
the grave and were believed to guide their souls on their last journeys.
The change in the mystes destiny was so dramatic that it could be perceived as an apotheosis: Once human, you have become a god, is the
inscription on one of the gold tablets (Cole, 2003, p. 207; Price, 1999,
pp. 119121; cf. Graf & Johnston, 2007). Initiation transformed the initiates 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 efcacy 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. 218255).
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 intensied 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, 284285). Dionysiac mania is achieved in a group, which is
symbolically mirrored in the ecstatic retinue surrounding the god, his
maenads and satyrs (Figure 3.4). A votary of Dionysus Bacchus, abandoning

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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
sacrices, 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 gure, who
is about to disclose the great secret, a basket lled with fruit (a symbol of
fertility), among which a huge phallus rises (Figure 3.5). Preparation
and alteration of the state of consciousness, referred to by Aristotle, were
necessary to ensure that viewing trivial objects like this basket produced
the sensation of a direct encounter with the divine, imparting exclusive
knowledge that elevated the initiate to his new blessed state.

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

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

Y. Sokolovskaya, after Kerenyi, 1976, g. 135.

Platos third kind of divine madness is poetic inspiration. Greek writers

are quite explicit about the divine nature of poetry. Democritus says: Everything a poet does with enthusiasm and divine spirit, is very good (Delatte,
1934, pp. 2879), whereas in Platos 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 3639; cf. Plato Laws 3. 682a; Ion 533536B; Compton,
2006, p. 177179; Cornford, 1952, p. 66; Tigerstedt, 1970).
The Greeks even developed ideas that we could dene as a theory of
conscious alteration. They perceived mental experiences of exceptional
intensity as stemming from divine intervention: Poets were inspired by
the Muses, the visions of prophets were imparted by gods, sages received
revelatory dreams, and the intense emotional experiences of simple mortals were also believed to be caused by divine intervention. Unusual
psychological phenomena were explained as possession by the gods or
enthousiasmos (Chadwick, 1942; Cornford, 1952, pp. 88106; Delatte,
1934, p. 5; Murray, 1981; Vernant, 1974, pp. 1213). Democritus, the
inventor of the atomic theory of matter, also recognized the kinship of
the seers intuitions, poetic genius, mystic insights, and mental afictions

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but ascribed these phenomena to an anomalous physical condition,

namely to extremely rapid motion of psychic atoms (Cornford, 1952,
pp. 6466). At the same time, distrust of the mundane human wisdom
is inherent in Greek thought. The early Greeks believed that only the gods
could really know the truth (Snell, 1960, p. 136; Starr, 1968, pp. 349,
351). In the Phaedo, Socrates argues that the sustenance of the body and
its desires hinders the pursuit of the truth and that even when people turn
to philosophy (66 DE),
the body is constantly breaking in upon our studies and disturbing us with
noise and confusion, so that it prevents our beholding the truth, and in fact
we perceive that, if we are ever to know anything absolutely, we must be
free from the body and must behold the actual activities with the eye of
the soul alone. And then, as our argument shows, when we are dead we
are likely to possess the wisdom which we desire and claim to be enamoured of, but not while we live. For, if pure knowledge is impossible while
the body is with us, one of two things must follow, either it cannot be
acquired at all or only when we are dead; for then the soul will be by itself
apart from the body, but not before. And while we live, we shall, I think, be
nearest to knowledge when we avoid, so far as possible, intercourse and
communion with the body

For Socrates, in order to reach the ultimate truth, the mind of a mortal
must cease to be merely human and mingle with the divine. To attain the
superhuman wisdom, the soul must be liberated from its connection with
the body. He says in the Phaedo that in order to transcend the limits of
incarnate knowledge, the philosopher must terminate his worldly existence, and only then is he able to reach the real divine postcarnate knowledge (Cornford, 1952, p. 58; Morgan, 1990, pp. 5579).
The Greeks knew several ways to liberate their souls from the constraints of the body and still remain alive. Some mystics claimed that they
could release their souls at will; independent of the body, the soul could
achieve superhuman knowledge. Others attained states of intense concentration by means of meditation-like techniques. Ordinary people on the
verge of death reported out-of-body experiences involving the feeling of
their souls ight. 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. 177217.

Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity

The Roman Empire

Traditional Roman piety did not welcome manipulations of consciousness, but after the Romans had conquered the Mediterranean world and
founded an empire, Greek and Near Eastern beliefs and cults ooded 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 goddesss 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 Isiss
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, purications, and silent meditations, the aspirant initiate could
approach the threshold of death and experience the overwhelming contact with the divinity, beyond the limits of space and time. An Isiac initiation and the sentiments of the initiate are depicted by Apuleius in the
Metamorphoses, written in the mid-second century AD (11. 23):
I approached the boundary of death and treading on Proserpines threshold, I was carried through all the elements, after which I returned. At dead
of night I saw the sun ushing 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 ashing with bright light. This phrase
is reminiscent of the bright light shining in the darkness in the descriptions of mental vortex, typical of the initial stages of ASC. The initiate even
depicts the light of the sun as lumen candidum, which may mean not only
bright but also benign or kindly. Furthermore, his ight through all the
elements brings to mind out-of-body experiences occurring in ASC,
including near-death experiences.

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At the climax of the Isiac initiation, the votary was alone with the Alone,
to use the phrase of Plotinus, a philosopher and mystic (Witt, 1971, p. 160).
The initiate experienced voluntary death and eternal salvation, an ineffable
communion with the divine, that produced a profound and elevating effect
(Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11. 2125). Apuleiuss description of the initiates
intense happiness in front of Isiss statue, in the innermost place in her temple, attests to spirituality imbued with a sensuous element. This experience,
which could be incited by the sublimation of eros, developed into a genuine
mystic union with Isis, a radiant all-encompassing joy (Grifths, 1986,
p. 59). Achieved as a result of the solitary vigil, it came from within the
initiates 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 (Watereld, 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 boys 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
ame of the lamp, you . . . ask him concerning everything that you wish
after reciting the invocation . . . (column 16; Grifth & Thompson, 1904,
pp. 112113)

The boy was probably an adolescent undeled by sexual contacts, as

required for magical proceedings in other parts of this long papyrus. His state
of consciousness was altered by means of xation on light, and the words
uttered in this context were believed to contain superhuman knowledge.
The idea that that human mind is evicted by the divine and that a gap
divides the unexcited state from the divine mania remained ingrained in
ancient pagan philosophy until its eclipse (Nasrallah, 2003, p. 41). Plotinus,
a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Egypt and lived in Rome, is often
labeled the father of Western mysticism (Rist, 1977, p. 213). His exceptional account of his own multiple out-of-body experiences allows fascinating
insights into the philosophers mental world (Plotinus, Ennead 4. 8. 1. 111):
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

lived the best life and come to identify with the divine; and set rm in it I
have come to that actuality setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever come down, and how
my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be
in itself, even when it is in the body.

This powerful description allows a unique glimpse into the mind of a

mystic living in the third century AD. His frequent ecstatic experiences left
him with the sensation of having seen the ultimate beauty.12 Plotinus felt
that he became one with the divine: The beholder and the beheld were
united. This ineffable experience, which he called henosis (unity), was
beyond the ordinary borders of intellect, which acts along the lines of
logical reasoning. The joy of this mental state was so overwhelming that
Plotinus wondered why his soul returned to the body at all. It is noteworthy that he compared his henosis to prophetic possession (Ennead 5. 3. 14.
914; Dillon, 1992, pp. 198200; Schuhl & Hadot, 1971; Wallis, 1972,
pp. 7282). For Plotinus, his out-of-body state is pure Mind, and the
return to the body entails return to discursive reasoning. Thus, there was
a noetic insight while the thinker was ecstatic, but afterward it was subjected to rational analysis and expressed in conventional literary form.

Conclusions
Since the Stone Age, human beings have manipulated their consciousness. There is little doubt that psychotropic plants were used in the Neolithic period, and it is most probable that this and other methods of
consciousness alteration, such as sensory deprivation, auditory driving,
and extensive motor behavior were employed even earlier, during the
Palaeolithic. With the invention of writing and subsequent development
of literature, descriptions of individual experiences of divine revelations,
out-of-body states, and related practices made their appearance. Ancient
Greeks went farther and began to expound altered states of consciousness
as a complex world view, basing their approach on the belief that human
ability to attain the ultimate truth is limited by nature, and only liberation
from the restraint of the mortal esh 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, Plotinuss soul is exalted above the beauty, Ennead
6. 9. 911.

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drawing on the heritage of the entire Mediterranean worldas well as on

the inherent human drive to attain extreme experiences by means of consciousness alteration.

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Editions of Ancient Sources

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Plutarch, On the Soul: Sandbach, F. H. (1967). Moralia Vol. 7. Leipzig: Teubner.

CHAPTER 4

Spirit Possession and Other

Alterations of
Consciousness in the
Christian Western Tradition
Moshe Sluhovsky
Introduction
The concept of an altered state of consciousness presupposes notions of
selfhood and consciousness that are stable enough to be altered and transformed. In the Western Christian tradition, self and consciousness have
always been bound with notions of a relatively coherent inner self and
the existence of external agenciesspiritsthat, at times, can take possession of this inner self and change it. The change could last anything from a
few seconds to a lifetime, could be voluntary or involuntary, and could
have either permanent or only short-term impact on the living subject
whose self is being possessed. An alteration of consciousness could be
ritualized, enabling a person to achieve a goal (usually spiritual) that could
not be achieved by normative human potentialities, and, alternatively,
could be spontaneous, unstructured, and chaotic. It could lead to a condition that could be evaluated by society as either positive or negative. It
could endow people with the halo of sanctity or label them as sick.
Theologians, philosophers, natural philosophers, and physicians participated in ongoing efforts throughout the Classical Age, the Middle Ages,
and the early modern period to develop and systematize epistemologies of
the self and of consciousness and to address the physiological and psychological implications of the theories they developed. Once they moved away
from a consensual understanding that self, consciousness, and altered states
of consciousness exist, however, there was very little they agreed on. Where,

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exactly, is the location of the self and of consciousness within the body and
where does the alteration of the self take place? The mindbody 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 congurations
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 communitys or an individuals requests to the divine powers (Pocs,
1999; Pocs, 2005, with very detailed bibliography; but see also de Blecourt,
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 dened as a psychobiological condition
that enables the surrendering of the body to external entities and the fall into
catalepsy (immobility), and it was understood as a precondition for a communicative act (Crapanzano, 1987, p. 14). The interaction with the deity
or the dead was usually construed either as mostly an imaginal journey of
the shamans soul to the realm of the divine or of the deceased ancestors
(i.e., the shamanic magical ight), or, less often, as a penetration of his or
her soul by a supernatural entity (i.e., spirit possession; see Cardena,
1996, and Winkelman, 1992, for further discussions of this distinction).
Although most European shamans practiced alone and in secrecy, in some
parts of Europe entire groups of practitioners (males as well as females) participated in a collective alteration of consciousness. Using incantations,
dancing (Tarantism), recitations, and maybe hallucinatory drugs, they
waged battles against malevolent entities. These battles of the good people
against enemiesevil or night spirits, donne di fuori (women from outside),
Mistresses of the Night, and otherswere assumed to heal individuals,
overcome malecium, 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

phenomena was similar, namely a belief in a supernatural realm and in the

ability of individuals to interact with this realm by means of transguration
or transmigration of their souls. Second, from a theological Christian
perspective, all of these pre-Christian and syncretistic pagan-Christian techniques were heretical. It is therefore not surprising that much of our knowledge concerning the prevalence of these altered consciousness systems in
the European past derives from inquisitorial records, witchcraft accusations,
and catalogs of superstitious practices the church tried to eradicate.
Was a departing soul actually journeying or was it a dream state? Was
this belief a part of an old Eurasian-wide tradition or merely local and
unrelated manifestations? Given the fragmented nature of the evidence,
these questions are not likely to be answered conclusively. The tradition
of possession of the soul by external entities is much better documented,
but this tradition, too, raises a number of philosophical, theological, and
morphological questions. Was a possessing spirit taking hold of the soul,
the spirit, or merely of the body of its host? How does it get in and how
does it get out? Is there a core that cannot be penetrated and possessed?
And how dramatic and profound should an alteration of consciousness
be in order to qualify its agent/victim as being possessed by a spirit?
The Christian god was an embodied god, a fact that added a layer to the
relations between body, soul, and the divine in Europe. Do, for example,
the tranquility, restfulness, and sense of both a shared community with
fellow human beings and of communion with the divine following the
intaking of the divine in the shape of the Eucharist count as an altered
state of consciousness? Alternatively, does a nocturnal emission, which
was understood in the monastic tradition to be a result of a demonic overpowering of a resisting self, constitute an altered state of consciousness?
(Elliott, 1999, 1434).
Given the huge body of theological, medical, natural philosophical, and
philosophical writings that were composed by medieval and early modern
theologians, physicians, philosophers, and natural philosophers in their
effort to make sense of the self, consciousness, and their transformations
and the spectrum of altered states of consciousness (ASC) in the preChristian and Christian Western traditions, it is unavoidable that we restrict
our discussion to the most common and the best documented Christian
congurations 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 congurations 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 afiction that

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resulted from the control (whose exact nature was open to debate) of
demonic entities over the self. Although in cases of a unitive mystical experience with the divine only the spirit itself determined the length of the
experience, a demonic possession necessitated an intervention by healing
professionals (saints, charismatic gures, or both lay and religious exorcists), whose intervention terminated the possession.
In this chapter, I trace some historical transformations of the Christian
idiom of spirit possession. The sense of change over time sometimes gets
lost in anthropological and ethnopsychiatric discussions of ASC that too
often assume stable conceptual notions of the interactions among humans
and divine or diabolic entities. The two forms of alteration of consciousness I discuss, however, went through a major historical reconguration.
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
Agesone malign and one benignthat 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 malevolencebenevolence spectrum, troubled theologians and threatened the stability of presumed clear
distinctions between the realms in which God and Satan can act and
among the forms possessions could take. The confusion, in turn, led, by
the later part of the period under discussion (the 16th and 17th centuries),
to new denitions of both divine and demonic possessions, to new techniques of discerning the differences between them, and then to processes
of legitimazing or delegitimazing of specic forms of ASC and the individuals who experienced them.

Divine Possession
Following St. Augustine, the medieval Christian tradition recognized
three experiences of union with the divine. Spiritual experience is more
excellent than the corporeal, and intellectual is more excellent than spiritual
(Augustine, 1982, p. 213). In intellectual mystical experiences, the mystic
acquires an inward presence of the divine independently of any sensory
form. Spiritual experiences involve imaginary hearing or seeing things with
the spiritual (as opposed to the bodily) senses (imaginations). Finally, corporeal experiences are perceived through the body and its real senses. An intellectual unitive experience is the most reliable, while spiritual and corporeal

Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness

experiences are always compromised because they rely on the materiality of

the natural world and of human perception and are further threatened
by the possibility of intentional distortions by evil spirits, who operate through
the senses. By the thirteenth century, two distinct schools of achieving the
transcendent experience of the divine co-existed in Europe. The intellectual
tradition was now joined by the pseudo-Dionysian school, which emphasized the Via negativa, the stripping away of all modes of thinking or understanding in order to annihilate the self within the divine. Love, rather than
intellect, was the route to achieve transcendence. This school encouraged
practitioners to employ affects rather than intelligence; to rst meditate upon
Christs life and death and to visualize themselves present at these events.
They then went beyond the rst stage of meditating on concrete sensory
things to contemplating Christs agony even without visualization, which
could lead them, nally, 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 ones senses (ecstasy, we should not forget,
comes from the Latin ex stasis: standing outside ones senses), it was always
rst mediated through the body. It was always experienced through the
senses and the emotions and communicated through language.
The unio mystica of the intellectual type is immediate, uncommunicative, and cannot be reached through exercises. In affective mysticism,
however, the practitioner actively seeks to alter her consciousness by
means of contemplation. She does so by learning and then regularly practicing a prescribed set of meditations and other spiritual exercises that
train the mind to experience the visible manifestations of the divine.
Admittedly, only divine will can infuse a mystical experience into the contemplating self, and no effort on behalf of a practitioner can guarantee a
transcendent unity, but one can advance systematically toward acquiring
deeper and deeper comprehensions of God through exercises. Not all the
practitioners, obviously, achieve the mystical unity, and contemplation
in and of itself is not a guarantee that the practitioner reaches the goal,
but successful contemplation leads to an alienation of the mind, which
acquires a state of the soul that is elevated above itself and above human
effort. The soul nds itself surmounting its natural capabilities,
suspending in God (McGinn, 2004).
The development of such sensory-imaginative forms of spirituality
meant a democratization of contemplation and meditation. Some spiritual
and contemplative guides, the most famous and popular among which
was The Clowde of Unknowyng (written between 1375 and 1400), were
written now in the vernacular and thus became available to the laity

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(Cloud of Unknowing, 1944). Religiously inclined women in the later

Middle Ages found affective and emotive spiritual exercises especially
appealing. It enabled them to contemplate the divine in its humanity (as
Christ) and to strive toward being possessed by it by using their own
bodies and emotions as the means to do so. Women, much more than
men, made divine possession a common religious idiom between the
13th and 16th centuries, and, more often than not, their possessions took
a bodily conguration. Female mystics levitated, entered into trance states,
shed copious tears, or were paralyzed in rigid positions. Women, after all,
were perceived to be more emotional, more embodied, and more passionate than men (Bynum, 1987). Their bodies, which had often been portrayed as a disadvantage and imperfection, could now be the tools that
enabled women, rather than men, to acquire knowledge of God. But, the
democratization, embodiment, and feminization of contemplation came
with a price. As the technique spread from monastic communities to the
laity and from learned men to ignorant women, more and more forces
rallied against it. It potentially diminished the centrality of the mediation
of the Sacraments through the church (and, thus, diminished the clerical
monopoly over access to the sacred), argued the opponents of affective
spirituality. It gave free rein to Free Spirits Antinomists and other heretics
or untrustworthy individuals. It gave credence to women, whose visions
and experiences should always be suspect. Systematic campaigns against
the contemplative route to ASC led, by the second half of the seventeenth
century, to its demise.

Diabolic Possession
Unlike divine possession, the techniques of which could be learned (but
it is worth repeating, demanded an infusion of the divine spirit to actually
occur), diabolic possession in the Christian tradition was never self-induced.
It was always regarded as an undesired intrusion and always necessitated an
intervention by healing experts who could expel the demonic spirit from the
possessed body. Here, too, there was no consensus among medieval and
early modern theologians and other experts concerning the exact nature,
origins, and conguration of this malign ASC. Individuals could be possessed by either revenants (souls returning from the realm of the dead),
Satan himself, or other (lesser) demonic agents; they could remain possessed
for many years or only for a short while; they could manifest their possession
in purely physical symptoms, purely psychological symptoms, or both;
and they could be relieved of their possession by a local lay or religious
professional (exorcist), by the charisma of a saint (dead or alive), or only by

Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness

traveling to a specic site (usually a shrine) whose patron (a Christian saint)

was renowned for his or her efcacy in combating possessing agents. In
short, diabolic possession was a catchall term that was used to describe all sorts
of both physiological and psychological afictions, whose causes were not
self-evidently organic, and illnesses that failed to respond to standard naturalist medical cures.
The Christian conguration 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, 13.1116; Mark 1.2326, 1.3234; Acts 10.38,
19.12; Bocher, 1972; Kelly, 1974; Langton, 1949, pp. 151172; Rodewyk,
1963, pp. 745; Van Dam, 1970). Only in very few cases, possessing agents
also exhibited supernatural knowledge, as was the case with the demon
who afrmed Jesus identity as the Son of God (Mark 16.17; Matthew
8.29ff). As such, it was not easy to determine whether a person was possessed by demonic agents or was merely suffering from physical organic
afiction. It usually took a tacit understanding among the possessed individual, her family and neighbors, and the expelling agencies to determine
that a person was, in fact, possessed by evil spirits, as the physical signs
themselves were similar to signs of purely natural and physical afictions
or mental illness.
Traditionally, and from a purely theological perspective, there was thus
a clear distinction between diabolic and divine possessions. Thomas of
Cantimpre, a 13th-century preacher and theologian, for example, asserted
that demons can only be in the body, not the soul. Most theologians,
including Thomas of Aquinas, agreed that while the Holy Spirit can penetrate the heart itself, demonic agencies can only penetrate the body, usually
the digestive system. From there, however, they inuence the senses in such
ways that it feels and looks as if they are in possession of the soul itself.
(Caciola, 2000, pp. 279285; Caciola, 2003, pp. 176207; Elliott, 1997;
Maggi, 2001; Sweetman, 1999). Practically and morphologically, therefore,
even prior to the spiritualization of possession (to be discussed below), it
was extremely difcult, if at all possible, to determine whether a person
was possessed by a divine or a demonic spirit. More importantly, starting
in the Late Middle Ages, the diagnosis of demonic possession was expanding. In the growing body of literature on diabolic possession, more attention
was paid from the 15th century onward to its supernatural rather than simply physiological symptoms.
By the early 17th century, an ofcial Roman Rite determined that the
knowledge of hidden secrets, together with additional supernatural

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symptoms, such as physical strength that exceeded the possessed persons

age and gender, and the inability to tolerate the presence of Christian symbols such as the Cross, the Bible, or the Host, or of priests or members of
religious orders, were prerequisites to a denition of diabolic possession
(Rituale Romanum, 1871). This document completed the transformation of
demonic possession from being manifested in purely physical symptoms
in early Christianity through a combination of physical and psychological
and supernatural symptoms in the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages to
the primacy and necessity of supernatural marks as a sine qua non for a diagnosis of possession. It is important to note, though, that popular understanding of possession maintained a more expansive denition, and
people suffering from purely physical symptoms continued to be diagnosed
as possessed by demons and to be dispossessed by both lay and religious
exorcists well into the 20th century (De Martino, 1959).
This widening of the scope of possession was a response to unprecedented growth of ecstatic behaviors that had in the past characterized only
divine possessions. With more people than ever claiming direct interactions
with the divine and possessions by the Holy Spirit, people who in the past
could have been understood to be mystics, prophets and prophetesses,
and visionaries were now often diagnosed as being possessed by diabolic
spirits. And because the large majority of these people were women, including lay women, this spiritualization of demonic possession, namely, the
increasing importance attached to psychological signs of possession, and
the tacit willingness to ascribe to demons the ability to take possession of a
persons soul (and not merely a persons 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 persons behavior,
a suspicion concerning visual signs, and a theological confusion. In its
clearly manifested signs of lack of control and the likelihood of deception,
diabolic possession of the soul became connected more than ever before
with the feminine, as these attributes had long been associated with women
(Caciola, 2003; Elliott, 2004; Newman, 1985; Sluhovsky, 2007).

Discernment of Possessing Spirits

Starting in the 13th century, then, possession came to indicate an involuntary encounter between a human being and a spirit of undetermined
nature, and it was left to concentric circles of people to dene the nature
of this spirit. At the core of these decision-making circles stood the possessed person and her immediate family, since they were the only ones
who could testify as to the precise circumstances of the rst outburst of

Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness

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
communitys own diagnosis. A third circle of decision makers was the theologians or exorcists. They, in fact, had the nal word. In cases of suspected
diabolic etiology, their willingness to cast out the possessing agent was an
afrmation of the demonic origins of the possession. In cases of alleged
divine possession, their patronage and support of the claimant were of
utmost importance. They, and only they, could authenticate mystical experiences of a claimant and decide that a specic woman or man was, in fact, a
mystic who enjoyed a possession by a divine spirit. Alternatively, they, and
only they, could put an alleged mystic to tests, deny her claims, or even
arrest her. This being said, in a few cases families, friends, and devotees continued to believe in the divine origins of a persons possession even after the
religious authorities determined otherwise (Di Agresti, 1980, pp. 199200;
Polizzotto, 1993).
This new indeterminacy of possession was a major theological, epistemological, and philosophical challenge. The result was the development
of an ever-growing and more and more elaborate theology and techniques
of discernment of possession spirits, new practices, and a new literary
genre that reached its peak in the 17th century and the accumulative
production of which reached hundreds of titles (Anderson, 2002; Caciola,
2003; Schutte, 2001; Sluhovsky, 2007, pp. 169205; 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 claried the difference between divine and
demonic possessions. But by emphasizing repeatedly the hypotheses that
moderation in spiritual behavior, humility, advanced learning, and worthiness are more likely to be indications of a divine possession while
ecstatic behavior, lack of humility and learning, and social or educational
unworthiness are more likely than not to indicate a demonic possession,
these theologians restricted signicantly the chances of a woman to claim
mystical experiences. A woman, they argued repeatedly, is by nature more
credulous, less reliable, more likely to deceive and be deceived, and less
capable of learning and understanding divine matters. As such, her claims
for possession by the divine spirit are very often either lies and deceptions
or hysterical misconceptions.

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The task of discerning interior possessing spirits was, obviously,

beyond the competence of lay eyewitnesses to possession or medical
specialists. Although each individual could, theoretically at least, participate in the process of diagnosing physical diabolic possession, and many
lay people took place in the negotiation that led to such a denition, basing
their opinion on visual symptoms, only expert theologians could discern
and differentiate among spirits that possessed the soul and that manifested
themselves in purely psychological symptoms. This spiritualization of
demonic possession from the 13th century on was, therefore, a multidimensional process. By emphasizing the psychological rather than the
physical symptoms of diabolic possession, it changed its traditional conguration; by associating its symptoms with the allegedly natural characteristics of women, it feminized it and concurrently restricted womens
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
Gods 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 Christs 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 difcult
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, fth, or seventh sons of fathers who were
themselves third, fth, or seventh sons in their lineage. Some acquired reputation as exorcists because they were born on Good Friday or Christmas
Day, others because they were born with the caul (Del Rio, 2000, p. 50;
Ginzburg, 1966; Sluhovsky, 2007, 3949).
The rituals used to expel demons also varied. Living charismatic gures,
whether they were religious or lay, often followed the tradition and invoked

Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness

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, 19571963, 1:100, 156157, 214215, 401; 2:75, 136139,
142143, 170171, 268; 3:290291; Vita sanctae Genovefae, 44). Cult practitioners in saints shrines usually invoked both Christ and the local saint,
who had been herself or himself renowned in her or his own lifetime for
performing successful exorcisms. Professional religious exorcists followed
prescribed rites and formulas, which varied from place to place, and both
they and lay exorcists used a combination of Christian prayers, saints relics,
fumigations, incantations, herbs, and a mixture of amulets and other paraliturgical and magical techniques. Making the sign of the Cross over the possessed body was a common and successful technique, as were reading
citations from the Bible, reciting names of demons and forcing them to
reveal their names, recalling the Christian myth of creation, Incarnation,
Crucixion, and redemption, and, at times, using physical violence against
the demon (Maggi, 2001; Sluhovsky, 2007, pp. 3670).
The need to systematize exorcismal practices arose only in the early
16th century as part of the Catholic Churchs ongoing battle against superstitious beliefs and practices. Many techniques that had been tolerated by
the church and often used by clerical exorcists themselves were now
deemed to be unauthorized, superstitious, and at times even criminal. A
rst 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 ve books in which he
offered practicing exorcists a collection of legitimate rites. These books
were then incorporated into the massive compendium the Thesaurus exorcismorum of 1608. Hundreds of other guides circulated in the early modern
Catholic world, and even the publication of the Rituale Romanum of 1614
did not put an end to the spread of alternative variations. What all these
books had in common was a demarcation of the boundaries between
authorized and unauthorized techniques of exorcism and between purely
physical aliments and diabolic possession, and a growing attention to the
uncertainty of all symptoms, both physical and psychological (Libellus
ad Leonem X, 1723, c. 688; Thesaurus exorcismorum, 1608). At the same
time that the curative aspect of exorcism was being codied for the rst
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 rst experiencing her mystical visions, her father confessor

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recommended exorcisms not because she exhibited traditional signs of

either physical or psychological possession but in order to determine
what the source of her experiences was and whether it was divine or
demonic. (Weber, 1993; see also Paluzzi, 1980, p. 189 and additional
examples in Caciola, 2000, pp. 274279). Originally, as we recall, divine
possession had nothing to do with exorcism, which was a response to diabolic possessions. Now, because of the growing morphological similarities
between the two forms of alteration of consciousness and the growing anxiety concerning (mostly womens) ecstatic forms of divine possession, exorcism became a means of discerning false claims for mystical possessions as
much as it was a healing technique.

Summary
At the center of my chapter is the argument that, although both
divinely and demonically inspired forms of altered states of consciousness
have always existed in the Christian West, it is important to note the historical changes these idioms went through and to contextualize these
transformations within their precise historical settings. Divine possession,
as we have seen, broke away from the conned walls of male monastic
communities in the twelfth and 13th centuries and reshaped Christian
mysticism, prayer, and mens and womens access to the divine. New theology of contemplation and new practices popularized and democratized
possession by the divine spirit, while affective, imaginary, and sensory
techniques enabled unlearned but nonetheless spiritually inclined individuals, including women, to pursue new forms of religiosity and alteration of consciousness.
Possession by demonic entities also witnessed a transformation in the
later Middle Ages. Its symptoms, which in the past had been mostly physical,
now became psychological. And with this change, a new set of quandaries
arose: How could demonic entities possess the soul, which is supposed to
be immune to their penetration? Who is to decide that a person is possessed
when she does not exhibit the traditional physical symptoms of diabolic
possession? How does one discern possessing spirits? The fact that both
divine and demonic possession were assumed now to take place within
the human soul and that both led to alterations in consciousness that were
morphologically similar created a theological, conceptual, and philosophical confusion. Unsurprisingly, then, the churchs 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

Among the means it employed to pursue this goal was the old technique of
exorcism. Just as the discernment of possessing spirits was a new technique
that shifted power from the laity to the clergy, the new employment of
exorcism as a probative mechanism restricted its own use to religiously
trained exorcists.
Both forms of spirit possession have continued, however, to exist. Even
after the restriction on some forms of female contemplative experiences
that could lead to unity with the divine and annihilation of the self, and
even after new and stringent rules for the authentication of mystical experiences were codied, 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 denition of diabolic possession is
advanced (De Exorcismis, 1998). The Catholic Church, in other words,
still maintains the 2000-year-old Christian tradition of dening alteration
of consciousness through encounter with possessing spirits.

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CHAPTER 5

Altered Consciousness from the

Age of Enlightenment Through
1
Mid20th Century
Etzel Cardena and Carlos S. Alvarado
Introduction
The alterations of consciousness, discernment strategies, and explanatory
models described in the previous chapter [see Sluhovsky, this volume] continued throughout the 18th century, although the Age of Enlightenment
would bring its own ideology to bear on these matters. Even earlier, the
physician Duncan in 1634 had attributed the phenomena of the possessed
nuns of Loudun to folly and error of the imagination and suggestion by
the confessors rather than to supernatural causes (in de Certeau, 2000,
pp. 135136). The 17th century had a cadre of outstanding thinkers such
as Leibniz and Descartes, but their rational models of the universe were still
undergirded by God and religion; thus, the 18th century stands out thanks
to a plethora of important works that pushed rational analyses above and
beyond religious concerns. The groundbreaking works of Kant, Voltaire,
and the French Encyclopedists set the stage for a search for knowledge perhaps unparalleled since the Al-Andaluz period during the Arabic reign of
the Iberic peninsula in which rational and empirical concerns were harmoniously integrated with a mystical vision (Bakan, Merkur, & Weiss, 2009).
Similarly to classical Greece (cf. Dodds, 1951/1973), however, the age
of enlightenment and rationality in Europe and the Americas had a corresponding and perhaps partly reactive set of religious and quasi-religious
movements in which alterations of consciousness and behavior were a
major concern for a large segment of the population, even though many
of these manifestations had, earlier on, been condemned by the Christian
1

We are grateful for the editorial assistance of Alan Gauld.

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church. Rosen (1969) provides a nonexhaustive list of movements that

announced that their devotees could prophesize and be in contact with a
divine realm, including the Camisard prophets and the Jansenist convulsionaries in France; the Shakers, the early Methodists, and the Great
Awakening, especially in Great Britain and the USA; the Chlysti in Russia;
and the Hassidic movement of the Baal-Shem Tov.
Similarly to contemporary Brazilian followers of Afro-Caribbean religions
(cf. Frigerio, 1989), the prophetic state of consciousness among devotees of
French sects included various degreesthe warning (lavertissement), the
whisper of inspiration (le soufe), the prophecy (la prophetie), and the gift
(le don)besides physical manifestations including shivering, twitching
convulsively, leaping, foaming in the mouth, speaking in tongues (i.e., glossolalia), and falling into stupor (Rosen, 1969, p. 211). The way to achieve such
alterations in consciousness and behavior included, depending on the group,
praying, singing, frenetic movements or dancing, fasting, sexual abstinence or
license, and in more extreme cases whipping and even sexual automutilation
(as among the Skopze, cf. Zacharias, 1980). Many of these religious movements are analyzed in detail by Garrett (1987) and the experiences and behaviors they manifested can be found across cultures and times, including ecstatic
religions and Christian, Moslem, and Judaic traditions that continue to seek a
direct religious experience of being possessed by spirits, saints, or the Divinity.
Although there may be a temptation to assume that all or most of the followers
of these groups may have suffered from psychopathology, contemporary
studies in different cultures suggests that practitioners in these sects are as a
group at least as healthy as their cultural referent groups (Cardena, van Duijl,
Weiner, & Terhune, 2009; Moreira-Almeida, Lotufo Neto, & Cardena,
2008). We will now discuss the most inuential set of ideas and practices in
the Western World concerning altered consciousness during the end of the
18th through beginning of the 20th centuries, namely animal magnetism/
hypnosis and mediumship.

Mesmer and Animal Magnetism

The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by secular, rational explanations for many phenomena, including altered consciousness, previously
understood only within a religious context. Perhaps the most inuential
was the development by the physician Franz Anton Mesmer (17341815)
of animal magnetism. Although it may be the case that the priest Johann
Joseph Gassner (17271779) used what would now be called psychotherapeutic strategies in his exorcisms (Peter, 2005), his explanation invoked
the metaphysical battle between good and evil. In contrast, Mesmer

Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid20th Century

developed in his medical dissertation a theory that purported to explain

possession and exorcism phenomena in terms of his conception of an allpervading magnetism in the universe (Mesmer, 1779; see also Pattie,
1994). Some of his tenets may bespeak of esoterism to some today, but they
were compatible with the interpretation by Mesmer of what Benjamin
Franklin and others researched about the electromagnetic forces of the universe. Furthermore, the astronomical underpinnings of Mesmers theory,
although suspect nowadays, were in agreement with a nonreligious explanation of the universe, as sought by Enlightenment authors (cf. Darnton,
1968). Mesmer (1779) declared that there is an universally distributed
uid . . . which by its nature, is susceptible of receiving, propagating &
communicating all the impressions of movement . . . . (p. 74). This
substance, which he postulated interacted with the rest of the forces in the
universe, he called animal magnetism. Sickness was explained as a disturbance in the ow of this substance that could be exaggerated by the use of
magnets or hands to the point that the system would go into a crisis and
rebalance itself into its natural, healthy condition. Thus, the exorcism healings produced by the charismatic Father Gassner, the ironically named
Father Hell (17201792), and others were explained by Mesmer through
the skilful manipulation of animal magnetism rather than by the struggle
between divine and demonic forces (Gauld, 1992).
At the beginning, Mesmer performed individual treatments touching
or passing above the body magnets and, later on, his hands. After he traveled to Paris and became very well known and sought after, he had group
healing sessions in which he used music and appeared in a showy purple
robe while the aficted Parisian nobility sat around a baquet (tub) lled
with magnetized water from which protruded metal tubes that could be
moved to the aficted bodily parts (see Figure 5.1). Reports from the time
mention the crises experienced by Mesmers clients, particularly women.
One writer stated that the crises started by a small cough that becomes
convulsive, which is soon followed by hiccups, a shriek, [and] by extraordinary singing, and by the imitation of dogs, cats, and chickens (Paulet,
1784, p. 22). In addition, some individuals cried, laughed, had gastric disturbances, experienced a sense of warmth or heat, went into convulsions,
and even lost consciousness supposedly as a manifestation of the magnetic
crisis (Gauld, 1992), phenomena previously observed in connection with
spirit possession. Some of the behaviors seen at Mesmers sessions seemed
to spread once a person had manifested them, reminiscent of group manifestations occurring earlier as part of the Tarantella or St. Vituss dances
in which individuals affected with apparently uncontrollable dancing
would end up affecting other onlookers. This phenomenon, when referring

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Figure 5.1

Drawing of a group of patients around Mesmers baquet.

to a pathological manifestation, is currently called medically unexplained

epidemic illness or mass psychogenic illness (Van Ommeren et al., 2001), probably mediated in part by an automatic emotional response, especially among
some suggestible individuals (Cardena, Terhune, Loof, & Buratti, 2009).
As Gauld (1992) observes, Mesmer would explicitly state what physical manifestations the person could expect, which besides less direct suggestions probably had a strong effect on many individuals. Although it is
not possible to ascertain with accuracy the effectiveness of Mesmers treatments, he seemed to have had success in relief of pain and general unease
and perhaps even in healing refractory medical cases. The two Royal

Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid20th Century

Commissions ordered by Louis XVI to investigate the scandalous practices

of Mesmer would not dispute their effectiveness, but would criticize his
theory to explain his cures and point to the potential danger of the use
of imagination and the implicit sexual tension fraught in the practices
(Gauld, 1992).

Hypnotic Somnambulism
Although Mesmerism as a theory came into disrepute following the
reports by the commissions, the idea of animal magnetism as a physical
agent persisted longer than it is generally realized (Alvarado, 2009). A student of Mesmer, A. M. J. Chastenet, Marquis de Puysegur (17511825),
would introduce changes in practice that are the true predecessors of contemporary hypnotic practice. When he treated the peasant Victor Race for
a lung condition, Puysegur noticed that he did not go into a mesmeric crisis (perhaps because he did not have any models as to how he should
behave and/or perhaps because he might have been delirious) but instead
seemed to be experiencing and acting as if he were in a dream, which he
could not recall once he seemed to come out of that state as if waking
up. This and similar manifestations were called somnambulism, which
means carrying out complex acts in a sleeplike state. This presumed association between mesmeric phenomena and sleep would be retained in the
later term hypnos, which refers to the Greek god of sleep.
Puysegur 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 Puysegur, 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 mesmerists communications, heightened memory, alterations in the senses, apparent insensibility to pain, and a special rapport with the magnetizer. Crabtree
(1988) has also documented copious sources that describe potential psi
phenomena during the magnetic state, including the apparent communication of the sensations or behaviors of the magnetizer to the magnetized
without any known sensory or logical links (community of sensation and
of muscular action), telepathy, becoming mesmerized at a distance without sensory or logical intermediation, clairvoyance of remote (in time
and place) events and of medical conditions, and awareness of spiritual
things and beings (see also Dingwall, 19671968).

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Many, but not all, of these observations might be explained by unconscious sensory leakage, inferences, and similar ordinary mechanisms, but
carefully described cases such as Pierre Janets (18591947) patient
Mme. B (the pseudonym of Le onie Leboulanger; Janet, 1885/1968a,
1886/1968b) or the extraordinary displays while mesmerized of the
brothers Didier cannot be so easily explained away (cf. Gauld, 1992).
Thus, the conclusion by Dingwall (19671968) regarding a possible connection between psi phenomena and hypnosis that [A]n attitude of suspended judgment both as regards the past and the present is perhaps the
most judicial (V. 1, p. 297) is not far fetched, especially when controlled
psi experiments generally suggest that hypnosis may be a context that
facilitates psi phenomena (Cardena, 2010).
In the early 19th century, Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge (17821844)
categorized six levels or degrees of the phenomenology of magnetic somnambulism: waking state with increased warmth, half-sleep, inner darkness
(sleep proper and insensitivity), inner clarity (perception through the body),
self-contemplation (the ability to accurately see ones 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. 7880). Current research on hypnotic phenomena has partly validated
this categorization in the sense that only a minority of individuals (i.e., highly
hypnotizables) spontaneously report transcendent experiences, and only
when they feel that they are in self-evaluated very deep hypnosis, whereas
they experience mostly body sensation and image changes during light hypnosis and disembodied and imaginal experiences during middle hypnosis
(Cardena, 2005; Cardena, Lehmann, Jonsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007).
Other authors recorded interesting somnambulistic manifestations in
their mesmeric participants. In France, the mesmerist Joseph Philippe
Francois Deleuze (17531835) wrote in his book Histoire Critique du Magnetisme Animal that somnambulists could recover the recollection of
things that were forgotten during wakefulness (Deleuze, 1813, p. 176).
Also, events taking place during somnambulism were forgotten when the
person was in his or her normal state, which Deleuze believed was an indication that the two states are unfamiliar to one another, and that there
were two separate beings (p. 176). He mentioned a case in which a
woman in the somnambulistic state was opposed to the desire of her normal self to work in the theatre. Answering a question during her somnambulistic state about why she wanted to be in the theatre, she said, It is not
me, it is her . . . she is mad (p. 177).

Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid20th Century

There was also a discussion of what we would refer today as examples

of state-specic memory. In France, Alexandre Bertrand (17951831)
referred to the phenomenon as one of the most constant properties of
the somnambulistic state (Bertrand, 1826, p. 409). In England, William
Gregory (18031858) 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 (18471888) conducted more systematic
studies of hypnotic state-specic memory. He described one test when
his subject was hypnotized:
In this condition he was able to read . . . After reading a paragraph . . . he
was then woke [sic] completely as usual. But only one word of what he
had read could be recalled, and he was very uncertain about that; he recollected distinctly, however, a paragraph that he had recently read in the
normal state, and felt satised that that was the last one read. Again hypnotized, he had full recollection of the paragraph read in the hypnotic state
with open eyes. (Gurney, 1888, p. 10)

Nowadays, hypnosis research has generally found that when controlling for implicit and explicit suggestions, amnesia is not a typical outcome of a hypnotic induction (e.g., Laurence & Perry, 1988). Gurney
(1884) also mentioned two hypnotic states, an alert and a deep hypnotic
one. He believed that the identication of these states was difcult
because
(E)ach state admits of many degrees and the characteristics of either of them
may be only slightly or only very transiently presented; and in the second
place, unless special means are adopted, it is very easy to mistake the
alert state for normal waking, and the deep state for sleep. (Gurney,
1884, p. 62)

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According to Gurney (1884), individuals in the alert state may look

vacant, the state resembling that of the usual consciousness, the eyes could
be open and the person would be sensitive to pain but particularly open to
suggestion. Gurney said that the deep stage could escape detection
because it
. . . is liable to be confounded with a contiguous condition, namely, the
genuine hypnotic sleep into which it tends to merge. It resembles that condition in the fact that the eyelids are closed; that, if one of them be forcibly
raised, the eyeball is found to be rolled upwards; in the general insensibility
to pain and to ordinary modes of stimulation . . . If the subject be left to
himself, he will have no opportunity to manifest its characteristics, but . . .
will soon lose consciousness and individuality in profound slumber. With
some subjects, moreover, the invasion of mental torpor is so rapid that it
might be hard to x and retain them in the genuine deep stage . . . . But
many others, if taken in time, after their eyes are closed and they have
become insensible to pain, but before sleep has intervened, will prove quite
capable of rational conversation; they are mentally awake, even when their
bodies are almost past movement . . . . The state is, however, harder to sustain at an even level than the alert one, owing to a stronger and more continuous tendency to lapse into a deeper condition. (p. 64)

Other observations documented changes of personality of different

sorts. This was the case of a patient named Isabella:
When in the state of what has been termed sleepwalking, or somnambulism, the patient always talks of herself as of another person. In the
Mesmeric state she calls herself Martha, and she talks of Isabella (her real
name) as of a totally different individual. When asked about the complaints
with which Isabella was troubled, she described them with what seemed to
be the greatest accuracy, and indicated the most suitable remedies. (Lang,
1843, p. 108)

Other changes were documented in a case reported by Gregory (1851):

When the sleeper has become fully asleep, so as to answer questions readily
without waking, there is almost always observed a remarkable change in
the countenance, the manner, and the voice. On falling asleep at rst, 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 Mid20th Century

. . . 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. 8082)

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 Esdailes (1808
1859) discussions of pain control, as seen in his book Mesmerism in India
(1846). In his view, in the mesmeric trance the most severe and protracted surgical operations can be performed, without the patients being
sensible of pain (p. 271), although some of his descriptions have been
recently qualied (Chaves, 1997).

Mediumship
Besides putative exceptional powers, some of the anomalous experiences reported by gifted participants during magnetic/hypnotic sessions
2

Even before mesmerism, there have been discussions of such phenomena as alternate
consciousnesses and psychogenic amnesia (Gauld, 1992), and from early mesmerism
onward it was proposed that mesmeric andlaterhypnotic 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
rst discussed under the umbrella of such terms as hysteria, double or multiple personality
and, more recently, dissociative identity disorder became associated with hypnotic phenomena and techniques. This is evident, for instance, in the works of Pierre Janet
(1889), Breuer and Freud (1895/1955), and many other pioneers of clinical psychology
and psychiatry (Ellenberger, 1970; see also Spiegel & Cardena, 1991). The relationship
between hypnosis, suggestion, and identity multiplicity has been contentious. Sufce it
to say here that although some authors have criticized the reality of identity multiplicity
or fragmentation as mere cultural creation or, worse, iatrogenic suggestion, research has
overwhelmingly shown a relationship between dissociation (including identity fragmentation), exposure to trauma, and hypnotic capacity (for a review, see Cardena & Gleaves,
2007), although this relationship seems to occur only in a subgroup of highly hypnotizable
individuals (Terhune, Cardena, & Lindgren, 2011).

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mentioned contact with angels and departed spirits, and there were some
who interpreted these literally (Billot, 1839; Cahagnet, 1851; cf. Gauld,
1992, p. 3). One such mesmeric subject was an English woman called
Emma. According to the report:
Emma . . . began to speak frequently of spiritual objects and beings. I soon
perceived, that one being, under whose inuence 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 rst 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 triing 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 mid19th century, which proposed that discarnate entities, especially the deceased, could communicate
with the living in various ways. Although physical manifestations such as
levitating tables were an innovation of this movement, trance mediumship,
in which a gifted individual is supposed to communicate with the dead after
entering some kind of altered state of consciousness (ASC), can partly trace
its roots to mesmeric/hypnotic theories and practices; accordingly, historian
Nicole Edelman (1995) has stated that mediums were both the daughters
and the sisters of somnambulists (p. 9).
From the beginnings of modern spiritualism in the United States,
mediums presented various unusual behaviors. Many of them, presumably under the inuence of discarnate spirits, talked at length about the
other world and about a variety of moral, philosophical, social, and scientic topics (e.g., Hatch, 1858). Others saw spirits, had impressions,
personied the dead, and produced writing. Furthermore, there were
mediums that painted, performed music, and sang. In their book Spiritualism (1853) Judge John W. Edmonds (17991874) 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 Mid20th Century

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 inuence, 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
inuence; and I have never seen any person that could, in his normal
condition, write with such rapidity, at one sitting, four or ve 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 Spicers Sights and Sounds (1853) there
was mention of communications from such individuals as Washington
(pp. 145146) and Calvin (pp. 147148). But there were also many
mediumistic performances representing the action of common individuals,
as well as ancient characters, as seen in the case of a purported Egyptian spirit (Berry, 1876, pp. 193217). Even more exotic were the communications
of spirits claiming to live on other planets, such as those the playwright
Victorien Sardou (18311908) 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 (18091892), it was
stated that the mediums voice and manner differed much when under
different inuences (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 (Faireld, 1875, p. 24). Carl G. Jung
(18751961) wrote as follows about his cousin, a 15-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 nd mention of trance throughout

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the spiritualistic and psychical research literatures to refer to a variety of

apparent ASC while mediums produced their phenomena, but from the
beginnings it was noticed that not all mediums showed this feature. For
example, commenting on their own mediumship, Edmonds and Dexter
(1855, p. xviii) pointed out that the rst was never unconscious while
the second frequently was.
Some of the communications appeared to present information that
could be veried as related to the ostensible discarnate communicator.
An early example referred to communications from the writers 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
rst recognise it. (Cooper, 1867, p. 75)

For our purposes, the paranormality or not of some of these communications is not relevant, although skeptical accounts have not explained
away successfully the most spectacular and well-researched cases of some
mediums, among them Leonora E. Piper (18571950) and Gladys
Osborne Leonard (18811968; for overviews see Sage, 1904; Smith,
1964). Consequently, we focus on other aspects of their mediumship.
Mrs. Piper showed a variety of alterations of consciousness and corresponding phenomena (Sidgwick, 1915). Psychical researcher Richard
Hodgson (18551905) observed what he described as an initial stage in
which Mrs. Piper was dreamily conscious of the sitter, and dreamily conscious of spirits (Hodgson, 1898, p. 397). This was followed by a fuller
and clearer consciousnesswe may call it her subliminal consciousness
which is in direct relation . . . not so much with our ordinary physical
world as with another world (p. 397). Then came a state in which he
thought the subliminal consciousness (i.e., the subconscious mind) withdraws completely from the control of her body and takes her supraliminal
consciousness (i.e., the conscious mind) with it (p. 398). At the end it
seemed to Hodgson that Mrs. Piper returned to her normal consciousness
in a reverse order of the previous states. Hodgson wrote:
But in passing out of trance, the stages are usually of longer duration than
when she enters it. She frequently repeats statements apparently made to her
by the communicators while she is in the purely subliminal stage, as
though she was a spirit controlling her body but not in full possession of it,

Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid20th Century

and, after her supraliminal consciousness has begun to surge up into view, she
frequently has visions apparently of the distant or departing communicators.
(pp. 400401)

In a very thorough account of Mrs. Leonards mediumship, Una Lady

Troubridge (18871963) described four different states of consciousness
of Mrs. Leonard: (a) normal, (b) slight drowsiness associated with automatic writing, (c) a trance, including analgesia and amnesia and in
which she manifested a different personality, and (d) a state in which
she impersonated deceased individuals. The amnesia in the latter two
states was not always present or sustained (Troubridge, 1922, p. 357),
resembling spirit possession (Frigerio, 1989). Also, sometimes Mrs. Leonards
body seemed to lose all muscle tone, as has been observed in various ritual
contexts, including Balinese dancers possessed by a spirit (Belo, 1960)
and among a subgroup of highly hypnotizable and dissociative individuals
(Barrett, 1990; Carden a, 1989). Troubridge also described how the
medium Stanislawa Tomczyk initially interpreted her control Moyenne
as being an inner part of her personality before concluding that she was
a spirit and mentions that it was common to nd that the mediums controls were disinhibited and undersocialized as compared with the mediums regular personalities, as exemplied by the alter Margaret of Doris
Fischer and the Feda control of Mrs. Leonard (Troubridge, 1922).
Trance mediumship was one of the phenomena studied during the latter
part of the 19th century that contributed to the development of ideas of the subconscious mind and of dissociation (Alvarado, Machado, Zangari, & Zingrone,
2007; Crabtree, 1993). Two important examples of this were the ideas of Pierre
Janet and of classical scholar and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers
(18431901). Janet discussed mediumship in his classic work LAutomatisme
Psychologique (1889) to support the concept of dissociation. He believed that
the phenomena of hypnotized individuals and of mediums were similar, showing the disaggregation of personal perception and . . . the formation of several
personalities that developed both successively as well as simultaneously (Janet,
1889, p. 413). Furthermore, probably following J. M. Charcots (18251893)
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
dened it in part as a manifestation of the subliminal (or subconscious)
mind. He believed that the utterances of trance mediums constitute one

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of many classes of phenomena which occur in sane subjects without entering the normal waking consciousness or forming part of the habitual chain
of memory (Myers, 1890, p. 437). Myers saw mediumship as one of several
psychological processes that illustrated the idea that the subliminal mind
communicated with the supraliminal (or conscious) mind through a variety
of automatism using sensory and motor means (e.g., hallucinations, speaking; Myers, 1884, 1885, 1889). Regardless of the differences between Janet
and Myers, their work on mediumship shows that the phenomenon was
part of the development of the constructs of the subconscious mind and of
dissociation, a position that mediumship shared with hysteria and hypnosis, among other phenomena.

Into the 20th Century

A systematic study of debatable phenomena designated by such terms
as mesmeric, psychical, and Spiritualistic . . . without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned
inquiry would be initiated by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) at
the end of the 19th century (Society for Psychical Research, 1882). The foremost members of this society continued doing research on mediumship and
hypnosis, both with regard to the nature of these phenomena as well as their
possible relationship with potential parapsychological phenomena such as
telepathy and precognition (Gauld, 1968; see Luke, Volume 2). One of their
major works was Phantasms of the Living (Gurney, Myers, & Podmore,
1886), which presented a meticulous account of the phenomenology of hallucinations in the population at large and of how they provide consistent
evidence for some type of anomalous transfer of information. Contemporary
research has supported their ndings at least with regard to the phenomenal
experience of hallucinations among nonclinical samples (Aleman & Lari,
2008, pp. 6171). Although Edmund Gurney died fairly young, F. W. H.
Myers continued working prolically on all of these areas and his thoughts
culminated in his posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903; see also Alvarado, 2004).
Before the book was published, Myers had argued:
I suggest . . . that the stream of consciousness in which we habitually live is
not the only consciousness which exists in connection with our organism.
Our habitual or empirical consciousness may consist of a mere selection
from a multitude of thoughts and sensations, of which some at least
are equally conscious with those that we empirically know. (Myers, 1892,
p. 301)

Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid20th Century

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
dened 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 (18421910) would discuss as consciousness at large.
Myers wrote:
I conceive also that no Self of which we can here have cognisance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self,revealed in a fashion at once
shifting and limited through an organism not so framed as to afford it full
manifestation. (1903, Vol. 1, p. 15)

Although Myerss 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 gure 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. Jamess
attention to dissociation was evident in his early writings about Mrs. Piper
and automatic writing in which he suggested the action of a secondary
consciousness directing the phenomena. (James, 1886, 1889). In the case
of a 21-year-old student that produced writing with his hand and with a
planchette, James wrote:
Here . . . we have the consciousness of a subject split into two parts, one of
which expresses itself through the mouth, and the other through the hand,
whilst both are in communication with the ear. The mouth-consciousness
is ignorant of all that the hand suffers or does; the hand-consciousness is
ignorant of pin-pricks indicted upon other parts of the body. (James,
1889, p. 551)

Regarding multiplicity, he wrote: It must be admitted . . . that in certain persons, at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts
which coexist but mutually ignore each other, and share the objects of knowledge between them (1890, Vol. 1, p. 206).
In the Principles, besides automatism he also discussed hypnotism,
imagination, the mindbody problem (his discussion against jumping

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from neurological correlation to causation should be obligatory reading in

neuroscience courses), and an extraordinary chapter on the stream of
thought (later referred to as the stream of consciousness) that inuenced not
only psychological thought but literary practice through the stream of
consciousness literary style of one of Jamess students, Gertrude Stein,
and of James Joyce and others [see Cousins, this volume].
It is, however, another of Jamess masterpieces that has proven to be
the cornerstone of the scientic studies of ASC. His The Varieties of Religious Experience provided the most cited justication for the study of alterations in consciousness:
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it,
is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from
it by the lmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness
entirely different . . . at a touch they are there in all completeness,
denite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their eld
of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality
can be nal which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite
disregarded. (James, 1902/1961, p. 298)

But even before his treatise on religious experience, in his 1896 Lowell
lectures he had discussed dreams, hypnosis, automatism, hysteria,
multiple personality (nowadays dissociative identity disorder), and a
number of other alterations of consciousness (Taylor, 1983).
Besides Myers and James, many if not most of the pioneers in clinical
psychology/psychiatry at the end of the 19th century and beginning of
the 20th were very much involved in the study of altered consciousness.
To give just some examples, besides his foundational work on dissociation, Pierre Janet (1926) provided a thorough account of various ASC of
some of his patients including Madeleine, whom he treated for 22 years
and who experienced mystical transports and other intense emotional
events. The Swiss professor of psychology Theodore Flournoy (1854
1920) gave a detailed case analysis of the medium Hele`ne Smith (1861
1929, pseudonym of Catherine Elise Muller) 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 inuence 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 Mid20th Century

In addition to Flournoy, other students of mediumship contributed to

develop the idea of the dramatizing powers of the mediums subconscious
mind (Alvarado et al., 2007). This was the case of studies with Mrs. Piper
(e.g., Sidgwick, 1915; Tanner, 1910). Eleanor Sidgwick (18451936)
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 furtherwhat makes her case
of great importanceshe can obtain, imperfectly and for the most part fragmentarily, telepathic impressions. (Sidgwick, 1915, p. 330)

In Italy, psychiatrist Enrico Morselli (18521929) argued that mediums were persons showing an
anomalous psychic constitution, or, at least, on the extreme gradation of the
scale of normal variability regarding the coalescence of the psychic elements. In mediums this coalescence is . . . labile to the extreme . . . with a
facility for personal disaggregation. (Morselli, 1908, Vol. 1, p. 93)

Later, French psychical researcher Rene Sudre (18801968) discussed

what he referred to as prosopopesis or the nonconscious tendency to impersonate, as seen in mediumship, as well as in hypnosis, possession and
cases of double and multiple personality (Sudre, 1926). Relatedly, a dramatic aspect of spirit possession in other cultures was discussed by
Metraux (1955).
Besides them, many other eminent psychological clinicians and
researchers of the time from various countries took a keen interest in dissociation, hypnosis, depersonalization, and similar areas, but the ascent of
psychoanalysis within clinical practice and behaviorism within academic
psychology condemned the study of ASC to oblivion until a few decades
ago (Spiegel & Cardena, 1991). There were, however, a few exceptions
here and there to this exile. Thus, despite Sigmund Freuds (18561939)
dominant interest in the unconscious causes of symptomatology, his and
Joseph Breuers (18421925) Studies on Hysteria (1895/1955) contains
extraordinary descriptions of altered, hypnoid states, and Freud would
also discuss other alterations of consciousness such as his own dissociative
episodes (Freud, 1936), and a case of demonic possession (Freud, 1923).

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There were also exceptions within academia such as the short-lived but
extraordinarily fruitful research by Clark L. Hull (18841952; 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 (18951980) 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 rst half of the 20th century devoted considerable time to
researching altered consciousness. Santiago Ramon y Cajal (18521934),
1906 Nobel prizewinner and a towering gure for his work on the neuron,
did research on hypnosis, mediumship, and parapsychological phenomena, although unfortunately a book he had written on the subject got lost
during the Spanish Civil War (Sala et al., 2008). Hans Berger (18731941)
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
(18501935), 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 briey a tendency outside of both the academic
and clinical spheres (some therapists such as C. G. Jung were clearly inuenced 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 ones
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 inuential, to expand or awaken or, to paraphrase William Blakes
(17571827) line, cleanse the doors of perception. This cleansing typically includes questioning the absolute value of rationality and the givenness of reality as presented by the senses, an idea present in Plato and
recurrent throughout history and in various places such as American transcendentalism. To achieve this goal, various esoteric traditions have
advanced practices to alter ones state of consciousness and, at times, to
derange the senses to use the phrase of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud
(18541891; 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 Mid20th Century

For instance, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner (18611925) is not only

a set of beliefs about spiritual matters but also includes a number of specic
physical exercises (eurythmy) and pedagogical practices, some of which are
currently practiced in the Waldorf educational system (cf. Ahern, 2009).
Also inuential in some circles is the very controversial George Gurdjieff
(18661949) whose The Work also proposed a set of movements and
psychological practices to uncover ones automatic cognitions and become
more mindful. More recently, Charles Tart (1986), while discarding much
of the metaphysical baggage of Gudjieff, has discussed his valuable ideas
on the automaticity of the mind in the context of meditation and contemporary psychology. Nonetheless, any history of psychology will show that consideration of ASC as a fundamental aspect of the human experience was to a
large degree relegated to the academic dustbin during a great part of the
20th century. Although the study of ASC has remerged during recent decades [see Beischel, Rock, & Krippner, this volume], it may be still some time
before the more comprehensive view of reality of such thinkers as Myers,
James, and yes, even Steiner gets a full hearing.

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CHAPTER 6

Reconceptualizing the Field of

Altered Consciousness:
A 50-Year Retrospective
Julie Beischel, Adam J. Rock,
and Stanley Krippner
Introduction
Although consciousness in its various senses has received attention as a
construct for more than three millennia, in modern psychology altered
states of consciousness (ASC) have often been deemed pathological or
anomalous and outside of conventional Western psychological frameworks. Eastern traditions, however, have developed intricate vocabularies
for describing these inner episodes of altered consciousness and spiritual
experiences and assign them a deeper grasp on reality.
The purpose of this chapter is to survey the preceding 50 years of
research on altering consciousness. Using Kuhns (1962) perspectives of scientic paradigms (i.e., the systemic features of scientic elds that guide
research and provide models for the solution of research problems), we
will highlight how the eld has been reconceptualized during this time.
Kuhn suggested that science approaches a topic like consciousness from
the standpoint of the prevailing paradigmin this case, materialism
until evidence for alternative interpretations reaches a critical mass and
new explanatory models take hold. For example, experiences of ASC
viewed as pathological by the existing psychological paradigm of the
1940s and 50s were eventually embraced as normative experiences exemplifying heightened awareness, transpersonal development, and even
spiritual transcendence by the turn of the century.
This shift is evident in the publication during recent decades of texts
that treat ASC as normal and healthy experiencesthough uncommon

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

Farthing, published in 1992, serves as a textbook for studying consciousness and discusses ASC including dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, and
psychedelic drug use. In addition, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientic Evidence (Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000), published
by the American Psychological Association (APA), dedicates entire chapters to ASC including hallucinations, synesthesia, and lucid dreaming as
well as out-of-body, near-death, anomalous healing, and mystical experiences. Also published by the APA, Alterations of Consciousness: An Empirical
Analysis for Social Scientists by Imants Baruss (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 scientic landscape that embraces these experiences. This
chapter will briey discuss phenomena of altered consciousness studied
during the past ve decades including meditation, hypnosis, near-death
and out-of-body experiences, hallucinations and hallucinogenic drugs,
nonlucid and lucid dreaming, and mystical experiences as well as theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding the denitions, language, and
contexts associated with these topics. However, a truly in-depth discussion
of any of these individual experiences or factors is beyond the scope of this
chapter, though every effort was made to reference additional materials
that an interested reader may wish to review. In addition, it should be
noted that many of these topics were studied over several decades (and
continue to be investigated today) and the decision to include a phenomenon in a certain decade was based on the timing of the initial work, a key
discovery, or the majority of research happening at that time. Through this
discussion, our retrospective look at research on altering consciousness
may suggest new directions of inquiry including further empirical, phenomenological, neurological, and psychological studies of ASC in the
upcoming 50 years.

The 1960s: Formative Years

The Language of Altered States
In contrast to the earlier paradigmatic framework of pathology, psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig (1966) positively characterized the term altered
states of consciousness as

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness

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

pharmacological maneuvers or agents, which can be recognized subjectively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the individual) as representing a sufcient deviation in subjective experience or
psychological functioning from certain general norms for that individual
during alert, waking consciousness. (p. 225)

Ludwig also delineated an assortment of general characteristics associated with ASC: alterations in discursive thinking, emotional expression,
signicance or meaning, subjective time, body image perception, a sense
of ineffability, reduced volitional control, hypersuggestibility, and rejuvenation. Nevertheless, one limitation of Ludwigs denition is that it
neglected to operationalize a sufcient 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 Tarts
seminal volume Altered States of Consciousness, which reected the burgeoning multidisciplinary interest in the eld of altering consciousness.
Tart (1969a) dened 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, uctuations in body image) are different (p. 1). The usefulness of
his denition is limited, however, because he neglected to stipulate how
prominent the qualitative shift must be, or how many qualities of ones
mental processes must be different, in order for an altered state to be
inferred. Tarts volume also illustrated the importance of the psychophysiology of ASC and exemplied 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 oating or traveling
away from the body. The prevalence of OBEs ranges from 10% to more
than 80% depending on the population in question (e.g., general, students, certain personality types, groups with parapsychological interests).

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Each OBE is as unique as the experient, but the majority of individuals

who have had an OBE report having more than one as well as the experience of viewing the physical body from above. Less common features
include: a nonphysical body, a ropelike connection between the physical
body and the location of the self, and the ability to observe veriable information (reviewed in Alvarado, 2000). These experiences result in a change
in attitude regarding life after death and a reduction in fear of death in the
majority of experients (e.g., Osis, 1979); it should be mentioned that some
of these OBE reports happened in the context of near-death experiences
(see below). Laboratory studies of the psychophysiological correlates of
OBEs most often employed participants, including Robert Monroe and
Ingo Swann, who could enter the state on demand. For example, Tart
found that Monroes 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 denitional fuzziness, though some efforts at operationalization, including the LintonLangs questionnaire (Linton & Langs, 1962) were attempted. At that
stage, the necessary and sufcient 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 Denitions
In 1972, psychologist Stanley Krippner extended previous denitions
of ASC by comparing the changes that occur during ASC to the individuals
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 individuals normal alert state
(1972, p. 1). While ostensibly resolving previous problems associated
with operationalizing the qualier sufcient, Krippners denition
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

In response to terminological problems regarding states of consciousness, in 1975, Tart proposed the term discrete states of consciousness
(d-SoC), which he dened as a unique conguration or system of psychological structures or subsystems . . . that maintains its integrity or identity
as a recognizable system in spite of variations in input from the environment and in spite of various (small) changes in the subsystems (p. 62).
According to Tart, psychological structures include, for example, sensory
qualities and body image (i.e., content of consciousness). It is evident
that Tart is suggesting that a d-SoC is not a process (i.e., conscious awareness) that renders a system of psychological structures (content) recognizable but rather the actual system of psychological structures (content)
that is rendered recognizable. Thus, when Tart afxes the qualiers
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 scientic
method could be utilized to address ASC using what he termed statespecic sciences (SSS), which would provide
a group of highly skilled, dedicated, and trained practitioners able to
achieve certain [states of consciousness (SoCs)], and able to agree with
one another that they have attained a common state. While in that SoC,
they might then investigate other areas of interest, whether these be totally
internal phenomena of that given state, the interaction of that state with
external, physical reality, or people in other SoCs. (p. 1206)

He also emphasized that the creation of SSS neither validates nor invalidates the activities of normal consciousness sciences . . . [It] means only
that certain kinds of phenomena may be handled more adequately within
these potential new sciences (p. 1207). Tart later rened his suggestion
by proposing that ASC could be studied on their own terms as statespecic perceptions and logics (1998, p. 103). For example, ordinary
waking states operate according to the logic of binary and linear segmentation (i.e., duality and temporality, respectively), whereas ASC such as
samadhi ostensibly do not. Tart emphasized that the methods of essential
science (observation, theorizing, prediction, communication/consensual
validation) can be applied from within various SoCs and ASCs to generate

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state-specic sciences (1998, p. 103). Perhaps the most well-known

example of an investigator examining ASC from within those states is
physician John C. Lillys inquiries into the use of isolation tanks and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in tandem (e.g., Lilly, 1972).

Psychedelics
Although it can be argued that the use of psychedelicor mindexpandingdrugs 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,
19671968), and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD; e.g., Houston, 1969).
The most interesting ndings 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 reected in
related objective measures. In addition, researchers in the 1970s demonstrated marijuanas effects on attention, memory, perception of time, creativity, driving ability, cognition, and mood (reviewed in Farthing, 1992).
During this decade, Siegel (e.g., 1977) performed controlled research
on the form, color, movement, and actions of visual hallucinations produced by psychoactive substances including LSD, psilocybin, marijuana,
and mescaline by using an image classication system that participants
were trained to use to describe their experiences. Siegel and Jarvik
(1975) proposed that the same mechanism is involved in the production
of visual hallucinations by different hallucinogens (as well as other situations such as migraines) because of the similarities in the content of the
hallucinations regardless of the substance involved.

Near-Death Experiences
A global sensation, the publication of physician Raymond Moodys
book Life After Life (1975) rst brought the unique altered state that
Moody called a near-death experience (NDE), the subjective experience
of surviving clinical death, into light. Moody described 150 cases and recognized 15 commonly recurring elements of NDEs (e.g., ineffability, a
brilliant light, an out-of-body experience, a tunnel, feelings of quiet and
peace, meeting others, and a border or limit) but noted that both the

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness

circumstances surrounding [NDEs] and the persons describing them vary

widely (p. 17). This publication marked the start of decades of NDE
research to come and that continues today. In his foreword to The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Holden, Greyson, & James, 2009), Kenneth Ring describes the new scientic interest in
NDEs during the 1970s by saying: We were out neither to prove it nor
debunk it: our aim instead was only to try to understand it and to encourage other scientists and scholars to do likewise (p. viii). This outlook was
indicative of the scientic paradigm shift surrounding ASC that occurred
during the last half century.

Other Inquiries
The experimental approach to ASC was extended in the early 1970s
when Jean Houston and Robert Masters (1972) developed the Altered
States of Consciousness Induction Device (ASCID) to induce religioustype experiences in a laboratory setting. The ASCID is a metal swing or
pendulum in which the subject stands upright, supported by broad bands
of canvas and wearing blindfold goggles (p. 310). Participants were more
likely to report that their experiences were religious if they were spiritual
growth seekers with a readiness or need for such an experience. Positive
aftereffects from the ASCID included improved family relationships and
a sense of continuing growth by one theologian participant (Houston &
Masters, 1972).
Another unique alteration in consciousness that garnered attention in
the 1970s was spirit possession, which involves a voluntary or involuntary
dissociative state in which the individuals personality is substituted by
that of purported spirits (Bourguignon, 1976). In possession trance, alterations of consciousness occur in which the possessing entities may speak
and engage in other observable behaviors (Bourguignon, 1976). Possession trance is a state welcomed by trance mediums who, during readings,
freely turn over control of their bodies to spirit guides, deceased loved
ones, or other friendly entities for a prescribed purpose and length of
time, as well as being embraced by other individuals engaged in certain
religious or secular practices.
Perhaps the form of altered consciousness that people experience most
often, dreaming was examined extensively during the 1970s. Though the
association between the rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep and
dreaming was rst noted by Aserinsky and Kleitman in 1953, the physiological parameters of dreaming were more thoroughly investigated during
the 1960s and 70s. For example, Dement (1976) noted specic brain

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wave and respiration patterns during REM periods. The content of dreams
was also studied during this decade. Snyder (1970) and colleagues collected more than 600 dream reports from roughly 50 college and medical
students and concluded that dreaming consciousness is a remarkably
faithful replica of waking life (p. 133) containing environments, objects,
and people similar to those experienced during waking consciousness.
In addition, Van de Castle (1971) found cross-cultural differences in
dream content and Winget, Kramer, and Whitman (1972) noted that
differences in gender, age, and socioeconomic status were also associated
with differences in content.

Mapping Consciousness
The development of various cartographies of consciousness that
emphasized an empirical domain was another notable feature of the
1970s. These included Ken Wilbers spectrum of consciousness, which consisted of various levels (e.g., ego, existential, Mind). Wilbers (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. Grofs
cartography proposed spatial and/or temporal expansion of consciousness
within and beyond Einsteinian space-time, as well as psychoid experiences
where mind/matter duality ostensibly collapses (e.g., in instances of putative psychokinesis).
Psychiatrist Roland Fischer (1971, 1972, 1976) also formulated a cartography of ASC on a perceptionmeditation continuum that emphasizes
differences between ergotropic and trophotropic arousal. Ergotropic arousal
refers to hyperaroused states such as shamanic journeying experiences
while trophotropic arousal denotes hypoaroused states such as zazen or
samadhi meditation (Fischer, 1971).
In contrast to these cartographies of consciousness, which described
an empirical reality to ASC, this decade also accommodated several constructivist perspectives. This involved philosophers of religion addressing
the epistemology of ASC, especially mystical experiences. The key elements of the constructivist position were distilled in Steven Katzs inuential edited volume Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978). The

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness

contributors argued that mystical experience is conceptually and linguistically shaped by the experients religious beliefs and values. Katzs position may be termed incomplete constructivism because he suggested that
not all aspects of mystical experience are shaped by ones religious tradition. In contrast, Gimello (1978) advocated hard or complete constructivism
in which mystical experience is entirely determined by the experients
religio-cultural-linguistic framework.
Summary

This decade witnessed a concern with addressing terminological issues

and, more importantly, a shift from denitions of ASC to the development
of more sophisticated models exemplied in cartographies that acknowledged the phenomenological diversity of ASC. In addition, systematic
research was performed on specic ASC including psychedelic drug use,
near-death experiences, spirit possession, and dreaming.

The 1980s
Mystical States
During the 1980s, philosophers of religion continued to reect on ASC
and substantiated the decontextualist position, as exemplied in Robert
Formans 1986 article Pure Consciousness Events and Mysticism (c.f.,
Almond, 1982; Kessler, & Prigge, 1982). Forman dened a pure consciousness event (PCE) as a waking state of consciousness devoid of phenomenological content. A substantial body of evidence in the form of introspective
accounts was produced to support the contention that the PCE exists
cross-culturally. For example, Bucknell (1989) asserted that the third
non-material jhana encountered during Buddhist meditative practice is
consistent with the introvertive mystical experience in which both the
thought-stream and sensory input have ceased, leaving zero mental content (p. 19).
The 1980s also witnessed a resurgence of anthropologically inspired
studies of consciousness, exemplied in the neoshamanic practices that
were becoming rather popular amongst westerners. For example, in a
seminal study published in 1980, Peters and Price-Williams examined
the ethnographic literature pertaining to 42 different cultures and delineated several transcultural factors indicative of shamanic ecstasy including
mastery or control with respect to both the entrance and duration of the
altered state, the ability to communicate with spectators, and postevent
memory (p. 397). In later research, Noll (1983) used a state-specic

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approach to demonstrate that shamanic states are incompatible with

schizophrenic states on a number of phenomenological dimensions
including volition, affect, and modality of perceptions (p. 443). Noll
(1985) also evaluated the ethnographic literature pertaining to shamanism
and concluded that shamanic mental imagery training consists of two
phases: enhancing the vividness of imagery and cultivating a mastery over
mental images. In a review paper published near the end of this decade,
Peters (1989) identied parallels between shamanic states and lucid
dreaming (discussed below). Thus, shamanic studies up to this point typically consisted of nonexperimental methodologies and were conducted
from an anthropological perspective. It must be acknowledged, however,
that during this decade, a small number of experimental studies of shamans were, in fact, conducted (e.g., Saklani, 1988).

Empirical Attitudes
Empirical approaches to ASC continued to be developed in other areas
in the 1980s and were exemplied by clinical psychologist Ronald Pekala,
who extended research regarding ASC with quantitative instruments that
permitted operationalization of ASC (Pekala, 1985; Pekala & Levine,
19821983). The rst version of this instrument (the Phenomenology of
Consciousness Questionnaire) was revised into the Phenomenology of
Consciousness Inventory (PCI; Pekala & Kumar, 1986), a 53-item questionnaire that quanties 12 major dimensions (altered state, rationality,
positive affect, arousal, self-awareness, memory, inward absorbed attention, negative affect, altered experience, volitional control, vivid imagery,
and internal dialogue) and 14 minor dimensions (joy, sexual excitement,
love, anger, sadness, fear, body image, time sense, perception, meaning,
visual imagery amount, vividness, direction of attention, and absorption;
Pekala, Wenger, & Levine, 1985). The PCI builds on the theoretical foundations of earlier consciousness researchers in operationalizing three different states of consciousness (SoCs): identity or I-states that exhibit
nonsignicantly different phenomenological intensity and pattern parameters (Pekala, 1991, p. 231); discrete or D-states that exhibit a signicantly different intensity and pattern relative to another SoC; and
discrete altered or A-states, which are D-states that exhibit signicantly
higher altered-state-of-awareness intensity ratings relative to another SoC.
In 1985, Dittrich and his colleagues developed the APZ-OAV Questionnaire (Abnormer Psychischer Zustand refers to altered or abnormal mental states) to quantify ASC induced by hallucinogens and other stimuli
(e.g., sensory deprivation; Dittrich, von Arx, & Staub, 1985). This 66-item

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness

questionnaire consists of three subscales: (1) oceanic boundlessness measures a positive state that may include depersonalization, ethereal happiness, and grandiosity; (2) dread of ego dissolution measures a state
involving thought disorder, ego disintegration, and paranoia; and (3)
visionary restructuralization measures a state comprising illusions, hallucinations, and synesthetic phenomena. The validity of these three dimensions is supported by the results of the International Study on Altered
States of Consciousness (Dittrich, 1998), which sampled more than one
thousand participants from six countries. Other notable quantitative
instruments that ostensibly measure constructs related to altered consciousness include Friedmans (1983) Self-Expansiveness Level Form
(SELF) and Mathes, Zevon, Roter, and Joergers (1982) Peak Experiences
Scale (PES).

Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming, ones experience of being aware that one is dreaming,
gained notoriety in the 1980s. Snyder and Gackenbach (1988) found that
the majority of U.S. adults have had at least one lucid dream. The phenomenology of lucid dreams differs from that of nonlucid dreams in that
the former usually contain more auditory and kinesthetic imagery, more
control over the direction of the dream, and fewer dream characters
(Gackenbach, 1988). Perhaps the most intriguing research done on this
topic was performed by investigators at Stanford University and involved
participants able to voluntarily enter into the lucid dream state and consciously alter their eye movements (LaBerge, Nagel, Dement, & Zarcone,
1981), respiration rates (LaBerge & Dement, 1982), and level of sexual
arousal (LaBerge, Greenleaf, & Kedzierski, 1983), which were simultaneously tracked by the researchers. Tholey (1988) later proposed that lucid
dreaming could serve as a clinically relevant tool for personal integration
because resistance to frightening characters or situations is limited; the
dreamer can focus on individuals, places, times, or situations of relevance;
and the dream ego can recognize and then alter certain aspects of the
personality.

Hallucinations
The scientic paradigm shift continued to be demonstrated in the
1980s through the surge of research on hallucinations that, until that time,
were generally viewed from a psychopathological standpoint rather than
in terms of psychological processes known to be responsible for normal

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perception and reasoning (Bentall, 2000, p. 85). A hallucination can be

dened as an involuntary perception-based experience that occurs in the
absence of relevant stimuli and affects the experient with the same force
or impact as a similar actual perception would (Slade & Bentall, 1988,
p. 23). It should be noted that hallucinations that occur in the absence
of hallucinogens like LSD (described above) are phenomenologically different than drug-induced hallucinogens (Siegel & Jarvick, 1975). During
the 1980s, several instruments were developed to measure the severity of
psychiatric symptoms including hallucinations (e.g., the Positive and Negative Syndrome Schedule; Kay, Opler, and Fiszbein, 1988) and where they
might fall on the continuum of normal psychological processes (e.g.,
Chapman & Chapman, 1980; Launay & Slade, 1981). These led to the
development of additional scales in the 1990s including the Mental Health
Research Institute Unusual Perceptions Schedule (MUPS; Carter, Mackinnon, Howard, Zeegers, & Copolov, 1995), which rates several characteristics and aftereffects of auditory hallucinations and the experients coping
strategies. Romme and Escher (1989) reported that roughly two thirds of
450 study respondents had difculty coping with hallucinated voices.
Though hallucinations are often a symptom of physical and psychiatric
disorders including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, a number of survey studies about hallucinations in nonclinical populations have taken
place and found that between 10% and 25% of the general population
have had at least one hallucination, most often a visual experience
(reviewed in Bentall, 2000).
Summary

The 1980s were characterized by the development of more operationalized psychophenomenological approaches to experimentally investigate
whether an altered state effect had been induced and to empirically differentiate among ASC using quantitative instruments and anthropological
approaches. Furthermore, specic 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 ones attention for the purpose of
achieving a short- or long-term benet) focused on the perceptual (e.g.,
Brown, Forte, Rich, & Epstein, 19821983; Walsh, 1978), emotional

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness

(e.g., Maupin, 1965; Osis, Bokert, & Carlson, 1973), developmental

(e.g., Brown & Engler, 1986), and neuroelectrical (e.g., Anand, Chhina,
& Singh, 1961; Banquet, 1973) nature of the experience, it has been noted
that this body of research may contain key methodological limitations
regarding sample sizes, representativeness of samples, expectancy effects,
appropriate control conditions, and suitable levels of practice or training
by the participants (reviewed by Farthing, 1992; Pekala, 1987). In 1994,
Gifford-May and Thompson used a phenomenological approach to address
meditation by interviewing 10 coresearchers (a term used to emphasize the
active role of the participants in the interview process) from different traditional backgrounds (including Siddha and Kundalini yoga, Transcendental
Meditation, and Buddhism) and of different levels of experience. The coresearchers detailed descriptions of their deep states of meditation revealed
a complex range of experiences (p. 136) and the following key themes:
(1) transcendence beyond the normal physical and mental boundaries of
the self, (2) a different sense of reality, and (3) positive emotions including
calm and joy. Only the rst theme was experienced by all 10 meditators.

Experimental Approaches
During the 1990s, psychologists began investigating shamanic phenomena using experimental rather than anthropological methodologies. For
example, Wright (1991) found that a shamanic drumming group reported
numerous shifts in mental functioning (e.g., changes in time sense, affect,
and imagery vividness) relative to baseline. Maxeld (1994) reported experimental evidence suggesting that shamanic drumming facilitates theta activity that, in turn, promotes the production of ASC. In another study,
Woodside, Kumar, and Pekala (1997) reported that trance postures and
monotonous drumming were associated with a myriad of phenomenological effects (e.g., self-awareness and absorption) compared to baseline. However, Woodside et al. concluded that their results were indicative of a
discrete state of consciousness rather than an altered state of consciousness.
In 1994, psychiatrist Rick Strassman and his team published preliminary data regarding a 126-item quantitative instrument (i.e., the Hallucinogen Rating Scale; HRS) that they developed to assess the subjective
effects of hallucinogenic drugs (Strassman et al., 1994). The HRS items
were derived from interviews with 19 N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT)
users and were organized according to the following six predetermined
clinical clusters: (1) somaesthesia, (2) affect, (3) perception, (4) cognition,
(5) volition, and (6) intensity. Strassman and his colleagues (1994)
discovered varying patterns of visual hallucinations, bodily dissociation,

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alterations in affect, and somaesthetic effects that were dependent on the

intravenous dose of DMT.

Continued Theoretical Shifts

Psychiatrist Roger Walsh differentiated among ASC using a phenomenological mapping technique that consisted of various key dimensions:
awareness of the environment, ability to communicate, concentration,
control, degree of arousal, degree of calm, affect, self-sense, and content
of inner experience. He concluded that although shamanic, Buddhist
(e.g., jhanas), and yogic (e.g., samadhi) states exhibit commonalities, they
remain distinct from one another and markedly different from schizophrenic states (Walsh, 1993), thus challenging scholars (e.g., Silverman,
1969) who pathologize ASC such as shamanic states. Empirical studies
with traditional healers (e.g., Van Ommeren, Komproe, Cardena, et al.,
2004) and practitioners of ritual spirit possession (Cardena, 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, Winkelmans (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
inuence the course of nature or human affairs. This research also conrmed
and extended Bourguignons (1976) research on the social correlates of spirit
possession by drawing distinctions between possession and other ASC.
Summary

During the 1990s, researchers formulated techniques to further investigate the phenomenological diversity of ASCs and experimental methodologies were applied in a variety of new contexts (e.g., meditation,
shamanic drumming, hallucinogenic drugs).

The New Millennium

More Hallucinogenic Drugs
The experimental investigation of the effects of hallucinogenic drugs
continued into the new millennium with the publication of a plethora of

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness

double-blind studies evaluating the psychological effects of, for example,

psilocybin (e.g., Grifths, Richards, McCann, & Jesse, 2006), ketamine
(e.g., Lofwall, Grifths, & Mintzer, 2006), MDMA (e.g., Cami et al.,
2000), DMT (e.g., Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 2005), and ayahuasca (e.g.,
Riba et al., 2003). Studies of this nature typically used the HRS and/or
the APZ-OAV Questionnaire to quantify drug-induced ASC.

Other Altered States

Although the history of hypnosis is longer than the history of psychology (Farthing, 1992, p. 334) and a number of standardized instruments
were developed in decades prior to 2000 to quantitatively measure hypnotic susceptibility (e.g., the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales,
Weitzenhoffer & Hilgard, 1959, 1962; Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic
Susceptibility, Shor & Orne, 1962), suggestion (e.g., Carleton University
Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale, Spanos et al., 1983), and depth (e.g.,
Tart, 1979), controversy also existed regarding whether hypnosis, that is,
a psychological state or condition, induced by a ritualistic procedure, in
which the subject experiences changes in perception, thinking, memory
and behavior in response to suggestions by the hypnotist (Farthing,
1992, p. 337) is truly an ASC and whether hypnotic responses are real
(reviewed in Farthing, 1992). Etzel Cardena (2005) addressed various
methodological limitations of research from previous decades on the experience of hypnosis
by controlling for the effects of relaxation on subjective experience through
the use of physical activity, evaluating the effects of different types of physical activity on subjective experience, and integrating valid quantitative techniques with qualitative methods such as experience sampling and
interview. (p. 41)

Cardena investigated 12 hypnotic virtuosos who were given the neutral

suggestion to simply go deeply into hypnosis. He found that participants
experienced consistent and signicant . . . alterations of consciousness,
even after controlling for the effects of relaxation and concluded that different levels of hypnotic experience (e.g., light vs. deep) are distinct modes of
experiencing rather than variations in intensity (p. 51).
During the rst decade of the new millennium, the scientic study of
mediums (i.e., individuals who experience regular communication with
the deceased) underwent a major resurgence after considerable neglect.
This rejuvenated eld of research included phenomenological studies of

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mediums experiences during mediumship readings. For example, Rock

and Beischel (2008) quantitatively analyzed seven credentialed nondenominational, mental mediums experiences using the Phenomenology of
Consciousness Inventory (Pekala & Kumar, 1986), and found that readings in which information about a deceased person were requested by an
experimenter were associated with ASC on the part of the medium when
compared to a control condition in which contact with the deceased was
not attempted (p. 172).

Reformatting Terms
In a recent series of theoretical essays, Rock and Krippner (2007a,
2007b, 2011) have argued that denitions 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 denitions of [altered] states of consciousness (e.g.,
Krippner, 1972; Ludwig, 1966; Tart, 1969a) confuse consciousness with
its content. That is to say, Tart, Ludwig, and Krippner asserted that ASC
refers to shifts or deviations in the content of consciousness rather than
consciousness itself. Rock and Krippner further argued that this confusion
is avoided if the term altered pattern of phenomenal properties replaces
altered states of consciousness. This change would then compel reconceptualizing the eld of altering consciousness as altering phenomenology and have
numerous implications for future research. Paradigm shifts are necessary
for any eld of inquiry to retain its vitality and, therefore, avoid succumbing to stasis. Perhaps reconceptualizing altering consciousness as altering phenomenology will serve to revitalize this eld as we enter the second
decade of the new millennium.

The Increasing Importance of the Neurosciences

The study of ASC in the neurosciences has remained by and large marginal, with a few important exceptions such as the more sophisticated
recent studies on neurological changes associated with OBEs (e.g., Blanke
& Arzy, 2005), hypnosis (e.g., Oakley & Halligan, 2009), and meditation
(Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008). Very promising is the neurophenomenological approach that ties rst-person data about conscious
experience with the large psychodynamics of consciousness (Lutz &
Thompson, 2003) and has been used in the investigation of specic
hypnotic experiences and brain dynamics (Cardena, Lehmann, Jonsson,
Terhune, & Faber, 2007).

Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness

Summary

During the rst 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 signicant changes in the denitions, methods, and theories that investigators have used to address ASC. As members of the general public
continue to intentionally engage in, experiment with, and embrace altered
states personally (e.g., through meditation, psychedelic drugs, lucid
dreaming, and hypnosis) or simply endorse these states as interested
observers concerned with learning about them through books, articles,
and television shows, academics and researchers will ideally keep investigating these and other similar phenomena using open minds, sound methods, and varied approaches.

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Anand, B., Chhina, G., & Singh, B. (1961). Some aspects of electroencephalographic studies in yogis. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology,
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PART II

Cultural Perspectives

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CHAPTER 7

Eastern Approaches to Altered

States of Consciousness*
Jonathan Shear
I. Eastern civilizations have traditionally placed much greater emphasis on
altered states of consciousness than the civilizations of the West. Altered,
higher states are crucial to the major Eastern religions. They play an
important role in the practice and content of cultural activities from
poetry, painting and dance to traditional martial arts throughout much
of Asia [see Zarrilli, this volume]. And their existence is taken for granted
and often emphasized in popular mythology. So it is only natural that
Eastern civilizations over the centuries have paid a great deal of attention
to analyzing the nature of these states and developing techniques to produce them as effectively as possible.
A wide variety of approaches to altering states of consciousness have
been developed and used. These include purely mental meditation procedures, ancillary physical procedures, and behavioral procedures combining mental and physical components.1 The story of Eastern approaches
to altering consciousness is much too vast and complex to be covered in
a single chapter. Nevertheless, if we conne ourselves to the major traditions such as Yoga, Vedanta, and East-Asian Buddhism, important
common understandings of altered, higher states of consciousness
readily emerge. For despite their different imagery and often conicting
metaphysical interpretations, they all emphasize meditation, recognize
comparable levels of mind, and describe the same basic higher states
of consciousness.

*Copyright # Jonathan Shear. Reprinted by permission.

1
The use of pharmaceutical approaches is also mentioned favorably in some very ancient
texts. In recent millennia, however, it has generally been downplayed and portrayed negatively, and major traditions often discourage it as damaging to aspects of the nervous system responsible for the growth of higher states of consciousness.

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This chapter will describe important experiences, states of consciousness, levels of consciousness, and real-world effects emphasized by these
traditions, relate them to features of meditation procedures, and offer
reections from the perspective of ongoing scientic research.

Experiences
II. The major Eastern traditions focusing on developing higher states of
consciousness all hold that meditation, when successful, can enable the
activity of the mind to settle down and disappear entirely so that its fundamental inner nature, independent of all the contents of ordinary awareness, can be experienced with clarity. Different traditions may interpret
the experience differently, according to their different theories, but there
is wide agreement that the experience is fundamentally important, for it
is said to enliven our true inner nature and help free it to express itself naturally and fulllingly throughout life. Gaining the experience is also said
to enhance psychological and physiological integration and functioning
and to have all sorts of benecial effects, including liberation of our natural tendencies for compassion and helpfulness and enhanced performance
in all areas of life. And most important for our present discussion, it is said
to be the basis of growth of a unique higher state of consciousness referred
to as liberation or enlightenment, the overarching goal of all the major
meditation traditions.
The experience itself is extraordinarily simple. Indeed, it appears to be
the logical ultimate of simplicity. For it has nothing in it allno perception of objects, no colors or sounds, no feelings or emotions, no thoughts.
This of course is not easy to imagine. In fact, it is impossible to imagine. For
if anything we can imagine were in it, it would not be this completely
empty experience. What is the experience like? By all accounts it is not like
anything at all. Just itself. Yet it is different from unconsciousness. For
unlike unconsciousness, when one comes out of the experience, one can
remember it. What is it remembered as? Not as anything at all. Just itself.
Some traditions, such as Yoga and Vedanta, call the experience pure
consciousness inasmuch as it appears to be consciousness itself, that is,
what remains when everything one is conscious of has been removed from
consciousness. Buddhist traditions generally refer to it as emptiness,
reecting 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, reecting both the usefulness and inadequacy of

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

all these terms. All the traditions naturally link the terms used to their preferred metaphysical beliefs. But all questions of metaphysics and terminology aside, in tradition after tradition all over the world, the descriptions
make it clear that what is being referred to appears to be completely empty
of empirical content, so empty, in fact, that it does not even contain the
internal perceptual manifold or space in which such content could
appear.
The standard descriptions of the experience can easily seem incomprehensible to people who have never had it. So they may often try to explain
them away as empty words, reecting little more than the preconceptions
of people committed to metaphysical traditions and their terminology.
People who have had the experience, however, nd the above sorts of
descriptions quite natural, regardless of their backgrounds, metaphysical
or not. Indeed, anyone with much familiarity with the topic is likely to
know, or at least know about, people who had the experience spontaneously and only later became drawn to some meditation tradition or other
after they learned that it seemed to describe the experience they had
already had.
Laboratory studies of meditators also give us good reason to take the
above sorts of experiential reports seriously. Meditation traditions have
reported for centuries that the experience is accompanied by signicant
reduction of metabolic activity, including most conspicuously complete
cessation of respiration. This is found in many Indian traditions, including, for example, the Yoga Sutras, the canonical text of Yoga. It is found
in ancient Taoist texts. The association is so standard that Chinese Zen
even uses the expression breath stops as a name for the experience itself.
Laboratory studies of people practicing traditional meditation procedures
now provide objective, scientically signicant corroboration of such
reports. Studies of people practicing the Transcendental Meditation (TM)
technique from Advaita Vedanta, for example, show extremely high correlation between reported instances of the experience and cessation of perceptible respiratory activity, as reported in the traditional literature. They
also report that the O2 and CO2 levels in the blood remain unchanged
during these episodes of respiratory suspension, consistent with the traditional accounts of reduction of metabolic activity. They also have found
other physiological parameters unknown to prescientic 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 ndings to the question of whether traditional
sorts of descriptions of the pure consciousness/emptiness experience

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should be taken at all seriously is straightforward. For it would hardly

seem plausible that different types of procedures, practiced in different
cultures with different, often opposing belief structures, would produce
the same pairing of (i) a specic, unique type of experiential report and
(ii) a unique unconscious physiological state unless (iii) the reports
reected the natural subjective correlate of that particular state, rather
than (iv) the inconsistent and often opposing contexts of belief in which
the reports were made. The traditional reports and contemporary research
thus give us good reason to think that, at least sometimes, reports of experiences devoid of all empirical content reect the experiences themselves
rather than such things as metaphysical beliefs and wishful thinking.2 In
other words, they give us good reason to conclude that experiences corresponding to the standard descriptions of pure consciousness/emptiness
actually exist.
III. The question naturally arises of why throughout history people
should have been so concerned to obtain an experience that, as completely empty, is necessarily devoid of any interesting content. The simplest answer is that it has been thought to be desirable for the effects it
produces, for it is widely held to be the basis of developing all sorts of
remarkable, intrinsically desirable experiences and states, including
that of full enlightenment. Consider, for example, the following examples from modern North Americans and Europeans practicing Zen
(Japanese Buddhist lineages) and TM (Advaita Vedanta), traditions
especially well known for their focus on altered, higher states of consciousness.
First, two descriptions of the pure consciousness/emptiness experience
we have been discussing:
E1. The time comes when no reection appears at all. One comes to notice
nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing . . . But it is not vacant
emptiness. Rather it is the purest condition of our existence. (Zen: K.S.,
quoted in Austin, 1998, p. 473)

E2. My meditations are characterized by the experience of no experience

. . . I just remain in the Absolute for the entire sitting and nothing else seems
2

This is not to say that reports that are false and/or simply confused cannot also occur.
Meditation traditions have accordingly devised various protocols to separate valid from
invalid reports. To minimize the risk of their being thwarted, these protocols are generally
not a matter of public record and will not be discussed here.

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

to happen, other than the feeling of bliss permeating me completely. (TM)

(P.B., quoted in Maharishi, 1977, p. 80)

Next, some more advanced experiences of the kinds often said to

develop from the above:
E3. A thousand new sensations are bombarding my senses, a thousand
new paths are opening before me . . . a warm love pervade[s] my whole
being, because I know that I am not just my little self but a great big
miraculous Self. My constant thought is to have everybody share this deep
satisfaction. (Zen) (A.M., in Kapleau, 1972, p. 245)
E4. Then I knew that my little me had become big Me . . . I felt like I had
been reborn into the purity and innocence of a new-born child, yet I felt
wise, like a person who had lived for a long time. My inner awareness is
immovable, stable, integrated, exible and condent. I am no longer
dependent on changing circumstances, friendships, or activities for
an inner stability peace and fulllment. (TM) (D.N., in Maharishi, 1977,
p. 81)
E5. I noticed a totally new feeling of softness and sweetness develop. There
were days when I felt my heart melting as if I could take everything in creation into myself and cherish it with the greatest love. Often I would have
long periods of the day when everything I saw seemed to be glowing with
divine radiance. (TM) (J.B., in Maharishi, 1977, p. 81)
E6. The least expression of weather variation, a soft rain or a gentle breeze,
touches me as awhat 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 ner 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
uctuations of my body and consciousness. These uctuations 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
uctuation. (TM) (L.A., in Maharishi, 1977, p. 84)
E8. The least act, such as eating or scratching an arm, is not at all simple. It
is merely a visible moment in a network of causes and effects reaching

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forward into Unknowingness and back into an innity 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, lled with such things as expansion of self, rened perception, bliss, universal love, and unity with all of nature, are all quite
remarkable. They are precisely the kinds of things that often attract people, especially in the West, to meditation in the rst place.

Higher States of Consciousness

IV. The contents of the above experiences might at rst glance appear
to be a bit of a jumble. But Eastern traditions have developed a variety of
phenomenological maps to make sense out of the above sorts of experiences and relate them both to each other and to our more ordinary ones. And
the list of experiences above was organized in accord with one of the most
basic maps, a map of higher states of consciousness used for centuries by
major meditation traditions. In its simplest form, the map distinguishes
three major higher states of consciousness in the sequence in which they
typically are reported to develop. The identifying phenomenological feature of each of these states can be described as follows:
HS1. pure consciousness/emptiness, by itself, in isolation from everything else
HS2. pure consciousness/emptiness permanently stable throughout all of ones
experiences
HS3. pure consciousness/emptiness as the perceived ground of everything one experiences, external as well as internal.

The rst thing that we can note is that all of these higher states of consciousness are dened in terms of the relation of pure consciousness/emptiness to all the other contents of our awareness. In the rst of these states,
pure consciousness/emptiness is experienced alone by itself. And this
experience is widely held to be the precondition of recognizing the experiential nature of consciousness itself, as contrasted with the all the other
things we experience, in the rst place. That this should be the case
should not be surprising. Our attention is normally drawn to what is
changing in experience. This is a psychological truism, and information

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

theory often even denes 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 ones attention to one part of ones perceptual eld 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 atness of the screen is unlikely to be noticed until, that
is, the lm (but not the light) stops, leaving the screen to be seen alone
by itself. So it should not be surprising if, as widely reported, the experiential nature of pure consciousness/emptiness usually rst becomes
apparent only in the rst higher state, HS1 as dened above, where it
is experienced alone by itself after all objects of perception have disappeared, before it is likely to also be experienced along with everything else
one experiences, the dening feature of the second higher state, HS2
above.
For most people, of course, the experience of pure consciousness/
emptiness by itself at st occurs only as a result of practicing a meditation technique designed to produce it. Once it has occurred, however,
what had formerly been merely subliminal can become apparent along
with other experiences, rst, perhaps, along with quiet thoughts and
feelings in meditation, later along with all the dynamic, previously overshadowing experiences of daily life. This may at rst occur episodically.
But in time, according to tradition after tradition, it can become experienced as stable and permanent throughout all the changing experiences
of the waking state of consciousness, the chaos of the dream state, and
even the obscurity of dreamless sleep. Different explanations are given
for this progression. But regardless of explanations, it should be easy to
see why the experience HS1 of pure consciousness/emptiness by itself
is the natural prerequisite for the more advanced higher state HS2,
in which pure consciousness/emptiness has become stabilized permanently throughout all of ones other, changing experiences [see Geels, this
volume].
The next higher state HS3, pure consciousness perceived as the ground
of all of ones experiences, is more difcult to grasp. Here, using our movie
screen analogy, it is as though ones perception has become so subtle that
all the colors are seen not only as on the screen but of it. That is, to stretch
our analogy further, it is as though one sees (rather than merely grasps
conceptually) that the colors are not something superimposed on the

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screen but direct expressions of its nature. But for our purposes it will be
enough simply to recognize the typical descriptions of the phenomenological nature of HS3, where everything, internal and external alike, is perceived as emerging from the same pure consciousness/emptiness that one
experiences in HS1. With this, the whole universe, oneself included, is
perceived as a single unied existence.3
We should note here, however, that while major nondual traditions
such as Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta clearly emphasize all the
higher states as described above, nondual traditions such as Yoga and
Dvaita Vedanta argue that one could never in fact perceive the single
ground of everything, despite how things might appear to an advanced
experiencer. For even if pure consciousness can (and should) be experienced as the ground of different individuals awareness, this does not
imply that the pure consciousness experienced by each has the same
source, any more than pure water drawn from two different wells has to
come from the same aquifer. Theravada Buddhism rejects the notion that
the emptiness an advanced practitioner can recognize everywhere represents a fundamental ground either of oneself or the universe as a whole,
for they reject the notion of such a ground in the rst place. Nevertheless,
all questions of metaphysical interpretations aside, there is wide agreement among the major traditions that the above higher states (or variations
extremely close to them), dened 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 ll it out somewhat, let us return to the experiences described earlier. The descriptions
3

It is worth noting that pure consciousness/emptiness, as devoid of empirical qualities, is

the only phenomenologically denable thing (or non-thing) that, logically speaking,
could ever be experienced as the ground of all possible experiences. For anything that
has empirical qualities of its own would be incompatible with logically possible experiences where those qualities were not present.
4
Compare, for example, emphatic comments to this effect by Samdong Rinpoche (noted
scholar and head of the Dalai Lamas government in exile) in Shear and Mukherjee,
2006, p. 360.
We can also note that the rst and third of the higher states described above (pure consciousness/emptiness by itself and as the ground of everything, respectively) correspond to
the introvertive (IME) and extrovertive (EME) mystical experiences identied by Walter
Stace in the mid 1900s and often held by scholars to be the two central mystical experiences. Stace, however, took the IME to be the more advanced experience (perhaps because,
unlike the EME, it seems to have nothing in common with ordinary experience), and as a
result was puzzled by the fact that the supposedly more advanced IME experience was
recorded in the literature much more often than the supposedly less advanced EME. The
map and gloss above resolve Staces puzzle by showing, and explaining, the actual
sequence of development traditionally described.

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

consist of four pairs of examples drawn from Zen and TM. The rst 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 rened 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 rst 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 rst 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, exible and condent. I am no longer
dependent on changing circumstances, friendships, or activities for an
inner stability peace and fulllment. (TM)

Both of these examples describe typical meditation-related experiences

of expansion of self, as noted earlier. But they do not mention pure consciousness/emptiness, the crucial variable in the denition of all the higher
states on the map, at all. So their relation to the map might not at rst
glance be at all apparent. However, once we know the linguistic conventions of Zen and Advaita Vedanta, the traditions associated with the two
descriptions, the connection becomes readily apparent. For both of these
traditions tend to (i) use the term self to refer to self as ordinarily understood in terms of body, personality, self-images, and so forth, and
(ii) Self (with a capital S in English) to refer to what they take the self
(or Self) to really be, namely pure consciousness/emptiness itself, experienced deep within. Thus when they say such things as not just my little
self but a great big miraculous Self and my little me became a big Me,
what they mean is not, of course, that they have grown physically bigger,
but that what they experience themselves as being has shifted from (i) the

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small, space-timebounded 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 identies the passages as describing the type of experiences characteristic of
the state HS2 above, where pure consciousness/emptinesshere identied with Selfis experienced along with all the ordinary experiences of
daily life.5
We should note, however, that the above examples are offered just to
illustrate what experience in this second advanced state HS2 is like. The
examples by themselves do not indicate whether this kind of experience
was established permanently throughout waking, dreaming, and even, as
strange as it might sound, throughout deep dreamless sleep, as full development of HS2 would require.
The relation of the third pair (E5 and E6) of experiences to the map of
higher states is more complex. We will return to these experiences in section VIII below.
The relation of the fourth pair (E7 and E8) of experiences to the map,
however, is simple enough. They describe everythingminds, bodies,
consciousness, and external universeas comprising a profound unity,
and they refer to the unifying ground as unuctuating consciousness,
an innity of silence, and beyond the grasp of the intellect. Zen and
Vedanta (along with many other traditions) regularly use such expressions to refer to the pure consciousness/emptiness they take to be the
perceived ground of both (i) individual consciousness and (ii) all of
nature. The descriptions, written by advanced meditators in the contexts
of their own traditions, make it clear that the perceived unifying ground
referred to is pure consciousness/emptiness. The experiences, in other
words, are clear examples characteristic of the highest state, HS3, in the
map.
VI. The above modern examples of reports of higher states have been
used to illustrate the signicance of the typology of the map. The map,
once understood, can then often clarify otherwise confusing claims and
reports in the elds of meditation and mysticism in general. It can let us
5

We should note that Theravada Buddhism, emphasizing the Buddhist doctrine of noself, eschews such talk about Self. However East-Asian Mahayana Buddhism, referring
to the Mahaparisamadhi Sutra they take to be preserved in Tibet and China but lost in India
and South-Asia, regularly asserts that the no-self doctrine is a preliminary one that
Buddha said was to be superseded (for sufciently advanced practitioners) by a doctrine
of transcendental Self of the sort described above. Thus the above terminology, although
consistent with Mahayana, is inconsistent with Theravada. Terminology aside, however,
they all appear to have the experiences described above.

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

recognize for example that inconsistent claims about the contents and
implications of experiences often arise from the fact that different states
of consciousness are being referred to. It can also help us see that seemingly unrelated descriptions can often actually reect the same higher
state. Sorting things out in this way is not always easy, of course, since
experiential accounts are often formulated in and/or alluded to in very different ways in different traditions and cultures. Still, with the above map
otherwise obscure relationships can often become transparent. Thus, for
example, it is easy to see that the following account of a disciples experience, written by Shankara, the 8th-century Advaita Vedanta Master, refers
to the maps 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 Ching-yuan), the

12th-century Chinese Zen Master, might at rst seem entirely unrelated
both to Shankaras description. But with a little thought, the map lets us
recognize that it reects the same higher state.
A short while ago my attendant monk told me that it was raining too hard
and the audience might nd it too difcult 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 rainthis 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 Butsugens meaning
becomes clear when he follows the above remark with the story of Genshs
(another famous Zen master) responding to a monks warning shout of
Tiger! by shouting back,
It is you who are the tiger!
Tiger, rain, you, everything . . . all one thing. Thats how it seems in the
maps 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 maps phenomenological categories can thus, in short, be used to
identify state-specic structural features of diverse types of experiences,

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even when the experiences are expressed in seemingly unrelated language.

This, in turn, can help identify when differences of metaphysical claims
and theories reect differences of state-specic 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 reecting more and less full levels of development of
consciousnessalthough such conclusions are often roundly disputed
by those said to be of lesser levels of development.6
Having seen something of the phenomenological signicance 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 dened
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 ones habits of attention, one may simply pass
through any particular level without noticing it, especially at the beginning of ones practice. But all the levels are said to be experienceable by
sufciently advanced practitioners. The content of each more supercial
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)

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 identiable as the deepest stratum of L3. For ease of expression, and to
emphasize its importance, however, it will be referred to here as a separate level (L4)
rather than the deepest stratum of L3.

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

We are all familiar with the rst two levels, senses and discursive
thinking. The phenomenological nature of the rst level, the senses,
needs no special explanation. The second level, discursive thinking, is
where thinking in words, as in ordinary internal discourse, takes place.
The third level, discriminative intellect, is more abstract. It is said to
underlie the activity of discursive thinking and intelligent activity in general. Without it, we would not be able to distinguish different sensory
objects, recognize that words are particular kinds of objects, or even
understand that words relate to other things, much less relate to them
meaningfully. As abstract as this level is, however, its existence can be recognized experientially in the preverbal thinking of the kinds ordinary people sometimes, and highly creative people often, report.
The deeper levels are less likely to be familiar. All of them lie outside the
ordinary range of experience. They are all highly abstract. And they are
usually rst experienced clearly only as a result of meditation. Level L4,
pure individuality or ego, at rst 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 objectsall the kinds of things, in
other words, that we are ordinarily aware of. This can occur after the activity
of the more supercial levels has settled in meditation and their phenomenal objects have disappeared, while one nevertheless remains awake. It is
in effect experience of the space of mindthe phenomenological manifold. Traditionally the experience is likened to that of being a disembodied
observer in the midst of vast emptiness. Thus, in the language of Vedanta,
one is said to hold ones 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 minds eye
in the midst of vast emptiness makes it clear that it still contains the Iit
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 rst of the tree experiences in the following from the Zen tradition:
[inner] space becomes the object of consciousness, followed by an awareness of
objectless innity, and then by absorption into a void which has nothingness as its object
(Austin, 1998, p. 474).

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are no thoughts or other phenomenal objects here. But the empty structure
can be remembered, and recognized conceptually, when one returns to
more ordinary levels of awareness. It can also be remembered as permeated
by abstract undifferentiated objectless bliss.
Level L5, pure bliss (or pure positive affect), is even more abstract. For
here there is no longer any sense even of being an observer or having a
vantage point. Thus even the empty subjectobject duality of L4 is no longer
present. All that remains is abstract bliss or well-being itselfhappiness
beyond the superlative, as the Bhagavad Gita, canonical to most Indian
traditions, puts it.
Level L6, pure consciousness (pure emptiness), is simply the pure
consciousness/emptiness we have been discussing, the logical ultimate of
abstraction.
VIII. The basic link between the levels and states maps is straightforward: The pure consciousness/emptiness of the deepest level, L6, of the
levels map is the same pure consciousness/emptiness central to the denitions of all the states described by the higher states map. The rst 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 ones
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 rst experienced and then enlivened throughout
all of ones awareness in the appropriate ways.
The same process of moving attention from the surface levels through
the intermediate levels to the deepest level and back again also is found
to enliven the intermediate levels as well. Which particular levels are enlivened to what degree is highly variable and depends on such things as the
particular techniques practiced and the nature and degree of development
of individual meditators. But it is a widely reported effect. And it is not
hard to recognize in some of the experiences we described earlier.
Repeated experience of the deep bliss-lled level L5, for example, is
often followed by experiences of aesthetic beauty and expansive love such
as those described in
E5. I noticed a totally new feeling of softness and sweetness develop. There
were days when I felt my heart melting as if I could take everything in creation into myself and cherish it with the greatest love. Often I would have

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

long periods of the day when everything I saw seemed to be glowing with
divine radiance. (TM)
E3 . . . a warm love pervade[s] my whole being, because I know that I am
not just my little self but a great big miraculous Self. My constant thought
is to have everybody share this deep satisfaction. (Zen)

Enlivenment of rened preverbal strata of level L3 of the map, coupled

with growth of positive affect, is said to produce the kinds of subtle conceptual and perceptual discrimination evident in the following passage
E6. The least expression of weather variation, a soft rain or a gentle breeze,
touches me as awhat 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 ner songs. (Zen)

And the same kind of perceptual renement is naturally evident in experiences such as the following, characteristic of the highest state of the states
map.
E7. It also seems that every object contains all sizes of waves, all in some kind
of synchrony. Yet underlying that, there is no movement or uctuation. (TM)
E8. The least act, such as eating or scratching an arm, is not at all simple. It
is merely a visible moment in a network of causes and effects reaching forward into Unknowingness and back into an innity of Silence where individual consciousness cannot even enter. (Zen)

The above examples should be enough to give an idea, at least in principle, of how the states and levels maps have traditionally been used both
to help understand meditation-related experiences and to evaluate the
degree of development of meditators.

Practical Effects
IX. In culture after culture, it is taken for granted that access to the deeper
levels of awareness and development of higher states of consciousness

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can signicantly enhance a wide spectrum of human abilities. Many different

kinds of explanation for this are offered, some metaphysical, others down to
earth. The logic of many of the latter can be explained as follows: The higher
states we have been discussing all involve enlivening the silent, nonactive,
empirically contentless ground of awareness, consciousness/emptiness itself.
In one common analogy, a mind in which this qualityless ground remains
lively when the other levels become active will, like a completely clean mirror, be optimally responsive to its environment. Or, to use a modern image,
a mind that is tuned to pure silence is like a good stereo. Free from internal
noise, it is completely silent when the programs are off and the volume control is turned up high. A stereo that maintains the absence of internal noise
when programming is reintroduced optimizes its signal-to-noise ratio. It will,
in other words, be high delity. 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. Rened intellectual and perceptual discrimination should be expected to enhance activity in the world holistically. Stable experience of bliss ought to help
people become more ethical. For the selsh 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 fullled.
And growth of unbounded love should enliven this concern for others
directly.
Whether or not the above sorts of explanations are plausible, realworld results of the kinds they are supposed to explain have been reported
for millennia. Claims of such results have also become the subject of scientic research.
X. The idea that higher states of consciousness might produce such
practical results, however, seems counter to the widespread understanding that meditation and its products are really impractical, best suited only
for hermits, monks, and others who want to withdraw from daily life. The
practice of meditation involves withdrawal of attention from the world
inward to the minds 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

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 BhagavadGitas injunction that we should become established in pure consciousness as the basis for performing action (yogastah kurukarmani). The fact
that this injunction is given to a warrior on the battleeld, where performance is a life-and-death matter, is especially telling. The same theme is
a well-known feature of the Zen and Taoist martial arts that have had
ample timeand the highest motiveto determine what really does and
does not really work in practice. And, moving from battle to high culture,
throughout much of Asia practices designed to produce higher states are
integrated into the training in artistic disciplines such as poetry, calligraphy, painting, and dance, both because of the efciency in action and
the creativity, rened perception, deep positive affect, and intimacy with
nature they are thought to produce. 10 Comparable ideas have been
reected 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 othersall features of what psychologists today often refer to as selfactualization.
XI. How seriously should we take such claims? All of them, internal as
well as external, are just the kinds of things that modern scientic protocols are designed to examine.11 And in recent decades, thousands of studies have been conducted on the psychological, physiological, and

10

Compare, for example, D. T. Suzukis fascinating Zen and Japanese Culture (Suzuki,
1970).
11
Claims about fantastic abilities such as being able to become invisible, walk on water,
change ones size at will, and so forth, are also often found. Texts such as the Yoga Sutras
even list techniques intended to develop them in the service of enlivening subtler levels
of awareness and helping the nervous system become fully integrated. Such texts also contain strong warnings, however, that it is all too easy to become attached to such abilities
and distracted from the goal of enlightenment. In the absence of credible scientic evidence for such abilities, however, we need not deal with them here.

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behavioral correlates and effects of meditation and associated experiences

of higher states. Signicant problems in interpreting the results of such
studies have arisen, however. These problems arise from the fact that
meditation techniques often differ greatly in both their internal mechanics
and their internal and external effects. Consider, for example, the following short list of features of major meditation procedures described by
representatives of the traditions referred to:
Zen Buddhist practices are likely to use concentration, whether
directed perceptually toward breathing or conceptually toward paradoxes
(koans) that defy intellectual resolution. Taoist practices emphasize circulation of energy throughout channels of the body. Transcendental Meditation uses relaxed attention to special sounds (or mantras) repeated silently
within the mind. Yoga adds many other procedures and objects, such as
concentration on energy centers in the body (chakras), the light of the
mind, and attributes of God. Theravada Buddhism emphasizes dispassionate observation of the impermanence of sensations, thoughts, and
whatever else is meditated on, including the self itself. Susm follows the
inner feeling of love for God [see Maliszewski et al., Volume 2].
Traditional meditation procedures thus differ with regard to the mental faculties they use (attention, feeling, reasoning, visualization, memory,
bodily awareness, and so forth), the way these faculties are used (effortlessly, forcefully, actively, passively), and the objects they are directed to
(thoughts, images, concepts, internal energy, breath, subtle aspects of the
body, love, God). They also often differ strongly with regard to how they
relate to questions of belief, with some systems emphasizing the need
to hold particular philosophical, metaphysical, and/or religious views and
others emphasizing complete independence of them all.12
This diversity makes it difcult to talk about effects of meditation
considered generically, since different procedures often produce very different results. Thus, for example, procedures focusing on respiration and
those ignoring it have been found to have different effects on respiratory
parameters, as might be expected, and procedures involving intense focus
and those emphasizing effortlessness naturally have different effects on
variables such as EEG patterns and trait anxiety. Traditional texts, contemporary teachers claims, and contemporary meditators reports also differ
greatly about how quickly (if at all) experiences and states of the kinds
we have been discussing are likely to be gained. Some claim ordinary
people can begin to enjoy them within a few weeks or months, others
12

The two preceding paragraphs were adapted from the Introduction to Shear, 2006,
p. xvi.

Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness

insist that it is likely to be years, and others hold that only very few people
have the ability to gain them at all.
Perhaps because the topic is relatively new to modern Western culture, people nevertheless have often tended to lump all meditation procedures together and think of them as more or less equivalent. This has led
to signicant errors in interpreting the existing research. One has been to
take the many conicting outcomes on given variables as implying that
meditation (conceived generically) has no signicant 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 rst diminishes interest in further research.
The second has often led people to begin to practice particular procedures on the basis of results reported for some other procedure and, not
nding the expected result, to become disillusioned and reject meditation
in general.
What is needed is a concerted, nuanced research program to determine
which procedures produce what experiences and states on what subpopulations and over what time frames. Only then will we know how practical
the idea of gaining the remarkable experiences, states, and effects we have
been discussing really is.

References
Austin, J. H. (1998). Zen and the brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kapleau, P. (Ed.). (1972). The three pillars of Zen. Boston: Beacon Press.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (1967). The Bhagavad-Gita: A new translation and commentary. Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (1977). Creating an ideal society. West Germany: MERU
Press.
Shankara. (1970). Shankaras 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 rst-person methodology: Real promiseand
problems. In H. Walach & S. Schmidt (Eds.), Meditation: Neuroscientic
approaches and philosophical explanations. New York: Springer.
Shear, J., & Mukherjee, S. P. (Eds.). (2006). Consciousness: A deeper scientic
search. Kolkata, India: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture.
Suzuki, D. T. (1970). Zen and Japanese culture. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Suzuki, D. T. (1971). What is Zen? New York: Harper and Row.

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Travis, F. T., Haaga, D. H., Hagelin, J., Tanner, M., Arenander, A., Nidich, S.,
Gaylord-King, C., Grosswald, S., Rainforth, M., & Schneider, R. (2010). A
self-referral default brain state: Patterns of coherence, power, and eLORETA
sources during eyes-closed rest and the transcendental meditation practice.
Cognitive Processes, 11, 2130.
Travis, F. T., & Wallace, R. K. (1997). Autonomic patterns during respiratory
suspensions: Possible markers of transcendental consciousness. Psychophysiology, 34, 3946.

CHAPTER 8

Shamanism and the Alteration

of Consciousness
Michael Winkelman
The concept of shamanism provides an important paradigmatic framework for understanding altered consciousness. Shamanism is a primordial
form of transcendence of ordinary consciousness that was found crossculturally, reecting manifestations of evolved biological adaptations.
Evolved capacities for hypnotic susceptibility, processing exogenous
neurotransmitter analogues, and music and dance contributed to the
emergence of shamanism. Other cross-cultural features of shamanic alteration of consciousness such as dream incubation and strenuous and
stressful activities share physiological effects of inducing parasympathetic
dominant states. These contribute to the production of a key feature of
shamanism, the soul ight or out-of-body experience, which illustrate
basic features of altered consciousness involving aspects of self related to
an ancient pre-language system of personal representation and emotional
bonding.

The Classic Shaman

Shamanic practices involving the alteration of consciousness became part
of post-Renaissance conceptual frameworks as Western colonial enterprises provided many accounts of what came to be recognized as shamanism (Siikala, 1978). The English use of the term shaman was a result of
Russian and German explorations that brought the concept from Siberia,
where etymologically and phonologically similar terms are widely dispersed. These early reports characterized shamanistic practices as representing an irrational aspect of human nature. These fragmentary and
distorted descriptions were eventually superseded by ethnographic reports
in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, which occurred after political, economic, and societal reforms had radically transformed Siberian

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shamanistic practices. Integration of reports on practices among Finnish,

Hungarian, Turkish, and Native American cultures contributed to a growing recognition of core commonalities in spiritual healing practices worldwide.
This was exemplied in Mircea Eliades (1951/1964) Shamanism:
Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, which provided a synthesis of these and
other cross-cultural materials that contributed to a modern perspective
on shamanism as a cross-cultural phenomenon. Eliade characterized shamanism as involving techniques of ecstasy used for interaction with the
spirit world on behalf of the community, particularly for healing, protection, and nding game animals. Eliade (1951/1964, p. 511) noted that
the shamanic ritual played an essential role in the psychological integrity
of the community. Shamans fought spirits and disease and defended life,
health, fertility, the world of light, against death, diseases, sterility, disaster, and the world of darkness (p. 509). The shamanic ritual was typically
a night-time ceremony attended by the entire local group in which the
shamans enactment of battles with the spirits produced fear, awe, and,
nally, assurance as the shaman dominated enemy spirits with the assistance of spirit allies. Dancing violently and excitedly for hours to the
accompaniment of drums, rattles, singing, and chanting, the shaman
eventually collapsed, exhausted, and entered the spirit world. This ecstatic
state involved a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body
and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld (Eliade, 1951/1964,
p. 5). This signature feature of the shamanic alterations of consciousness
referred to as soul ight 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 patients 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 aficted 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

reassembling each person with new capacities and powers that empowered the shaman as a wounded healer.
Eliades 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 y;
a special relationship to animal spirits involving transformation into an
animal; and the potential for malevolent use of power to cause sickness
or death. These intuitive and impressionistic approaches to shamanism
have led to the assimilation of many different types of practitioners under
the label of shamanism. Uncertainty regarding the empirical status of shamans and their characteristics has persisted because of the relative recency
of formal cross-cultural studies.

Cross-cultural Features of Shamans

Winkelmans (1990, 1992; Winkelman & White, 1987) systematic ethnological research, which established the cross-cultural or etic validity of
the concept of the shaman, is the basis for the following claims regarding
the empirical nature of shamanism. A formal cross-cultural sample and
quantitative analysis of the features of magico-religious practitioners established the empirical nature of shamans and their characteristics around the
world. The determination of the common features of shamans and their
differences from other types of religious practitioners was based on variables such as: selection and training procedures; ritual induction techniques
and characteristics; labeling of altered states of consciousness; sources of
power and relationships to spirit entities; magico-religious activities; types
of healing and divination techniques employed; context and motives for
professional activities; and sociopolitical powers and activities. Cluster
analysis assessment of shared characteristics provided the basis for determination of different types of religious practitioners and their differences
from shamans in terms of their respective characteristics.

Shamans and Other Types of Religious Practitioners

These quantitative procedures and empirical analyses revealed a similar form of religious practitioner in foraging societies worldwide (labeled
as shamans), as well as identifying different types of magico-religious

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practitioners that varied signicantly from shamans (which were labeled

shaman/healer, healer, medium, priest, and sorcerer/witch, following
terms frequently employed by anthropologists). These practitioner types
differed signicantly in terms of their central characteristics as well as in
terms of the social complexity of their respective societies (Winkelman,
1990, 1992). The cross-cultural validity of the concept of the shaman is
substantiated by these empirically derived groups, which indicate that
essentially identical religious practitioners are found in different regions
of the world (e.g., shamans are found in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas). This empirically derived group of shamans shares more characteristics in common amongst themselves than they do with other magicoreligious practitioners. The empirical similarity shared by these practitioners in different societies is more relevant than a priori denitions or
common geographical location.
The ndings 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 ight;
communal ritual activities involving chanting, music, drumming, and dancing;
a primary source of power involving control of animal spirits;
a belief in their ability to transform into animals;
professional abilities involving healing, diagnosis, divination, and assistance in
hunting;
theories of illness involving soul loss, magical intrusion of objects, and attacks by
spirits and shamans; and
a belief in their ability to do harm through sorcery.

This empirical similarity found cross-culturally indicates that the term

shaman should be restricted to practitioners that share these characteristics. This includes not only their personal features but their social characteristics as well, such as their principal occurrence in foraging societies,
particularly the hunter-gatherer societies where their activities rst arose.
Shamanism persisted in horticultural societies, but their practices began
a transformation as a function of changing subsistence patterns, increased
societal complexity, and the emergence of new types of religious practitioners such as priests (Winkelman, 1992).

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

Shamanistic Healers
In addition to the shamans, other types of religious practitioners
(shaman/healers, mediums, and many healers) also shared the core characteristic of shamanism suggested by Eliade (1964), namely altering consciousness in community rituals to interact with spiritual entities.
Furthermore, they also all engage in divination and healing rituals. These
common features that they share with shamans led Winkelman (1990)
to propose the inclusive term shamanistic healers. Shamanistic healers
represent a human universal; every society has religious healing practitioners who have a central concern with ritual procedures for altering consciousness. Shamanistic healers also share other central characteristics:
spiritual interpretations of therapeutic processes; the utilization of spirit
entities as projective mechanisms for representing the unconscious; symbolic and ritual restoration of social relations; and removal of illness attributed to spirits or other humans.

Explaining Shamanistic Universals: The Evolutionary Origins

of Techniques for Alteration of Consciousness
The universals of shamans and other shamanistic healers point to a
basis in something fundamental about human nature. The alterations of
consciousness, soul ight experiences, spirit and animal identities, healing
and divination practices, and other aspects of shamanistic healers reect 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 reect 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 signicance of its role in practices related
to the alteration of consciousness? An evolutionary perspective is necessary to understand these features of shamanism and how they emerged
as adaptations (Winkelman, 2002, 2010; Winkelman & Baker, 2008).
The complex of shamanic practices undoubtedly has many origins;
Winkelman and Baker (2008; cf. Winkelman, 2010) demonstrate
substantial similarities between chimpanzee and shamanic rituals that
establish the latters ancient roots in hominid lineage. Humans ritual

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activities to alter consciousness and induce shamanic experiences reect

elicitation of innate responses. These include the evolved capacities of hypnotic susceptibility, abilities for processing exogenous neurotransmitter
analogues in psychedelics, and behaviors of music and dance, which contributed to the emergence of shamanism. Other ritual processes involve
dreaming and inducing conditions that reect 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 ight and its out-of-body features that reects key aspects of self
development.

The Hypnotic Capacity

McClenons (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 ight, possession, mystical awareness, and similar phenomena, which are generally given spiritual interpretations (McClenon, 2002). Hypnotizability and increased suggestibility
also facilitate the placebo effect, providing a basis for miraculous cures
that enhance faith and survival.
Cardena (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. Cardena and Krippner (2010) note
many parallels between shamanic and hypnotic phenomena, including:
fantasy-prone and dissociative characteristics; family tendencies in susceptibility suggestive of genetic contributions; developmental paths
involving injury, illness, and trauma; a tendency for artistic production
and cognitive exibility; spontaneous out-of-body experiences; and the
use of monotonous procedures that focus attention and limit conscious
awareness.
Dissociative experiences involving a separation of the body from the
environment are a key aspect of hypnosis that promotes an engagement
with an alternate reality. This reality is generally interpreted in premodern
cultures as a spirit world in which these powerful others can act upon our
well-being through emotional impacts that can produce notable biological
responses. Lynn (2005) proposed that dissociation was an adaptive ability. In bypassing ordinary self-related cognitive and self operations,

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

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 exemplied in spirit possession
provides a further distancing from apparent self-interest. McClenon proposed that dissociation facilitated hominids ability to cope with stressful
experiences, with the ability to dissociate a key to evocation of placebo
responses that enhanced survival and reproduction, leading to selection
for genotypes that could benet from shamanic healing.

Exogenous Neurotransmitters in Human and Shamanic Evolution

An enhanced human capacity for using exogenous neurotransmitterlike substances (Sullivan, Hagen, & Hammerstein, 2008) reects 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 benets of substance use and adaptations to environmental sources of consciousness-altering chemicals directly related to
shamanism (Winkelman, 2010). There was an accelerated evolution of
and selection for polypeptide precursors and genes involved in opioid
regulation since the divergence of hominins from our hominid ancestors
(Rockman et al., 2005; Wang et al., 2005).
The uniquely human pituitary cyclase-activating polypeptide precursor (PACAP) has a critical role in enhancing the biological activity of
neuropeptides through increasing their afnity 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 signicant human and chimpanzee differences involving genes that enhance an ability to metabolize the
plant toxins indicate that positive selection for CYP2D6 enabled human
ancestors to metabolize opiates and other drugs, including serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The serotonergic agents, typied in psilocybin-containing
mushrooms found worldwide, produce profound alterations of consciousness normally interpreted as involving the soul and the supernatural. There are humanschimpanzee differences in serotonin binding with
psychedelics (Pregenzer et al., 1997) that provide direct evidence that
human serotonin systems evolved to more efciently 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 modied in the course of human evolution and contributed
to our cognitive specializations. This included development of cognitive

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capacities directly related to shamanism because the features of psychedelicinduced experiences are directly related to shamanism, such as:
providing access to a spiritual world;
producing an experience of the separation of ones 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 ones body;
establishing relationships with animals;
inducing an experience of transformation into an animal;
provoking an ego death and transformation or rebirth;
providing information through visions;
producing healing; and
inducing an enhancement of social cohesion
(Winkelman, 2010).

The worldwide association of plant drugs that profoundly alter consciousness with shamanistic activities points to their intrinsic relationships
involving the innate properties of our neurotransmission systems and
altered consciousness. Spiritual traditions worldwide consider these exogenous sources of neurotransmitter substances to be the origin of deities
and the reason for their spiritual and consciousness-transforming practices. These principles of altered consciousness are at the core of many,
perhaps all spiritual traditions; consequently, we must address the nature
of spirituality and altered consciousness in terms of the brain effects of the
variety of agents and activities that provoke these experiences. The phenomenological similarities of drug (psilocybin) and natural mystical experiences illustrated by Grifths and co-workers (2006) double-masked
study tell us that there are common substrates in the brain and neurotransmitters that underlie experiences of altered consciousness, irrespective of their origins or interpretations.
Understanding the relationships among natural and drug-induced alterations of consciousness requires an evolutionary perspective that reveals
endogenous mechanisms reecting ancient evolutionary adaptations. These
adaptations enhanced our ability to utilize exogenous sources of neurotransmitter substances and to more fully exploit the advantages of altered consciousness involving effects on behavior, emotions, and cognition.

Dance and Music

Shamanistic practices utilize singing or chanting, as well as drumming
or other percussion, which are integrated with dance [see Fachner, and
Zarrilli, this volume]. These practices reect exaptations of capacities that

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

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 behaviormimesisdeliberate imitation or enactment [see Whitehead, this volume]. These intrinsic rhythmic
abilities provide the deeper evolutionary roots of musicality and dance in
these expressions of a full-body capacity related to the inherent rhythm
of bipedal movement (Merker, 2009). Music is the vocal complement to
the behavioral expression of mimesis, a vocalcognitive 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 efcient
serotonin transporters (SLC6A4) and arginine vasopressin (AVPR1a), an
opioid widely associated with social communication and afliative behavior in primates. Interaction between vasopressin and serotonin in the
hypothalamus plays a key role in control of communicative behavior.
The association of enhanced dance propensities with ASC and mystical
experience indicates their co-evolution. Dance can alter consciousness
through a variety of mechanisms (such as stimulating the release of
opioids, producing rhythmic stimulation and the brain, and inducing
exhaustion and collapse; see Winkelman, 2010). The association of serotonin and the opioid system with alterations of consciousness, as well as
enhanced dance propensities, implicates their co-evolution involving
enhanced social bonding. Music was at the basis of this expanded coordination of the mimetic capacity and a core feature of our ancient ritual
capacities that increased the capacity for culture. Merker (2009) notes that
humans alone have ritual culture, one in which the arbitrary form of doing
things is obligatory for social participation. This arbitrariness is illustrated
in the forms of music and song. Music, however, is a human universal,
reecting innate capacities for music processing and perception and
capacities to affect emotions in ways that are transcultural.
Music is found at the core of communal ritual in small-scale societies,
where it is intrinsic to a broader range of expressive activities such as

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clapping, playing instruments, expressive gestures, and dancing that are

central aspects of human group ritual behavior that express and facilitate
afliative 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 reects adaptations that expanded mother
infant vocal interactional capacities involving an expression of the love
bond between mother and infant and a modulation of dynamics of emotional cooperation. The evolution of musicality was a way for mothers to
maintain a higher level of interaction with their dependent offspring.
These dynamics of exchange integrating body movements, facial dynamics, and emotional expressions involve the same behaviors found in afliative and submissive ritualizations of other primates and in the diverse
forms of human expressive culture that expand the motherinfant communicative dynamics to enhance bonding of larger social groups. Music
enhances adaptation through more effective devices for group coordination and formation of stronger emotional bonds among the members of a group.
Music and its effects on emotions provide an intrinsic reward for engaging in these activities that enhance social functionality. This includes
the ability of music to enhance hormone release, with effects on oxytocin
that enhance social bonds (see Panksepp & Trevarthen, 2009). These hormonal effects have both individual and collective effects, coordinating and
entraining the individual with the group. The intrinsic pulses of music and
their coordination effects on the group create intuitive linkages and coordination and a common sense of intentionality. The pulse that underlies
rhythm creates an inclusive sense of meaning that expands our consciousness and connectedness with others. Music enhanced social coordination
by expanding exchange of information across diverse modalities (behavior, facial and emotional expressions, vocalizations), illustrating a capacity
for the integration of consciousness and production of symbolism.
Musical or protomusical behavior has the potential to make use of several cognitive capacities at once, relying on the integration and control of
biological, psychological, social and physical systems; it gives the opportunity to practice and develop these integrated skills in a context of limited
risk. Cross and Morley (2009) emphasize the role of music in integrating
important cognitive skills . . . [and] stimulation of fundamentally important human interactive capacities (p. 77).
The evolution of the human singing and musical capacities was clearly
central to the evolution of the shamanic potentials and plays a

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

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. Musics effects reect an
information-processing capacity prior to language, a communication system rooted in primate vocalization systems and their social functions. Music
induces physiological effects through activity in the amygdala and hippocampus of the paleomammalian brain, activating emotional processing centers (see Crowe, 2004). The rhythmic properties of music entrain neural
oscillations that synchronize perception and action to the beat of the music,
unifying perception, cognition, and behavior in a primordial form of
psychointegration.
Freeman (1995, 2000a, 2000b) characterizes the last half million
years of human evolution as involving adaptations for enhanced social
communication and involving self-regulatory processes of the limbic system that are based on dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin
and vasopressin, basic mechanisms through which mammalian bonding
processes were extended to larger groups. Given that our knowledge of
the external world is limited to the representations produced within
our brains, this solipsism can only be overcome with information about
other minds. Freeman (1995) characterizes music and dancing as the
quintessential human technology for bridging the solipsistic gulf with
information signals from other brains. The basic biotechnology of information exchange and group formation involves rhythmic dancing,
marching, clapping, music, and chanting, an ancient socialization
mechanism for engaging our entire body into a group, a cooperative
community. Rhythmically repeated motions make the intentions and
behaviors of others predictable, with musical skills playing a central role
in humans intellectual evolution through expanding consciousness of
others. Consequently, this other consciousness must be understood
as central to the nature of altered consciousness and involving changes
in the experience of the self.

Ritual Induction Procedures: Engagement of Natural Drives

Shamanistic methods of altering consciousness involve activities
known for their ability to activate the sympathetic nervous system; when

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

of parasympathetic dominance. Shamans undergoing training and preparation for ceremonies typically fast, endure exposure to temperature
extremes and painful austerities, undergo sleep deprivation, experience
extensive auditory stimuli (drumming and chanting), and exercise (such
as prolonged dancing); they may also ingest psychoactive substances, particularly, psychedelics and tobacco. These processes inexorably lead to a
collapse into a modied dream/sleep state in which the shaman remains
conscious. This collapse into repose, a trophotropic (parasympathetic)
dominant condition, is accompanied by a slowing of the brain wave discharges into more synchronized patterns involving entrainment of the
frontal cortex by highly coherent slow-wave synchronized brain discharges
involving alpha and theta brain wave patterns (see Winkelman, Introduction in this volume; Winkelman, 2010, for further review). Underlying
principles involved in shamanic alteration of consciousness involve
directly engaging natural drives, generally restricting them by forcing one
to overcome or endure thirst and hunger, pain, cold or heat, sleeplessness,
and celibacy, often under unpleasant conditions (solitude, isolation).
Fasting

Restrictions on foods in general are typical preparations for shamanic

activities. Training of the neophyte typically involves dietary restrictions
for several weeks to a few months and may extend for as long as several
years. Fasting can affect serotonin synthesis, resulting in hallucinations, dissociation, paranoia, and megalomania (Fessler, 2002). Fasting induces in the
body a hypoglycemic state that can cause seizures and increases susceptibility to driving inuences on the EEG reecting effects on the pituitary and
adrenal glands, which stimulate the hypothalamus and hippocampal-septal
systems. Fessler proposed that severe dietary constriction results in an adaptive reduction of serotonin activity, which promotes increased risk-taking
and impulsivity. Food deprivation produces depersonalization experiences
as well [see Cardena, Volume 2] and can cause sleep disruption due to
reduced levels of melatonin precursors; these disruptions can produce the
visionary consciousness associated with shamanism.
Sexual Abstinence

Shamans are typically expected to be celibate before and after their ceremonies, a restriction that may be imposed for years during training.
These restrictions appear to have physiological bases associated with the
physiological dynamics of both sexual orgasm and ecstatic altered states

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

of consciousness (Davidson, 1980). Sexual activity requires a simultaneous increase in the activity of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic
nervous systems. When a peak of sexual excitation is achieved, the sympathetic system collapses, exhausted, and the parasympathetic state becomes
dominant. Shamanic practices induce similar patterns of excitation to collapse, a sympathetic activation followed by a parasympathetic dominant
state. Prior sexual activity could be expected to preclude as profound a
parasympathetic collapse. Consequently, sexual prohibitions can be seen
as functional in facilitating more powerful alterations of consciousness.
This is not, however the only dynamic of the relationship of sex to the
alteration of consciousness [see Maliszewski et al., Volume 2].
Extreme Exertion and Physical Stress

Extreme physical activity is an important way of inducing alterations of

consciousness. The extreme stimulation of the body by dancing can induce
the release of endogenous opiates because the central opioid systems are
activated by prolonged rhythmic activity and high-intensity exhaustive
anaerobic exercise that can overwhelm temperature-regulation mechanisms, stimulating the release of endogenous opioids (Appenzeller, 1987).
Dietrich and McDaniel (2004) integrated a range of research on how exercise stimulates the release of the endocannabinoids, the marijuana-like neurotransmitters found naturally in our brains. Exercise has a direct effect on
the serum concentrations of the endocannabinoids, likely contributing to
analgesia, sedation, and a sense of well-being. Stressful stimuli (burns,
extreme cold and heat, deliberate injury, and toxic substances) also contribute to extreme stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in a
parasympathetic dominant state and endorphin release (see Vaitl et al.
2005; Winkelman, 2010, for review). Social isolation, reduction of motor
behavior, and muscular relaxation lead to a parasympathetic dominant state
with increased cortical synchronization. Extensive, prolonged, and intense
sensory stimulation can lead to the same effects as sensory deprivation
through habituation and the complete blockage of perception of stimuli,
leading to a profound alteration of consciousness.

Dreams and Shamanic Altered Consciousness

Shamanic altered states inevitably incorporated dream processes by engaging in overnight rituals that rst prevent sleep by hours of dancing
drumming and singing; after exhaustion, the participants then collapse
into vivid dreamlike states. Ritual has the potential to produce an

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activation of lucid dreams because REM sleep is enhanced by high levels of

physical activity prior to sleep (Gackenbach & LaBerge 1988). Lucid
dreams engage an interaction between waking and dream consciousness
that can produce cognitive integration and therapeutic outcomes, reecting a greater awareness of information-processing capacities of the unconscious involving pre-egoic and prelinguistic levels of symbolization
(Laughlin, McManus, & dAquili, 1992). Hunt (1995) characterized
dream cognition as involving the presentational symbolic intelligence, a
form of analogic thought derived from a cross-modal fusion of visual
imagery, spatial information, and body expressions. The hippocampal
theta rhythm (3 to 6 cps brain waves) found during dreams is an indicator
of a special type of information-processing during which the information
from the primary sensory areas is integrated, processed, and transferred
to the neocortex (Winson, 1985). REM sleep is a basic mammalian
memory process for evaluating experience and forming strategies, reviewing experiences for their transfer from short-term to long-term memory
(Graham, 1990; Winson, 1985). Brereton (2000) characterized shamanic
use of dreaming as involving processes of risk-free construction and
examination of options or scenarios. Dreams allow for a replaying of crucial experiences and resolving them through exploring alternate ways of
addressing situations. Dreams also offer experiences of detachment from
the physical body, epitomized in the shamanic out-of-body experiences.

Soul Flight and the Body

A key aspect of the shamanic alteration of consciousness is reected 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 ight are paralleled
in a natural transformation of consciousness illustrated in near-death or
clinical death experiences (see Winkelman, 2010, for discussion). Laughlin, McManus, and dAquili (1992) illustrate how the experience of soul
ight involves a natural symbolization of the shamans transformative
experiences and a biologically based system of self-representation. The
body is a universal system of representation, a neurocognitive model that
humans use in organizing diverse forms of internal and external experiences. Hunt (1995) expanded on the out-of-body experience as a synesthesia
based on visual images of the body and the human capacity to take the
role of the othercommunicative interactions in which one monitors
messages from others to construct social perceptions regarding ones self.

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

The soul journey involves the capacity to take perspectives of others, manifested in seeing ones own body as it would appear from anothers perspective. The taking of the role of the other toward ones 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 ight is similar to a broader class of anomalous body
and self experiences that also exhibit central OBE features such as ying,
falling, oating, and spinning. OBEs reect three aspects of abnormal
self-representation: the self experience as lacking unity; the self as located
in a different place than the physical body; and the visual perspective of
seeing the world from a different perspective than the body (Metzinger,
2009; see also Blanke & Dieguez, Volume 2). The neural correlates of
OBE indicated by studies of clinical and normal populations (see Blanke
& Mohr, 2005; Blanke et al., 2005) implicate the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). The TPJ is adjacent to areas responsible for the integration of
somatosensory information, providing low-level vestibular processing
and mediation of interaction among the higher-level processes that underlie the production of a sense of the phenomenal self. Interference with this
integration or the transfer of vestibular information to other parts of the
brain can lead to altered senses of body ownership and disembodiment.
According to Blankes research, those disposed to OBE also had interference with interconnections between the TPJ and the prefrontal cortex
(PFC), a functional disconnection between parietal and frontal areas that
inhibit egocentric perspectives. While OBEs indicate a loss of connectivity
of the motor, somatic, and balance functions of the TPJ area with the executive and ego PFC, these experiences are always visual experiences, illustrating that self-connectivity with visual regions persists. The self-image of the
OBE is, however, not engaged with the actual visual eld but with an imagined visual eld that is also disconnected from actual body perception. The
loss of this integration of information regarding balance and motor experience underlies the ability of the self and experienced false body to travel
through space without the actual constraints of the physical body.
Shamanic soul ight may result from the deactivation of normal vestibular system functions from the extensive dancing and drumming
because excessive repetitive activities can overwhelm the ability of the vestibular system to manage input about movement. Functional areas of the
TPJ can be overloaded by the excessive stimulation, a habituation typical

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of over-stimulation, which leads to shutdown of a sensory system. Such

habituation allows body-processing and self-processing systems to operate
free of actual body input.
Metzinger (2009) noted that OBE phenomenological and functional
properties correspond to the concept of mind. The two self-models
present in OBE provide potentially adaptive features manifested in the
proto-concept of the mind. OBEs model a visual representation of ones
own body from a third-person perspective that is not the focus of experience nor of self-identity. Rather, a second self-representation modelthe
astral selfthat is removed from the body is the locus of the phenomenal
perceiving self and subjective experience, including proprioceptive and
spatial perceptions. It is this second self that provides an integrated representation of reality and has the attentional, experiential, kinesthetic qualities and the capacities of intentionality. This disembodied self has the
rst-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 reect transient functional modularization that allows the information-processing systems to differentially distribute functions to different self-modules. For instance, when physical trauma
cuts off somatosensory input, a separate sense of self can play the role of integrating higher cognitive functions such as attention, problem representation
and solutions, and agency and volitional processes. In the OBE condition,
intentional agent aspects of the person control higher cognitive functions independent of the limitations of the physical body.
Metzinger contends that the OBE has undoubtedly been at the basis of
humans postulation of spirits, souls, and other supernatural phenomena.
OBEs are a subjective paradigm for construction of cognized models of the
world that are fundamental to understanding the primordial nature of
altered consciousness. The force of the OBE invariably leads to dualist
perceptions of reality, seeing the material and mental aspectsbody and
soulas separate, and concluding that consciousness exists apart from
the physical body. These experience of ones self as a soul-like entity are
the basis of a neurophenomenological archetype and the reection of a
neurological potential that is at the core of human concerns with altered
consciousness even today. Soul ight experiences reect fundamental
characteristics of human consciousness involving a theoretical selfawareness and self-modeling that moves beyond the primitive bodily processes and transcends the present moment to both experience the past and
predict our future. Arzy, Molnar-Szakacs, and Blanke (2008) illustrated

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

that this capacity for mental time travel primarily evolved for anticipating
future events, reecting selection for mental processing of future predictions and decision-making.

Shamanic Consciousness and Brain Systems

The nature of the shamanic OBE suggests that the dynamics of altered
consciousness are related to levels of the brain involved in body representation. Shamanic ritual activities lead to a separation of body and selfperspectives and reect the ability of consciousness to operate apart from
the body-basis from which it arose. This illustrates functions of altered
consciousness involving an expansion of consciousness from the physiological bases from which it arose.
The nature of altered consciousness is closely related to activities of the
limbic brain [see Beauregard, Volume 2]. These responses are reected in
highly synchronized brain wave patterns, particularly in the theta range.
These brain wave discharges have the net effect of stimulating the processes of the lower brain systems and integrating them into the frontal cortex. It suggests that shamanic altered consciousness be understood in
terms of integrating the dynamics of the presymbolic mind into the
advanced cognitive capacities of the frontal cortex.
The triune brain model of MacLean (1990) provides a framework for
explicating the functional effects of shamanic alterations of consciousness.
A central feature involves the paleomammalian brain or limbic system, the
focus of the synchronized brain wave production. The structures of this
emotional brain play a vital role in subjective perception, using feelings
for guiding behavior and providing for an integrated sense of self. The
paleomammalian brain mediates patterns of social signaling that promote
a sense of community and provide for cooperationphysically, socially,
and mentallyin ways that enhance self-security, social relations, and
bonding and attachment. This reects fundamental aspects of altered consciousness, a connection with our emotions and relations with others.
Shamanic alterations of consciousness provide contexts in which the
intentions of the shaman and patient provide for a readjustment of these
vital personal and social dynamics.

Conclusions: Paradigms of Shamanism

The classic paradigms of shamanism emphasized a view of the practices and experiences as involving something delusory, even pathological.
The rationalist metaphysic sought to discount the practices, explicitly

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contrasting their irrationality with the rationality of science. The methodologies were etic, using the outsiders point of view, and generally
emetic, rejecting altogether the validity of the shamanic worldview. Consequently, the methodologies employed were descriptive and at best second hand, describing the experiences of the other, but without sharing
their experiences as a fundamental part of the research approach. The values assumed in this etic approach were those of materialist science,
rejecting the validity of the alternative view of the world exposed by shamanism. An exemplar of this approach can be found in Silvermans
(1967) article that characterized shamanism as a form of psychosis.
The anthropological engagement with shamanism gave rise to a diversity of new paradigms for understanding shamanism, the most important
of these being emic, attempting to convey the shamanic others world
view. Harners (1982) approach is explicitly emic in the sense that it
accepts the indigenous views of reality of spirits, viewing the indigenous
worldviews as a legitimate metaphysic. The methodologies are explicitly
experiential, emphasizing shamanic journeying and clairvoyance/seeing
as fundamental tools [see Luke, Volume 2]. The value system explicitly
rejects modern rationalism and science as inadequate to explain shamanism, instead preferring glosses of foreign concepts and the Western spiritual traditions as better frameworks for understanding shamanism. The
exemplars of this emic approach are epitomized in shamanic workshops
that provide the Westerner with the tools for beginning a journey into this
alternate reality.
My paradigmatic approach or disciplinary matrix to understanding
consciousness in general and shamanism in particular is neurophenomenological, based in an explicit effort to relate biological processes to phenomenological experience. Its metaphysic is idealist in the sense that it
recognizes that all experiences, including those of the physical world and
biological processes, are constructed, the product of the symbolic mind. It
accepts the extraordinary experiences of consciousness and shamanism as
symbolically real, withholding judgment regarding their ultimate ontological reality. The neurophenomenological approach requires plural methodologies, attempting to nd a ground to mediate the biological realities of
the brain and the phenomenological experiences of altered consciousness.
It expands the value orientations of materialist science in valuing the experiences of altered consciousness as primary data which an integrated science
of consciousness requires. The exemplars of this neurophenomenological
framework are epitomized in the biological modes of altered consciousness
that attempt to explain their phenomenological qualities and functional
characteristics in terms of the alteration of brain functions.

Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness

The concept of shamanism as a paradigm has cross-cultural support, as

well as substantial concurring neurophenomenological evidence, that
makes it a compelling universal framework for interpreting expressive culture (e.g., see Berman, 2008a, 2008b). The shamanic paradigm also provides a parsimonious framework for linking human religiosity with the
ritual dynamics prevalent as communication systems in other species
(Winkelman & Baker, 2008). These deep biological bases make the shamanic paradigm a compelling framework for the interpretations of altered
consciousness as well.

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CHAPTER 9

Altered Consciousness in Society

Charles Whitehead
Human beings are remarkably social creatures, and the minds of developing infants take shape in interactions with other people, notably the main
caretaker in the early months [see Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardena,
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 persons normal state
may be someone elses altered state. No account of altering consciousness
in society would be complete without rst discussing these enduring
changes in consciousness, which are addressed in Part 1 of this chapter.
Human societies also employ instrumental means of producing temporary shifts in consciousness, and these too vary cross-culturally, in part
because they are shifts from a culturally variable norm. These short-term
changes are discussed in Part 2, followed by their relationship to social
structure (Part 3) and social change (Part 4).
Culturally induced altered states in pre-industrial societies are commonly believed to be, and experienced as, spiritual in nature. Thus many
pre-industrial societies are polyphasic (Laughlin, McManus, & dAquili,
1992), that is, they value altered states (ASC) as sacred and socially constructive, whereas the post-industrial West is monophasic, that is, it
exclusively valorizes a waking state that is assumed to be predominantly
rational. Culturally instituted ASC may be just as common in monophasic societies, but they are either not perceived as orthodox (for example,
speaking in tongues is commonplace in charismatic but not Anglican
churches) or are secularized (such as states induced by the social consumption of alcohol or the clinical use of hypnosis) or criminalized (as
in the recreational use of drugs that are less traditional thanin the
Westalcohol, caffeine, or tobacco). In Part 5, in the light of everything
reviewed to that point, I discuss what we might infer about the nature of
human spirituality.

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Long-Term Alterations in Consciousness

Consciousnessthe way we perceive and experience ourselves and the
worldvaries from one culture to another, often in quite bizarre ways.
What seems bizarre to you, of course, depends on which culture you grew
up in. If a Dorze warrior tells you that all the local leopards are devout
Christians (Sperber, 1975, p. 3), you may well conclude that this person
is deluded. But he will think the same of you if you tell him that there is
no God and everything in the universe is meaningless and dead. Or, if a
Temiar hunter tells you that the forest is full of spirits, and all people, animals, plants, mountains, and rivers have two souls (Jennings, 1995), you
might think this is distinctly odd. But try telling him that there is no such
thing as a soul or spirit, and that these are delusions created by chemicals
in the brainthen 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
selsh 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 sacricing their lives to save complete strangers
from whom they expect nothing in return. Biologists might be wrong, of
course; incidents have been reported that suggest generalized altruism in
dolphins and elephants (Bates et al., 2008), which might be explained
by the evolution of empathy in social mammals. However, large-scale cooperation is uniquely human, and it may be no coincidence that all human
societies have formal systems of inated 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 selsh biological impulses in socially
desirable ways. For this reason, human culture might be regarded as antibiological.
Human systems of kinship and exchange have been associated with
two quite distinct effects on consciousness. Classicatory kinship, for
example, divides societies into lineage clans (Levi-Strauss, 1949/1969).
The clan you belong to is regarded as your kin: Every member in your

Altered Consciousness in Society

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 afnes (inlaws) and you and your siblings will marry someone from an afnal clan.
Radcliffe-Brown (1931, p. 97), studying kinship in Australia, found that
classicatory siblings have almost identical personalities. Mauss (1925/
1967) notes that, in clan-based societies, individuals are identied with
groups, groups themselves are regarded as persons, the gifts they
exchange are perceived as continuous with the giver, and clan chiefs are
conated 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 rst person
singular pronoun throughout: referring to his ancestors not as they but
as I and to mythic culture heroes such as Maui not as he but as I.
The economic systems of clan-based societies take the form of gift
exchange (Mauss, 1925/1967). Egalitarian societies (those without formal
leaders or social hierarchy) generally exchange like for like. If I give you a
pig with a patch over one eye, then, after a suitably respectful delay, you
must give me a pig with a patch over one eye. This must be a different
pig; to give my own pig back to me would be a deeply insulting rejection
of my gift. More complex and hierarchical societies have competitive
exchange systems in which gifts are supposedly given in a spirit of generosity and respect, but the covert intent is self-promotion and the humiliation, degradation, or ruin of your rivals. The monster child (Mauss,
1925/1967) of gift exchange is the potlatch system of northwest coastal
America. A chief would invite his rivals to a feast, at which honored
guests would be forced to witness an orgy of wealth destruction. This
would oblige them, at some future date, to reciprocate with an even more
reckless destruction of their own wealth. Failure to full ones obligations
in this relentless system would lead to loss of face, dishonor, and, ultimately, social exclusion.
Just as classicatory kinship involves inated 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 dened in terms of multiple exchange relationships, as the hub of a wheel is dened by its spokes. Each relationship
casts the person in a different role with a different set of attributes and attitudes. Because gifts are regarded as continuous with the giver, persons are
further conceived as partible (Strathern, 1988).
Moreover, the useless trade goods exchanged in competitive systems
are regarded as persons in their own right (Mauss, 1925/1967). They

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have personal names, are believed to have human-like minds and emotions, and are held to be capable of articulate speech. The belief that
non-human agents and objects have humanlike minds and motives is
known as animism. The fact that gifts are regarded as persons suggests
some linkage between animism and gift exchange.
Animism commonly incorporates another belief known as perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). That is, nonhuman agents not only have
humanlike personalities but also perceive themselves and the world from
a human perspective. For example, a jaguar lapping the blood of its prey
sees itself as a human drinking manioc beer; a vulture eating rotten meat
sees maggots as grilled sh. And, just as animals see themselves as human,
they see humans as animals, and such perceptions depend on relations of
carnivory. Jaguars and spirits eat humans, so they perceive us as whitelipped peccaries (animals that humans eat). Conversely, white-lipped peccaries see humans as jaguars or spirits. Further, the way animals, spirits,
and humans see each other is not thought of as a matter of appearance versus reality: All these conicting perceptions are realities. All beings live in
a multitude of parallel universes, playing a different role in each, determined by the entity whose perspective creates that particular universe.
Signicantly, other humans, including afnes, are seen as animal, and
it seems likely that perspectivism is interlinked with the perspectival relationships of classicatory kinship (Viveiros de Castro, 1999): My kin will
see me as human while my afnes will see me as animal; and since
sex is equated with eating, these perceptions likewise depend on relations of carnivory. Incest equates with cannibalism and both are
regarded as abhorrent.
Paradoxically, perspectival worldviews frequently include the belief
that animals are actually humans wearing animal suits. This belief persists
in hunting communities that regularly butcher meat, so it would seem that
animal costume transforms the human all the way through to the bones.
When a human dons an animal mask or costume in ritual, this is not
thought to conceal a human identity, but to create an animal one. A perennial fear in people with such beliefs is of meeting an animal in human
form. If the animal greets the person, and the personmistaking the animal for a humanresponds, then the person will be instantly transformed
into an animal of that species (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Shape-shifting is
not regarded as something miraculous but as an accident waiting to happen. For people with such beliefs, there is no essential body. Selfhood is
perceived as profoundly unstable and readily transformed by a simple
change of appearance or attitude.

Altered Consciousness in Society

In sum, I have so far suggested that the emergence of large-scale cooperation in humans required formal systems of expanded kinship and
reciprocity and that such systems in clan-based societies are commonly
associated with inated, fragmented, and mutable selfhood as well as culturally obfuscated views of reality. This raises the question of how these
alterations in perception, belief, and experience are accomplished.
It would be a mistake to suppose that cultural beliefs and attitudes are
transmitted from one generation to the next entirely or even mainly by word
of mouth. The whole way of life of a people conditions the sentiments and perceptions of its members. The anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1972/1977), for
example, has shown that merely to walk through a Kabuli house is an object
lesson in gender relations. The mans room, where he greets and entertains visitors, is raised above the level of the rest of the house. His chair is beside the
replace, with his gun, signifying his importance, leaning nearby. The womans 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
mans space and a womans. If a woman trespasses in a mans 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 inuence 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 concealedeven 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 articial 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 esh by tiny knife cuts), and frank mutilation. Many of these
alterations of the body are accomplished in or for ritual, and ritual is a
major institutional means of altering consciousness. Rituals are sacred performances, commonly involving song, dance, pantomime, and the

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manipulation of sacred objects or images. Wearing animal costumes and

pretending to be animals occurs in rites on every inhabited continent,
and this is likely to be an ancient feature of animistic ritual. People generally believe in the potency of their rituals and, apparently, believe they can
be truly transformed into animals. Such wholly-believed-in make-believe
may well explain the origin of animism and perspectivism, and it implicates not only role-play (the ability to pantomime) but suggestibility. The
capacity to pretend and to conform to group beliefs would appear to be
prerequisites for human culture and essential if people are to believe in
patent ctions of the kind noted above.
European folktales, including many of the bedtime stories we read to
our children, often feature talking animals and animal/human transformations. These tales reect the perspectival worldview that once prevailed in
pre-Christian Europe (Napier, 1985). Indeed, the Western scientic
worldview seems to have evolved through a series of reactions against perspectivism (Whitehead, 2010). Examples include the proscription of
graven images in the Ten Commandments, the emphasis on the spiritual
essentialism of the individual in Islam and Christianity, and the physicalist
notion of a universe that can be entirely understood without reference to
consciousness.
Although the scientic 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 authoritysuch as individualism and the valuation of work over playand even generates new ones of its own: notably physicalism, mentioned above. So many of the most basic scientic
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 statessuch as dissociation (partial or complete isolation of
one mental process from another)may have a social origin or serve
social functions (Cardena, Terhune, Loof, & Buratti, 2009).

Altered Consciousness in Society

Another phenomenon that humans share with many higher animals,

beside the daily sleepwake cycle, is the basic restactivity cycle. In
humans, this is called the daydream cycle, because we know that we
are daydreaming during these periods of relaxation. Human daydreaming
tends to recur at approximately 90-minute intervals that appear to be continuous with our REM sleep cycle, REM being the sleep phase when
dreaming is most continuous (Brown, 1991, p. 95). In humans, the daydream cycle has become adapted to serve a social function. It coincides
with the so-called chat cycle that occurs during free-owing human conversation. At 90-minute intervals, human conversation becomes particularly absorbing, spontaneous, and enjoyable. The same phenomenon
occurs in other forms of free-owing human co-action and is characterized by physiological rapport uniting the group. That is, physiological
indicessuch as heart rate, respiratory rate, pupil diameter, lip pallor,
skin conductivity, and galvanic muscle responsetend to converge
among participants in the group activity (Brown, 1991, pp. 46, 220).
Rapport is an essential precondition for hypnotic induction. The daydream state itself resembles a hypnotic condition, when humans are most
suggestible [see Kokoszka & Wallace, Volume 2].
These cyclical changes in consciousness are part of our biological heritage. Human cultures, however, have institutional methods of altering
consciousness that exploit this heritage. Durkheimian anthropologists
believe that all the antibiological features of human culture were initially
generated in ritual. Certainly all known human societies have rituals,
sacred or otherwise, and rituals are uniquely suited to exploiting human
capacities of dissociation and suggestibility.
Following an extensive study of rituals in India, Arnold van Gennep
(1909/1960) concluded that all rituals are rites of passage, because they
accompany or accomplish social transitions. Life crisis rites mark changes
of state or station in the lives of individuals: birth, initiation, marriage,
election to ofce, illness, and death. Calendrical rites mark the passage of
society as a whole from one season to the next. Van Gennep further
showed that rituals typically involve three phases: a separation phase in
which people are formally separated from the everyday world of mundane
activity; a transitional phase during which the intended transformation is
accomplished; and an incorporation phase, or return to the mundane
world transformed.
The transitional phase takes place in a kind of limbo, a betwixt-andbetween world that van Gennep called liminal (from Latin limen, meaning margin). In the liminal phase of life crisis rites, the normative social
order is usually suspended. During initiation, for example, all signs of

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status or rank are removed. The novitiates may be stripped naked, painted
with mud or black pigment, and declared to be invisible. In calendrical
rites, on the other hand, there is commonly a Saturnalian inversion of
the normative order, with the humble temporarily elevated to dominate
the powerful. Or again, if cannibalism is regarded as abhorrent in the
everyday world, it becomes a sacrament during ritualwhether real cannibalism, as among the Avatip in New Guinea (Harrison, 1993), or
make-believe cannibalism, as in Christian communion. The same can
apply to incest. Among the Eskimos, the whole of the winter was regarded
as ritual time. Married partners were separated, and sexual intercourse
took place between incestuous couples (Rasmusson, 1976).
Victor Turner (1969) coined the term anti-structure to describe the
transitional topsy-turveydom of the liminal phase of ritual. However, he
pointed out that in secular Western societies, where ritual participation
is no longer mandated by awesome spiritual potencies, the antistructural functions of religion have been taken over by the subjunctive
what if ? of leisure activities: entertainment, recreation, and the cultural
arts (Turner, 1982). Without such anti-structural episodes, Turner
believed, postindustrial societies could not continue to function. The
theory of anti-structure holds that human life alternates between the structural role play of everyday life and the anti-structural role play of ritual or
recreational activity. Furthermore, conicts created by the inevitable contradictions within social structure cause friction, disputes, and social
dramas, increasing entropy within the system. Anti-structural phases are
necessary to maintain, repair, and reinvigorate human social orders. Also,
when shifting circumstances require adaptive change in the normative system, anti-structural processes are again required; they are the source of
new culture.
Transformation and revitalization may be the principal functions of
ASC, which frequently show a striking parallel to van Genneps three ritual phases. Sleep, for example, is bracketed by hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences. Several authors (Bateson, 1955; Huizinga, 1955;
Jennings, 1995; Schechner, 1977; Turner, 1982; Winnicott, 1974) have
noted that childhood play, in line with van Genneps 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
spacean extended period of irresponsibility in which children,
shielded from the demands of adult society and survival, are free to
explore and expand their own developmental possibilities and the affordances of the society and culture into which they have been born.

Altered Consciousness in Society

All social play requires a shift in perception. For example, a play ght
should not be confused with a real ght. Make-believe play in particular
is dependent on dissociation, since two views of reality, one perceived
and the other invented, must not be confused (Leslie, 1987). A child pretending that stones are sweets should not swallow the stones, mistaking
them for sweets. Without dissociative ability, pretend play could hardly
have evolved as it has. Perhaps the most signal achievement of human
beings has been the discovery of institutional means of inducing collective
anti-structural states, exploiting our innate powers of make-believe, dissociation, and suggestibility in the service of large-scale cooperation [see
Cardena & Alvarado, this volume].

Spiritual Experience and Social Structure

Spiritual experiencesoften referred to as religious experiences or
REsare 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]. Scientic
investigation of REs began in the late 19th century, most famously by
William James (1902/1985), who coined the term noetic to describe their
revelatory quality, feeling states that are simultaneously knowledge
states. Rudolf Otto (1917/1926) referred to their numinous character
inspiring feelings of supernatural awe and wonder.
More systematic and statistical studies were pioneered by Alister Hardy
(1979) and his successors. Many people found the results surprising. Even
in the secular West, between a third and a half of the population has had
at least one spiritual experience (Wulff, 2000). Furthermore, agnostics
and atheists are as likely to have them as the devoutly religious, and they
are slightly more common in better-educated or relatively well-adjusted
individuals. Apparently, REs cannot be attributed to psychological compensation in the distressed or socially deprived (the opium of the people
hypothesis).
REs can have dramatic effects on those who experience thempeople
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
rarelyfrom faith to atheism (Hardy, 1979). A common consequence is
that the person becomes more tolerant of and caring toward others, more
spontaneous and energetic, less fearful of the future, and far less

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

power, status, or fame. Although spiritual experiences are culturally variable, there also appear to be cross-cultural parallels, notably the encounter
with sentient otherness, the sense of something bigger than the self, and
common if not universal features such as transcending time or space.
The prevalence and quality of REs correlate inversely with social complexity. Whereas many Westerners have one or more REs during their
lives, in more egalitarian societies almost everyone may have comparable
experiences, and may do so once or twice a week. Some aboriginal peoples
hear spirit voices every day and claim to receive useful knowledge and
advice from them (Krippner, 1999).
Erika Bourguignon (1973) has compared the use of institutionalized
ASC in 488 societies, that is, most of the societies for which we have any
kind of ethnographic information at all. In contrast to the monophasic
West, 90% of the societies in Bourguignons sample had one or more
forms of institutionalized ASC, usually in ritual or religious contexts. A
major category involves the experience of leaving the body and journeying
to other places, either in this world or in some spiritual otherworld. For
want of a better term, I will call such experiences shamanic trance [see
Winkelman, this volume].
A shamanic trance is a voluntary and conscious state, clearly remembered afterward, in which the experient encounters supernatural entities
or explores the natural or supernatural world, often with a view to achieving specic goals such as healing the sick, nding 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 persons typical personality.
Bourguignon found that shamanic states occur most frequently in the
most egalitarian and least stratied societies, whereas possession states
are most frequent in complex and highly stratied societies. Complex
societies frequently have a central religion linked to the central apparatus
of social control, along with peripheral cults that are much more autonomous. In Brazil, for example, the central religion is Roman Catholicism,
and peripheral cults include Umbanda and the Ayahuasca Church. Both
types of religion can have possession practices. Central possession trance
tends to be highly exclusive (only the legitimate priesthood can do it)
and conservative (dedicated to maintaining the status quo). Peripheral cults
tend to be more or less subversive since they provide an alternative source
of spiritual authority that cannot be directly controlled by any kind of centralized government.

Altered Consciousness in Society

Where possession may occur independently of any ritual context, it

commonly serves to coerce support from more dominant others and has
been described as a weapon of the weak (Lewis, 1989). For example, if
a Sri Lankan wife is abused by her all-powerful husband, she can greatly
improve her lot by becoming possessed by an unruly demon. Since all
her actions when possessed are deemed to be beyond her control, she
can embarrass her husband by behaving like a prostitute, shouting
obscenities, and offering to copulate with all comers. The offending husband is then forced to hire exorcists and host a very expensive public exorcism, in which the wifes 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
societiessimple foragers and agriculturaliststhey are much more
democratic. Almost anyone is deemed capable of experiencing them and
many seek them, use them to heal others, and so on (Jennings, 1995; Katz,
1982). With increasing degrees of gender or age-grade inequality, altered
states becomes more the exclusive domain of one gender and/or specialized practitioners [see Winkelman, this volume].
The inverse relationship between the incidence and richness of spiritual experience and the complexity and inequity of social structure is consistent with Turners theory of anti-structure. Conceivably, we may be
having spiritual experiences all the time, but some kind of imposed structure excludes this from everyday consciousness.

Social Change, Social Movements, and Charismatic Leadership

Victor Turner (1982) observed that, just as art imitates life, so life imitates art. He inferred that the structural role play of the social drama and
the anti-structural role play of the stage or ritual drama feed on and into
each other in an endless cycle, and this is the engine of conict 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 childrens and
other games. Sutton-Smith inferred that disorder, for which he borrowed
Turners term anti-structure, is the melting pot out of which all new culture emerges [see St John, this volume].
Psychological theories of creativity also implicate disorderly, nonrational, or playful processes: divergent thought, thinking outside the box,
conceptual blending, humor, daydreaming, REM sleep, and so on. Otto

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Rank (1932/1989, p. 368) described creativity as an assumptions breaking process, and Michael Apter (2008) advanced a psychological parallel
to Turners 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, conates categorical oppositions and follows multiple nonrational paths, leading to serendipitous discoveries and novel ideas and
concepts that could never have been predicted from a habitual set of xed
assumptions. Great ideas are never products of logic, but come out of the
blue when not thinking purposefully at all, famous examples being
Archimedes in his bath, Kekule in his reverie, and Newton seeing an apple
fall. Dreaming and daydreaming may be the most valuable work a scientist
ever does.
Ongoing social change is not necessarily noticed as such by group members, who may think they are being faithful to a primordial template
ordained in the mythic past by their revered ancestors (cf. Morphy, 1989).
However, quite dramatic changes do occur, and these too always depend
on ASC. Among shamanic peoples, all new ideasnew songs, dances,
cures, technologies, and customsare given to an individual in visions,
dream visitations, or ritual trance states (Biesele, 1993; Jennings, 1995,
pp. 139, 176178; Roseman, 1991, pp. 5279; 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 inuenza epidemic, crop failure, and
worsening relations with Malays, who disapproved of the Temiars nonIslamic lifestyle, a highly respected healer received in a dream a new song
and dance known as Chinchem, along with an entire system of reforms,
including avoidance of eating pork and covering womens breasts in public
(Noone, 1939). The result was a considerable improvement in relations and
trading opportunities with their Malay neighbors.
Colonialism commonly involves severe tension between immigrant
and indigenous populations. One recurring response to a colonial presence is the appearance of a cargo cult, most commonly in Melanesia and
Micronesia, but also in South America and elsewhere (Burridge, 1960;
Lawrence, 1964; Worsley, 1970). Typically, a charismatic prophet
receives a revelatory vision or message from the sacred world that informs
him that the cargos of wonderful goods delivered to the colonists are
actually gifts from the ancestors, intended for their indigenous descendents or for all people to share equally but cunningly appropriated by the
superior magic and greed of the foreigners. The aim of the cult is to get

Altered Consciousness in Society

the ancestors to realize what is going on and redirect the cargo to the
proper beneciaries. 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 Pacic increased greatly during and after
World War II, when vast quantities of military goods and supplies passed
through the islands. In the earliest cargo cults, the faithful would build
wooden jetties where the ancestral ships could dock, but recent cults built
airstrips, control towers, wooden headphones and radios with bamboo
aerials, and decoy aeroplanes made out of timber, palm thatch, and
bark, bound with vines (Burridge, 1960). They mimicked the landing signals used by ground staff and at night lit signal res and torches to mark
out the landing strip, all to attract the expected ood of riches from their
bountiful ancestors.
Quite dramatic alterations of consciousness are common in cargo cults.
Participants whirl, shake, dance, chant, foam at the mouth, or couple promiscuously in a frenzied attempt to attract the desired cargo (Burridge,
1960). The Vailala Madness, one of the earliest well-documented cargo
cults, gained its name from the behavior of its followers, which included
speaking in tongues, ts of shaking, and similar phenomena (Worsley,
1970).
Although the beliefs of cargo cultists are clearly based on a cultural
misperception, their motivations are human universals: demands for recognition, dignity, equality, and justice. People who have a traditional
ideology of giving and sharing cannot understand why White people,
who have so much when they have so little, show no impulse to redress
this inequity in a manner perceived as normal and human. Burridge
(1960), following his own eldwork 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 lled 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 ght and must
forego the self-mutilation associated with mourning the dead. Wilson
was convinced that if all Indians observed Gods teachings and performed
the 5-day Ghost Dance at the prescribed intervals, there would be no

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disease or old age, and the dead would be reunited with the living. The
entire Earth would be renewed, swept clean, and lled with food, happiness, and love.
As the Ghost Dance spread widely across the American West, some
interpretations acquired a more militant character, notably with the introduction of the Ghost Shirts. These garments, often decorated with birds,
turtles, stars, and other spiritually important motifs, were believed to render the wearer bulletproof. Despite the peaceful nature of Jack Wilsons
original message, the crazy dancing spread alarm among U.S. authorities, which culminated in the massacre of more than 200 Lakota Sioux
at Wounded Knee in 1890 (Brown, 1970).
An earlier nativistic movement among the Iroquois, led by the Seneca
prophet Handsome Lake, inuenced Anthony Wallaces (1956) theory of
revitalization movements, which he dened as a deliberate, organized,
conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying
culture (p. 265). Wallace, based on cross-cultural studies, theorized that
these politico-religious movements are responses to severe stress caused
by colonial, racial, or class oppression. They are usually founded by a spiritually inspired prophet or charismatic leader who predicts an imminent
transformation of the world order, elimination of oppression, restoration
of traditional values, and freedom from want. In Wallaces view, all the
higher religions, including Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, originated as revitalization movements.
Egalitarian societies, by denition, lack leaders and resist any attempt
by one person to dominate others (Erdel & Whiten, 1994; Katz, 1982;
Jennings, 1995), although respected healersthose perceived as having
outstanding abilities to deal with spiritual agenciesmight be thought of
as charismatic and can initiate social change, as in the Temiar case
reported by Noone (1939). Max Weber (1978, p. 242) dened charisma,
which he regarded as a chaotic phenomenon devoid of purpose or meaning, as a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he
is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural,
superhuman or at least specically exceptional powers or qualities. Emile
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 Durkheims make charisma
a two-way relationship; the audience bestows the role onto the leader, and
the leader acts the part accordingly. The power that the charismatic individual appears to exert is the result of collective effervescence, a state
of transcendent excitement that occurs whenever people are put into
closer and more active relations with one another (Durkheim, 1912/

Altered Consciousness in Society

1965, pp. 240241). The experience of the sacred, in Durkheims view, is

the sense of transcendent liberation resulting from surrendering the egoistic biological self to a larger collective reality.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that there are exceptional individuals who are more likely to become charismatic leaders than others.
Genealogical research (Horrobin, 1998) shows that pronounced negative
and positive traits occur repeatedly in specic human lineages. Individuals
with schizophrenia and manic depression are regularly found in the same
family descent groups as individuals with outstanding talents, including
mathematical, scientic, and artistic ability, intense religious faith, and
charismatic leadership. Charismatic leaders are of course always regarded
by their followers as exceptional, but what is so regarded is culturally variable. It can be the case that the leader has exceptional energy, determination, courage, or fanaticism, or it could be virtually anything that seems
strange such as epilepsy, behavior outside local norms, or, especially
where children are regarded as prophets, pure simplicity and innocence
(Wilson, 1975, p. 29).
The literature on charisma lacks any consensus. There are so many
divergent and conicting views that one begins to wonder whether charisma refers to anything real or, perhaps, to a multiplicity of disparate phenomena. Is it appropriate to apply the same word to Buddha, Christ, or
Jack Wilson, and also to Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, or Osama bin
Laden? One difference between messengers of love and messengers of hate
is that the former do not attempt to win converts (Ravindra, 2004). They
preach only to those who have ears to hear, those who are actively seeking greater spiritual development and guidance. The more malignant
forms of charisma occur in persons who are distinctly manipulative and
seek to exert power over others. Whatever charisma may ultimately prove
to be, Durkheims collective effervescence, Webers meaningless phenomenon, and Marxs opium of the people, clearly implicate antistructural processes with unpredictable consequences and potential for
creativity and change.

Final Thoughts
In this chapter, I have reviewed some of the evidence that the plasticity
of the human mind, its capacity for both enduring and transient alterations of consciousness, is a core prerequisite for human social and cultural
functioning. While discussing long-term changes in consciousness, however, I did not speculate about the kind of consciousness we might have

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if not changed by culture. The fact that so many ASC are experienced as
numinous, noetic, and spiritual is particularly intriguing. Did human religiousness evolve genetically, is it a product of culture, or is there perhaps a
third alternative? Genealogical evidence (Horrobin, 1998) implicates some
genetic inuence on religiousness, while research in epileptic patients suggests that religious ideation may be hard wired in the temporal lobes
(Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998, 175177, 179188, 285n286n).
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
(Baruss, 2008). For them, spirit has a much more profound ontological
status. Such divergent views, however, may not be mutually incompatible.
When observing Ndembu initiation rites, Victor Turner (1969) noted
that, after all signs of personal distinction had been removed, and following a series of painful and humbling ordeals, the novitiates entered a state
of intimate unity which he called communitas, in contrast to the normative
state of everyday living which he called societas. The communitas state suggested to him a solution to an apparent paradox. Why is it, he asked, that
people claim to discover truth in the world of artice and pretence created by ritual (1982, p. 114) or by theatre and art (pp. 115116)? The
answer, he suggested, is that the actor dons a mask to expose the false
mask of societas. Anti-structural genres cut through the hypocrisy of culture. The structured world of everyday life is itself articial, but the
truth experienced by artists, mystics, and others is some kind of bedrock
reality. This cannot be a cultural product. Turner (1982, pp. 113114)
cites Burridge (1979) on the protoindividual that can become apparent
in ritual liminality, and, in his earlier work (1969, p. 128), claims that,
in the productions of prophets and artists, we may catch glimpses of that
unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalised and xed in structure. Ritually induced communitas is a spontaneous phenomenon, not something scripted into the traditional formalities
of ritual. The suspension of societas enables people to experience something for themselves, not something they have acquired from their ancestors by cultural transmission. It is a discovery rather than an invention.
Elsewhere, however, he implies that it is not genetically determined
either. Turner (1969, p. 128) avers that communitas, even though it surely
involves a release of instinctual energies, cannot be reduced to anything

Altered Consciousness in Society

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

that Turner examined, he found that what is universally valued in spontaneous communitas is honesty, openness, humility, equality, mutual forgiveness, freedom from pretentions, indifference to wealth, sexual
restraint, and goodwill to all humankind. Such absolute selessness, as I
explained in section 1, is difcult 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 sufcient to account for our ability to
put ourselves in others shoes (cf. Mead, 1934/1974). However, human
cruelty also involves empathy, though not sympathy, and it is a far cry
from enjoying a novel to communitas or the oceanic experience of mysticism. Turner notes the universalizing tendency of communitas and the
cross-cultural appeal of spiritual teachings such as goodwill to all humankind. He expressly equates communitas with the sense of union, with
nature, humankind, God, the cosmos, and so forth, which occurs in mysticism and the ow experiences of athletes, gamblers, and others
when totally absorbed and at one with the activity they are engaged in
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1974).
Perhaps wisely, Turner avoids saying anything that might rouse the
book-burning passions of the Senior Editor of Nature (cf. Anonymous
[actually Maddox], 1981). But what Turner says implicates a third force
affecting human behavior, something that is neither cultural nor exclusively genetic, but that transcends both. He also makes one particularly
important point about communitas: it captures the winged moment as it
ies (Turner, 1969, p. 132). Communitas is about the here and now, in
contrast to societas, which is trapped in fossilized pasts, sedimented routines, and anxieties for the future. Yet communitas exists in contrast rather
than in opposition to societas (1982, pp. 5051). The two belong together
in a gure-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. Reectivity alienates us from ourselves by making us concerned about ourselves.
It enables, even compels, us to live in our context-independent memories
and plans for tomorrows that may never come. So we have lost the
immediacy of our own lived realities. As D. H. Lawrence (1936) put it,

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we humans paint pictures of ourselves, then live according to the picture

instead of from our spontaneous selves. This is living from the outside
in and truly the reversal of life.
Living in the spontaneous here and now is the central message of the
Sermon on the Mount and all the great spiritual traditions that we know.
Freedom from the self-obsessed ego turns people into fountains of living
waters. Ravi Ravindra (2004), comparing the gospel of John with Indian
mysticism, notes how Christ compares spirit to the wind: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell
whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the
Spirit (John 3:8). Turner notes that monastic institutionsand even
Marxismthat attempt to make of communitas a permanent state always
fail, because institutions cannot persist without structure. Professor Ravindra (2005), in a keynote conference paper, commented: Formal religions
have very little to do with spirituality.
Human culture, for all the wrong reasons, including collective ctions
and perceptual distortions, gave us the means to become free from our
self-conscious selves, enabling us to discover our own spirituality. One
might think that the suspension of cultural structure, and with it release
from the fetters of self-consciousness, ought to return us to some primordial monkey-like condition, truly spontaneous perhaps, but dominated
by the tyranny of selsh genes. But it does not. Rather, it accords a
glimpse of what we might become. The idea that a state valuing pure selessness could be arrived at by gradualistic steps seems logically incoherent to
me, and even more so that this could be accomplished by selsh-gene
mechanisms alone. Even the most trenchant physicalist must surely
acknowledge at least that spirituality is an emergent phenomenon, irreducible to psychopharmacology.

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CHAPTER 10

Spiritual Technologies and

Altering Consciousness in
Contemporary
Counterculture*
Graham St John
Introduction
With a focus on virtual reality, techno-rave culture, and psychedelic
trance, this chapter explores practices of consciousness alteration within
contemporary countercultures. By contemporary, I mean the period from
the 1960s to the present, with the chapter addressing the continuing legacy of earlier quests for consciousness expansion. Central to the discussion is the development and application of spiritual technologies (cyber,
digital, and chemical) and the appeal of traditional cultures in the lifestyles
of those sometimes referred to as modern primitives. I also pay attention
to specic individuals, techno-tribes, cultural formations and events heir
to and at the intersection of these developments, with special observations
drawn from the Boom FestivalPortugals carnival of consciousness. Furthermore, the chapter considers the prevalence of DiY consciousness echoed
in practices of modern shamanism. As the contiguity between altering
consciousness and altering culture is explored, the chapter considers the
psychological and political dimensions of that which has been variously
held as consciousness among spokespersons and participants within
visionary-, arts-, and techno-cultures.

*Portions of this chapter are adapted from Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival by
Graham St John. Published in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 1(1),
3564, 2009.

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Psychedelic Experience and Consciousness

It is necessary to begin with a discussion of the 1960s countercultural
milieu, whose quest for and techniques of experience are a continuing legacy found in the conditions of ecstatic embodiment and visionary mindstates charted in this chapter. The 1960s saw the emergence of new and
subversive forms of art, leisure, sexuality, and sociality. While hippies
pursued a radical immanence rooted most immediately in the Beats and
more epically in Romantic and Transcendentalist traditions, the children
of technique were altering consciousness on a scale previously unknown.
Psychotechnologies such as meditation and yoga, but also acid rock,
chemical compounds, and psychoactive plants, enabled the new prometheans to lay claim to the possibility of the selfs encounter with the Other
World, a gnosis we might identify as the epiphanous eld 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 condence in the evolution of consciousness that had been expressed since the late 19th century, especially in
the work of the Theosophists, and articulated in the quest for cosmic consciousness, the term coined by Richard Maurice Bucke in 1901 (see Lachman, 2003). For those seekers of transcendence and conscientious
objectors championing heterodox poetic, spiritual, and ecological aesthetics, the term freak was an acceptable designation for the evolutionary
(or indeed revolutionary) mutation from a condition of separation. Experimenting upon ones mind was critical to this break. To be a freak thus
presupposes the personal journey of transformation integral to the new
spiritual pathways fermenting in this period. The spiritual transit typically
implies movement from a condition of alienation (from inner god/ess,
nature, the cosmos, consciousness) implicit to monotheism, possessive
materialism, patriarchy, and patriotism, and a corresponding movement
toward a resolution: realization, utopia, awareness, peace, unity. Importantly, in this trajectory the self possesses a mind not disconnected from
body and spirit, the holistic departure from which was embodied in the
teachings of the human potential movement (Kripal, 2007) and the integral movement. 1 For practitioners of this progressive and holistic
1

Among whom gure Sri Aurobindo (whose work provided the inspiration for the founding of the California Institute of Integral Studies), George Burr Leonard, who coined the
term human potential movement, Michael Murphy, cofounder of the Esalen Institute in
Big Sur and Integral Transformative Practice (with Burr Leonard), and Ken Wilber,
who articulated integral theory and founded the Integral Institute.

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

movement, what Henri Bergson (1944 [1907]) called the life-force and
what has generally been regarded as universal consciousness could be
accessed and reafrmed through chosen activities in the phenomenal
world like Transcendental Meditation, dance, and travel to places of spiritual signicance. Radical immanence was practiced and cosmic consciousness achieved in alternative subcultural lifestyle trends exemplied 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 Nevadas Black Rock Desert, who Gilmore (2010, p. 96) indicates are performing a spirituality that is fundamentally experiential.
One of the chief ingredients in this development was LSD-25, the compound discovered in the late 1930s by Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann.
With Hofmann as its unwitting midwife, this potent mind-altering substance (acid) was crucial to the birth of the psychedelic (mindmanifesting) movement and its aesthetic legacy (psychedelia), whose
artistic expressions had, by the 1970s, permeated popular Western culture. LSD is a curious story, for it is, in its spectacular amplication 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 LSDs power as a tool for mind control, coveting
its potential utility to alter consciousness (to produce an exploitable alteration of personality) to secure state interests and funded a nationwide
network of psychiatrists and other operatives for whom LSD was a psychotomimetic (psychosis-mimicking) drug. For hippies, LSD was
hailed as a chief means to enhance an already altered worldview that had
percolated among those for whom the imperialist United States of
America was the primary cause of discontent and target of disavowal.
That is, psychedelics were enabling those already seeking alternative pathways to turn on to higher states of consciousness of the kind conveyed in
the writings of Aldous Huxley. In The Doors of Perception (1954) (usually
published with Heaven and Hell: 1956), and Island (1962), Huxley
endorsed the view that mescaline and other psychedelics were integral to
mystical experience in the modern era. Railing against a culture of conformity and acquiescence in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, newly
circulating psychoactives were considered the shortest and most effective
route to cosmic consciousness yet: an atomic blast of consciousness for
an atomic age. Following on from the nitrous oxide-fuelled insights
of William James in The Varieties of the Religious Experience (1902) and
Bergsons understanding of the mind as a reducing valve articulated in
his Creative Evolution (1944 [1907]), Huxley divined that psychedelics

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enabled users to turn off the perceptual screens and lters that typically blind one to the Other World accessed by saints, seers, mystics,
and prophets throughout history [see Geels, this volume; Beauregard,
Volume 2]. He thus acknowledged the psychophysiological basis of these
universal visionary mind states that were no less real and could be
achieved without fasting or a lifetime of meditational training.
Although Huxley saw the necessity for consciousness evolution with
the assistance of LSD, as Jay Stevens illustrates in Storming Heaven
(1989), the artistic, economic, and political elite was at odds with the likes
of visionary poet Allen Ginsberg and maverick psychologist Timothy
Leary, who used the mass media to promote LSD and facilitate consciousness change. For Leary, who would develop a model (the Eighth Circuit
Model of Consciousness) in which psychedelics were integral to the evolution of consciousness (Leary, 1977), cosmic consciousness was not to be
restricted to elites. Together with ex-Harvard colleagues Richard Alpert
(aka Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner, Leary produced an instruction
manual for consciousness expansion modeled on the Tibetan Book of the
Dead and inspired by a sojourn to India. As The Psychedelic Experience
(Leary, Metzner, & Alpert, 1964) conveyed, LSD was congured 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 Cuckoos Nest, Ken Kesey, whose Merry Pranksters orchestrated the
mid-1960s west coast Acid Tests. Enabling collective states of entrancement, the Acid Tests were a kind of freak rite of passage, the outcome
of which held a degree of uncertaintynot 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 amplied 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 Franciscos HaightAshbury district in the mid-1960s, this momentous event, in which more
than 20,000 people participated, was held in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. It was the nadir of the Summer of Love, and editor of the
San Francisco Oracle Allen Cohen promoted the event as a meeting of the
minds, namely the Berkeley radicals and the Haight-Ashbury hippies
(Perry, 1984, p. 122)in other words, the diverse membership of an

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

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; prots and empire
will lie drying on deserted beaches; violence will be submerged and transmuted in rhythm and dance (Allen Cohen in Perry, 1984, p. 122), with
youth sledgehammering at their shells until there was nothing left but
the ubiquitous dust, over the next year, LSD burnouts and heroin and
methamphetamine addiction took their place alongside rapes and murders in the Haight. Although the universal consciousness revolution
would thus remain illusory, by the late 1970s, psychedelia had become
integral to the sensory indulgences and leisured life of Americansan
outcome that Leary took as his own legacy (Lee & Shlain, 1985, p. 292).
Among those drawn to Golden Gate Park that day was a young man
named Terence McKenna. As an anarchist metaphysician and ethnonaturalist, McKenna would come to hold enthusiasm for the role of plantderived psychoactives in human evolution [see Winkelman, Volume 1,
Mishor, McKenna, & Callaway, Volume 2]. Formative was an expedition
to La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazonas in March 1971, where
Terence, together with his brother Dennis McKenna (who would become
a world-renowned ethnobotanist), had gone in search of ayahuasca-using
shamans and stumbled across Stropharia cubensis (psychoactive mushrooms; McKenna, 1993). In his so-called stoned ape theory of religion,
McKenna (1992) speculated that tryptamines, principally hallucinogenic
mushrooms, had performed a critical role in the evolution of consciousness and language, a view mooted by amateur ethnomycologist Robert
Gordon Wasson and others (see Forte, 1997; Wasson, Kramrisch, Ruck, &
Ott, 1992). Furthermore, in a co-authored work (McKenna & McKenna,
1993), the McKennas explored the ontological grounds for a theory of
tryptamine-led revitalization later echoed in Jonathon Otts Entheogenic
Reformation (Ott, 1995). Through the use of psychoactive plants, in particular psilocin-containing mushrooms, DMT, and the tryptaminecontaining entheogens of the Amazon, western humanity, so long disconnected from the vegetal Goddess, could revive the Paleolithic world of
natural magic and community (McKenna, 1991). As a core component
to his prophetic insights, DMT2 was regarded as a signicant agent in the
coming eschaton, the theory of which was formulated in the novelty math
2

DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is a naturally occurring tryptamine found in many plants

worldwide and is created in small amounts by the human body during metabolism. DMTcontaining plants are commonly used in several South American shamanic practices, and it
is usually one of the main active constituents of the drink ayahuasca.

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of Timewave Zero (McKenna & McKenna, 1993). Although the East had
been a popular destination among post-1960s spiritual seekers in the
wake of Leary, the McKennas expedition illustrated how the lore, practice, artifacts, and psychotropes of Amerindian cultures have inuenced
those desiring departure from core Western values and practice. The popularity of the McKennas ideas also demonstrated the appeal of the shaman
as anarchist. An advocate of what Des Tramacchi (2006) has called selfshamanism, with his mesmerizing Irish brogue, wit, and charm, Terence
McKenna would become a draw-card within the world psychedelic community from the 1980s through to his early death in 2000. In one inspired
mid-1990s presentation, he inveighed that our world is endangered by
the absence of good ideas . . . of consciousness, and that the objective
of the psychedelic experience was to participate in the redemption of
the human spirit, charging neoshamanic experimentalists to bring back
a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new
paradigm.

Cyberculture and Virtual Reality

The popularization of altered states via the circulation of LSD in the
1960s is coincident with the emergence of the personal computer, and
in particular the experience of mass altered consciousness facilitated by
networked computers. This cyber-spatial consciousness is what had been
dubbed virtual reality, the term science ction author William Gibson
applied to a disembodied networked experience that would leave ction
ten years after the publication of his Neuromancer (1984) as the Internet
achieved widespread commercialization. Alongside LSD, the personal
computer was imagined to enable a psychedelic experience by libertarian
champions of altered states, principally Leary, who endorsed a cyberdelic thesis in which LSD and computers are integral to consciousness
evolution (Leary, Horowitz & Marshall, 1994). In his premillennial cheerleading, Leary championed a New Breed of creative youth embracing
psychedelics, cyberculture, and electronic music. At the high tide of extropianism, Douglas Rushkoff divulged (1994, p. 19) that the 1990s cyberian counterculture was armed with new technologies, familiar with
cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness . . . to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully, his portrait of
Cyberia a celebration of the promethean spirit integral to countercultures throughout the ages (Davis, 1998; Goffman, 2004). The PC revolutions indebtedness to the utopian ideals of those for whom psychedelics

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

had red revelation is discussed by John Markoff (2005), and Fred Turner
(2006) argues that digital utopianism is rooted in the psychedelic
counterculture via Stewart Brands Whole Earth network and its retooling
of technologies from LSD to computers in the quest for consciousness,
wholeness, and liberation. Although computer-mediated utopianism
would take form in multiplayer role-playing games that found an exemplar in Second Life, perhaps the crowning achievement of DiY (do-ityourself) techno-utopianism is the Burning Man Festival that, in a massive
transmutation of the utopian subjunctivity (something that is imagined or
at least has not happened yet) native to virtual reality, or perhaps more
accurately the metaverse (the term used by Neal Stephenson in his
1992 science ction 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 Elluls interpretation in The Technological Society
(1964) of an essentially Manichean technology or mistrusted the dehumanizing and centralizing technocratic bureaucracy railed against by
Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), as Turner
conveys, with countercultural appropriation of cybernetic and ecological
discourse, the mythology of the personal and communally empowering
computer evolved into a romantic/transcendentalist embrace of machines
of loving grace. Indeed, the repurposing of cyber, chemical, and communications technologies was intended to inaugurate a New Consciousness
post-1960s. Lifestyles characterized as better living through circuitry
constituted a simultaneous phenomenological detournement of life under
capital and a quest for an alternate world. Thus, here, altering consciousness would be implicit to altering social, cultural, and political structures.
But although Web 2.0 applications and technologies such as web
applications, social networking sites, wikis, and blogs have facilitated
interactive information sharing as well as user-centered design and
collaboration, neoliberal globalization and state power have given rise
to a digital divide and Internet surveillance, circumstances undermining
the digital utopia. Criticism has also come from virtual reality pioneer
Jaren Lanier. Earlier forecasting the revolutionary impact of the World
Wide Web, Lanier (2010) grew to criticize what he called the digital
Maoism associated with the likes of Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter
and other virtual communities that are elevating the wisdom of
mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of
individuals.

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Techno-Rave and DiY Consciousness

Since the 1960s, the consciousness whose expansion has been the
purpose of spiritual technologies has been a DiY consciousness, since it is
almost always enabled through the repurposing and remixing of existing
cosmologies, beliefs, artifacts, and tools. The do-it-yourself Self is entirely
consistent with developments in which consumers are encouraged to
achieve their potential via a selective pastiche of symbols and praxis. From
the I-Ching to meditation and yoga and from the didjeridu to the djembe
and medicine drum, techniques and instruments enabling altered mind
states and entrancement were circulating among Westerners walking the
aisles of the supermarket of consciousness. But although sampling from
the art and rituals of world religions and shamanic practice facilitated
access to hidden knowledge and enabled repertoires of authentic selfhood for disenchanted moderns, by the late 1980s an effusive sociality
was at the centre of what in sections of the media was being hailed as the
Second Summer of Love. I speak of the empathetic yet ephemeral sociality
concentrated in the dance music phenomenon known as rave. While the
1980s might have been peak oil for the New Age industry, a period
when therapeutic self-management workshops, salons, and seminars
began employing teleologies of the self not incommensurate with corporate management-speak, in rave technologies were being harnessed, ret,
and reapplied to orchestrate experiences of the sacred that were indelibly
social. A unique crossroads of sound, vision, cybernetics, pharmacology,
and embodiment in dance inaugurated, as many contemporaneous utopians claimed, a new consciousness revolution, or rave-olution (see St
John, 2009a).
Several important developments collided at this crossroads: new technologies of perception such as electronic synthesizers and computerbased samplers; the technique of the remix in music re/production and
performance (Miller, 2008); consciousness alterants, principally ecstasy
(MDMA), which came into mass circulation and ostensibly fostered spirituality, personal development, and life change (Takahashi, 2004, p. 151;
see also Saunders & Doblin, 1996). New communications technologies,
formerly the instant messaging service and the mobile phone and subsequently the Internet, enabled subterranean communications concerning
production, performance, and a lifestyle that remained relatively covert
and independent. As this compendium of techniques and prosthetics effectively enabled transient autonomous zones, from inner-city warehouse
parties to massive teknivals emerging in Europe in the early 1990s,
they were conrmation of the circulating ideas of radical libertarian Hakim

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

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), sacrice and transgression (Gauthier, 2005), communitas and the
vibe (St John, 2008, 2011a; Tramacchi, 2000), ritualization (Gerard,
2004; Sylvan, 2005), and millenarianism and revitalization movements
(Olaveson, 2004; St John, 2004).
Importantly, EDMCs contextualize the condition of ecstatic entrancement, a shifting (or nonsteady) state of altered consciousness proliferating
in global dance cultures. Ecstatic entrancement does not simply refer to the
state of ecstasyassociated with the Greek ekstasis, which means to stand
outside of oneself, including ones gendered identity (see Hemment,
1996)but an entranced state, which implies the relinquishment of individual will and autonomy to an external power, higher energy, or extraordinary life force [see Ustinova, this volume]. The history of EDM scenes
illustrates commerce between these tendencies that fuel new sociosensual spaces, cultures, and dance movements. Although there is a paucity of sustained efforts to understand such states, Hillegonda Rietveld
(2004, p. 53) postulates transit to a cyborg-like subjectivity in postindustrial techno and house scenes in Detroit and London, which is the
product of a sacricial repetitive-beat ritual offering a temporary-yetrelived homeland for the alienated. Applying the phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty, for James Landau (2004, p. 113), the ecstatic condition
of the unbound raving body is recognized as a desubjectied cognitive
state that can best be understood as a corporeal style of being, i.e. a nonreective awareness autonomous in its freedom from ideology, language
and culture.
The collective alteration of consciousness among adolescent populations accessing a veritable pharmacopeia (e.g., LSD, ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine, GHB, 2CB, cocaine, mushrooms) has been much
maligned, eliciting challenges from cultural critics who railed against the
emergence of club scenes full of dead souls, zombie-eyed and prematurely haggard; in such contexts, instead of togetherness, sullen moats

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of personal space reappear; smiley faces give way to sour expression and
participants become connoisseurs of poisons, mix n matching toxins to
approximate the old high (Reynolds, 1997, pp. 8687). 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 Americas Vulnerability to Ecstasy.
In the history of rave, the raising or expanding of consciousness is as
important as its relinquishment in trance. Through the 1990s and the following decade, techno-rave culture offered upgrades on the techniques of
the human potential movement whose holistic practices had become consistent with utopian, ascensionist, and evolutionary fantasies implicated in
the cybernetic revolution. As a form of body transcendence, mind releasing, and self-awakening alongside meditation and yoga, certain forms
of raving appeared to be integral to an ongoing consciousness revolution,
a praxis in the repertoire of techniques of self-realization. The crowning
achievements in this development are what have been known as consciousness clubs or intentional parties, exemplied by Fraser Clarks
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 tting 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 prots to charities specically addressing peace, relief efforts, environment, and world youth.

Trance, Psytrance, and Neotrance

Though it has grown to accommodate diverse music styles, Earthdance
is rooted in psychedelic trance (or psytrance). Derived from parties held
on the beaches of the former Portuguese province of Goa, India, in the late
1960s and early 1970s, and incubated within Goa trance scenes developing in Goa and around the world from the mid-1990s, psytrance has
proliferated globally (St John, 2010a). Demonstrating inheritance from

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

the ecstatic and conscious pursuits of the 1960s, infused with the independent remixological practice endogenous to electronic music production and performance, harnessing the communication capabilities of the
Internet, and evolving a multimedia psychedelic arts scene, psytrance is
an EDMC whose larger international festivals are among the most culturally diverse music and dance events globally. From the 1960s, Goa
became an experimental outpost for middle-class dropouts seeking experience through transcendent states of subjectivity characterized across the
decades by disciplinary practice, ecstatic pleasure, and visionary states. A
place where charas (handmade hashish) remained legal until the mid1970s, Goa became a laboratory of what Davis (2004) identies as spiritual hedonism: an experience at the crossroads of the erotic/immanent
and cognitive/transcendent. With freaks undertaking, as Anthony
DAndrea (2007) points out, the simultaneous horizontal (geo-spatial)
and vertical (spiritual-psychedelic) journey from home/rational states,
Goa was populated by self-exiled Westerners for whom travel to the
Orient facilitated escape from the cage of Occidental rationality, enabling
a mystical Orientation eventually packaged as trance tourism. Early Full
Moon beach parties were spearheaded by California expatriate DJ Goa
Gil, who became a sadhu (ascetic holy person) and advocated recreating ancient tribal ritual for the twenty rst century. In his critique
of Goa trance, Arun Saldanha (2007) argues that White freaks have been
able to experience tribal ritual to the exclusion of brown-skinned natives.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the experimental traveler-enclave fermented
a distinct Goa trance sound and sensibility that would be transported
around the world. Goa trance labels, albums, and events emerging in the
mid-1990s would promote and package the trance experience as a transcendent journey adopting Oriental imagery and iconography to assist
the journey. With the Goa aesthetic transportable, enthusiasts on the dance
oor could consume the Goa experience, be exposed to the mystique, and
access the metaphysical lore without ever having set foot in India.
Over the next decade, as the genre exploded into various subgenres,
scenes, and aesthetics, psytrance made an impact across western Europe,
Israel, North America, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and elsewhere, gaining popularity more recently in Russia, Brazil, and Mexico.
In this period, psytrance would become fertile ground for the appropriation of symbols and praxis of Amerindian cultures, especially regarding consciousness alteration via the use of native herbs and their
chemical analogues. From the United States to Germany and Australia
and indeed among Brazilians, Mexicans, and Chileans of Portuguese
and Spanish decent, countercultural participants have long found

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Amerindians to embody an originary power, a spiritual purity, a remedy

for their alienated selves, circumstances challenged within academia
where dubious claims to indigeneity (Kehoe, 1990) and fakelore (Niman
1997, pp. 131148) are conated with neocolonial practice (see Johnson,
1995; Root, 1996).
Psytrance is not above reproach, for native cultures have been romanticized by artists and enthusiasts who sculpt fantasies using sound and
images sampled from popular cultural sources in music and at festivals
where generic natives have been the source to which initiates journey to
obtain wisdom to remedy their modern afictions. But while cultures with
great variation may be homogenized in sonic ctions and consumer fantasies
standardizing peoples according to primitivist specications, appropriations
should not be subject to blanket dismissal, because: (1) native millenarian
discourses have been adopted and repurposed to the ends of Western countercultural movements seeking resolution to the crises of modernity (e.g.,
existential, ecological, and otherwise); (2) native plants and their analogues
are known to initiate profound shifts in consciousness (Strassman, 2001;
Strassman et al., 2008; and other entries on entheogenic spirituality such
as Oroc, 2009), and; (3) native actors have become involved in manufacturing, selling, spending, and buying their own products.
In relation to this last point, today ayahuasqueros (ayahuasca shamans)
and other curanderos, vegetalistas, and perfumeros promote their services to
Westerners who undertake journeys to, for example, the Peruvian Amazon
(Razam, 2009). The practices of native inhabitants of the Central and South
Americas have generated appeal among dissidents (Burroughs & Ginsberg,
1963), many of whom, following T. McKennas lead, and also the (dubious)
works of Carlos Castaneda, went in search of what has more recently been
identied 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 diviners sage, Salvia divinorum has a long and continuing tradition of use
by indigenous Mazatec in Oaxaca, Mexico, where is it used by shamans to facilitate visionary states of consciousness during curing or divination sessions and is also used to treat ailments.

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

New World entheogen use (Tramacchi, 2006, p. 32). Within psytrance,

ayahuasca shamanism (Metzner, 1999) gained in popularity in advance of
its ostensible inuence on Hollywood, notably in the lm Avatar (see Davis,
2009). And as the popularity of DMT accelerated over the last decade, the
hyperspatial effect of its ingestion would have a considerable bearing on
psytrance music and culture, an impact that is clearly traceable to the work
of McKenna, who remains the most sampled individual in music productions. With McKenna acting as posthumous guide to the psychosomatic
and hyperdimensional frisson of DMT-space, psytrance and the wider
visionary arts community have become fertile ground for neoshamanic
experimentation.
Psychoactive plants and compounds amplify the liminal qualities
inherent to psytrance music, their popularity indicating that selftranscendence is a chief motivation for enthusiasts and event management
and is given expression across personal, social, and cultural vectors. And
by virtue of the intense occultic sociality of the experience, habitue s
become involved in states of radical immanence that have long been associated with ecstatic dance cults (Baldini, 2010). Furthermore, the entire
assemblage resounds with an expectancy of the kind animated by the recognition of mounting crisis (or crises) and that inspires the engineering of
projects, organizations, and initiatives motivated to make transit into an
alternative future, such as the cult of expectancy surrounding the
2012 movement (St John, 2011b). The psychedelic festival performs a
crucial role in these transitions. From overnight parties to all-week festivals, often marking seasonal transitions or celebrating celestial events,
these gatherings are the context for what I call neotrance, which indexes
the complexity of altered personal, social, and political states contextualized by psychedelic festivals. These are events enabling participants from
diverse national, cultural, and stylistic backgrounds to give expression to
their difference while at the same time potentiating the experience of singularity. In the West, the expression and dissolution of difference is a circumstance traditionally conditioned by the festival of Carnival. In
psytrance, the carnivalesque is apparent in dance festivals where the term
tribe is adopted to connote a particular aesthetic, practice, technique, or
language by which individuals or groups distinguish themselves from
others, and/or designate the dissolution of such differences (St John,
2009b).
We can observe the performance and dissolution of self on one of the
planets largest outdoor dance oors at Portugals biennial Boom Festival.
Initiated in 1997, the premiere event in global psytrance is held next to
lake Idanha-a-Nova in the mountainous Beira Baixa province. Known as

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the Dance Temple, Booms main dance oor is a stage for the performance
of a freak persona. Accommodating the creative recombination of aesthetics, undisciplined embodiment, and psychosomatic states, Boom is a
freak theatre, a staging ground for what Victor Turner had called the subjunctive mood (Turner, 1984, p. 21), an experimental state or atmosphere where occupants (wearing outts with theriomorphic [animallike], anime, superhero, mythical, and extraterrestrial themes, adopting
stylized glyphs printed on clothing, badges, and personalized patches,
and through innovative dance moves) indulge in alternate personas [see
Whitehead, this volume]. Participants are illuminated under UV lights,
caught in lasers, distorted by hypnagogic projections as they commit to
the acrobatics of re staff, glow-poi twirling, and club juggling. And in
dreadlocked and shaven-hair aesthetics, multiple piercings, dermal
anchors, tattoos, and other body modications 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 modications, and self-abandonment, Boom orchestrates the individual participants connection to a subterranean carnivalesque body.
The psychedelic festival enables new modes of identication
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 gures 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
chiey expressed in the context of Goa (or cosmic) trance, the inner
journey is facilitated by the sound apocalypse of self-discovery as analogized in the encounter with extraterrestrial aliens (St John, 2011c). Hosted
within the subgenre of dark trance (or darkpsy), monsters, especially the
living-dead zombie poached from horror cinema, burlesque the unpredictably re/animated condition of the trance dance oor (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
modications, hairstyles, adornments, and inscriptions, psytrance

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

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

and popular cultural sources.
The psychedelic festival, then, permits its habitues the freedom to join
ones ame to the conagration and to hold self-promotions on and off the
dance oor. Affording this commotion of singularity and freakiness, Boom
participants may experience fusion with or autonomy from others in
extraordinary altered states of consciousness. Event management, in collaboration with DJs, producers, sound engineers, and visual and decor
artists, optimize space, time, art, and other resources to realize this
dynamic of spectacular self(less)ness, which lies at the root of what I have
been calling neotrance. This concept, then, derives from the suspicion that
traditional conceptions of trance, particularly possession trance and
especially the analogy with what Emma Cohen (2008) calls executive
possession, are ill-suited to recognise the experiential complexity of
dance festal behavior and in particular the experience of trance endemic
to the psychedelic festival, its music, and its dance. Although the psychophysiological impact of percussive and rhythmic music (but see Rouget,
1985) may hold across traditional and contemporary trance performance
(Sylvan, 2002; Takahashi, 2005; Till, 2009), and although DJs (and scholars) invoke loose folk theories of divine guidance, conventional understandings of spirit possession tend to offer overstated, unfair, and
misleading frameworks for understanding trance dance cultures associated with contemporary popular music [see Fachner, this volume].
Loose contrasts make for an easy dismissal of EDM cultures as comparatively meaningless. Commenting on raves, Georgina Gore (1997, pp.
137138) 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 zombication of modern life, a disappearance from meaning, the zone entered by participants perhaps as pathological as that
ascribed to the world of gamblers and casinos.
Illustrating the results of an ethnographic approach to raves that would
deliver us closer to the trance in question, Melanie Takahashi (2005) seeks
to understand the alternative states of consciousness endogenous to these
events. She argues that through DJ techniques, optimized audio-visual
production, performance, and participant expectations at raves, technological advancements may compensate for the lack of coherent cultural
signiers vis-a` -vis the sophisticated scripted process of initiation
observed in ceremonial possession (Takahashi 2005, p. 253). Ravers
remain horses, only now they are ridden by the spirit of the optimized

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audio-visual assemblage channeled by the shaman DJ. Through these

techniques and sound-art strategies, which Morgan Gerard (2004) calls
liminal techniques, by comparison to other popular music forms/techniques, DJs are arguably better able to control the means of perception
(Takahashi, 2005, p. 254). But while it makes sense to hold inquiry about
the capabilities of newer and adapted technologies and chemicals to animate and energize participants and indeed communities of sound in
EDMC events including psytrance, persistent analogical modeling with
spirit possession becomes somewhat burdensome in itself.
With the objective of revealing the sacred terrain of raving, Francois
Gauthier harbors no such intellectual burden. He argues that rave is not
a possession trance, unless perhaps possession by nothing. Ravers do
not feel something (or indeed nothing) is overcoming them. On the contrary, it seems this overwhelming feeling originates from within, only they
cannot say how or where (Gauthier, 2004, p. 78). Further, the experience
is unhinged from a dened and institutionalizedand 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 dened 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 diffusea
pure gratuitous act, or a simple gesture of revolt. This argument, I suggest, may be more accurate for rave as opposed to psytrance, since the latter is more typically a repository for those practicing and experimenting
with alternative spiritual dispositions who are open to traverse human/spirit world boundaries outside mainstream religious practice and faith (principally that associated with Christianity). This is why organizers, such as
those who orchestrated Moroccos Rhythms of Peace festival, sought to
associate their events, in that instance, with master practitioners of Moroccan Gnawa, or why Su dancers were billed for the opening ceremony at
Soulclipse total solar eclipse festival in Turkey in March 2006, or why ceremonial dance is performed to didjeridus performed by Aboriginal custodians in the opening ceremony at Australias 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 oor participants oscillate
between the performative edge, where participants enact fantastic and
erotic personas often drawn from composite inuences, and an experience
approximate to dispossession, where trancers nd release from a troubled
and dispiriting lifeworld.

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

Furthermore, infused with the ecstatic and utilitarian dimensions of

the counterculture identied by Frank Musgrove as the dialectics of utopia (1974, p. 16), the psytrance festival accommodates diverse commitments in the wake of the 1960s consciousness explosion. Although
dance oors are the context for dispossession from routine consciousness,
the dance oor and wider festival grounds stage the performance of novel
modes of consciousness associated with new social, cultural, and political
initiatives. Because the festival is a vehicle for the ecstatic (selftranscendent), performative (self-expressive), as well as reexive (conscious
alternative) proclivities of the trance movement (St John, 2010b), it requires
heuristics deviating from traditional (e.g., Winkelman, 1986) and Western
(e.g. Taves, 1999) theories of trance. Although at one extreme, the party is
a vehicle for getting trashed and wasted, at the other it accommodates
an atmosphere of hope and expectancy. Where these events express desires
for modes of sociality and states of consciousness perceived to have been
lost or forgotten in the separation and isolation of the present, they mount
a response to inherited sociocultural frameworks that render these events
more than simply parties. Thus, while the popular tribal-trance designation may denote primitivist fantasies of the Other (Luckman, 2003), the
terms tribe and trance are more than often adopted as generic signiers for
alternative community. The apparent role of dance events in raising consciousness and ecological awareness, facilitating intercultural harmony,
delivering utopian dreams and global peace surface frequently in promotions. For instance, movement evangelists proclaim that psytrance holds
the potential to ultimately change the course of human consciousness,
and organizations like North Carolinas Touch Samadhi and San Franciscos
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 festivalit is what organizers
regard as a visionary arts and lifestyle festival, or an innovation in sustainable entertainment. Boom hosts two arenas that are representative of
the ecstatic and reexive dimensions of trance. Operating over 7 days, featuring more than 100 DJs and fusion bands from many different nations
performing a range of electronic trance genres and catering to approximately 5,000 to 6,000 people, the Dance Temple hosts a sophisticated
audio-visual assemblage designed for enhancing expressive/transcendent
states. At the same time, promoted as a dynamic conuence of people,
traditions, energy and information, 4 Booms Liminal Village is an
4

From the rst edition of the in-Village publication, the liminal zine Pathways.

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Altering Consciousness

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

the Liminal Village featured several zones including a visionary art gallery and a solar-powered bamboo temple, the Omniplex, the central
structure in an alternative educational zone, its interactive curriculum
spotlighting emergent mythologies, integrative philosophies, and techniques for sustainable and holistic living.5 With workshops, presentations, and metacine cinema zone, the complex was devoted to the
transmission of ecological principles (as demonstrated by permaculture
workshops), and a range of other ultimate concerns, including selfhealing modalities, psychedelic consciousness, and shamanism. That year,
the Village hosted well-known Shipibo curandero Guillermo Arevalo, who
leads ayahuasca retreats at his Peruvian botanical sanctuary, Espritu de
Anaconda. Offering a dedication to McKenna and the self-shamanizing
theme, the Liminal Village represents a conscious effort to adopt a language, architecture, and vision of transformation using anthropological
discourse forged in the study of ritual.6 Consciously emulating the demarcated and sacred zones of passage rites, facilitating the transmission of
alternative cultural sacra, the Village is juxtaposed to the Temple, the
vehicle for ecstatic states of dispossession.
In his observations on the idea of the festival, 2008 Liminal Village presenter Erik Davis (2008, p. 54) described the festival as an incubator of
novelty . . . A petri dish of possibility where the future forms of community
and consciousness are explored. This is a good description of Boom and
an appropriate juncture at which to conclude this chapter, for it suggests
that festivals can themselves be spiritual technologies. As a context within
which reexive practice, ecstatic experience, and expressive arts have coexisted and coevolved, and as a premiere site for the exploration of altered
states of mind, body, and culture in the contemporary, Boom is a carnival
at the crossroads of consciousness exploration. Heir to the quest for experience, Boom bridges ritual and party in an effort to export its culture of
consciousness from the crossroads into the everyday. In this achievement,
it lies downstream from the countercultural conuence in San Francisco
in 1967 and is a repository for the paradoxical culture of consciousness
that evolved through the developments discussed in this chapter: psychedelia, virtual reality, and the rave and psytrance movements.

Transmissions from the Edge: Retrieved February 9, 2008, from http://boomfestival.org/.

The universal experience of ritual liminality, the potent threshold rst articulated by
Arnold Van Gennep in his study of rites of passage (1960) and then developed by Victor
Turner (1982).
6

Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness

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PART III

The Humanities

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CHAPTER 11

Altered Consciousness
in Philosophy
Jennifer M. Windt
Altered consciousness (AC) or altered states of consciousness (ASC) have
been discussed throughout the history of philosophy and in different
philosophical subdisciplines. This chapter is an introduction to some of
the major philosophical problems raised by AC. My discussion of these
problems is selective rather than exhaustive, both in terms of the types of
alterations discussed and the questions asked, with a focus on Western
philosophy and specically epistemology, philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, and the history of ideas. My aim is mainly descriptive,
explaining the various philosophical problems related to AC and the solutions proposed in the literature, illustrating their strengths and weaknesses, and pointing out their interconnections as well as directions for
future research. I will also illustrate my own position on these matters.
Because the concept of ASC has already been discussed in this volume
[see Cardena, this volume], I do not develop my own denition here. The
examples discussed in this chapter range from those typically regarded as
ASC such as dreams, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), mystical experiences, and meditative states, to illusions and hallucinations, which according
to some researchers should not be regarded as ASC (Revonsuo, Kallio, &
Sikka, 2009). I include these examples in my discussion because their
comparison with standard wakefulness is philosophically informative,
especially in the philosophical discussion on perception (see section 2).
Finally, pathological ASC are often similar to spontaneous or experimentally induced ASC in important respects. Therefore, my discussion of
ASC includes both pathological and nonpathological cases.

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Epistemology: Does Altered Consciousness Present a Threat to Knowledge?

ASC has given rise to two sorts of epistemological problems. The rst is
whether they are a source of knowledge, for instance, by providing insights
that are not accessible during standard states of wakefulness (section 4). The
second is whether ASC present a threat to knowledge and support
skepticism about the external world and certain types of self-knowledge.
The best-known version of the second problem is dream skepticism as
formulated by Rene Descartes in the Meditations. Aiming to establish a secure
foundation of knowledge based on rational enquiry (Williams, 1978), Descartes begins by critically examining all of his opinions to determine whether
their truth can be doubted. Considering familiar cases of sensory illusions,
he realizes that they are not sufcient to justify the more far-reaching form
of doubt he has in mind, because there remain enough other cases in which
it is manifestly impossible to doubt the evidence presented by sensory perception (Descartes, 1996, I.4). An example of such a best-case scenario of
sensory perception (Stroud, 1984), which apparently leaves no room for
doubt, is his experience of sitting by the re in his dressing gown and holding a piece of paper in his hands (Decartes, 1996, I.5). Unless Descartes took
himself to be madan assumption that would contradict the very project of
purely rational enquiry (Frankfurt, 1970)such best-case scenarios of sensory perception seem immune to the deceptive threat posed by illusions. At
this point Descartes turns his attention to dreams:
Though this be true, I must nevertheless here consider that I am a man, and
that, consequently, I am in the habit of sleeping, and representing to myself
in dreams those same things, or even sometimes others less probable, which
the insane think are presented to them in their waking moments. How often
have I dreamt that I was in these familiar circumstances, that I was dressed,
and occupied this place by the re, when I was lying undressed in bed? At
the present moment, however, I certainly look upon this paper with eyes wide
awake; the head which I now move is not asleep; I extend this hand consciously and with express purpose, and I perceive it; the occurrences in sleep
are not so distinct as all this. But I cannot forget that, at other times I have
been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those
cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state
of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished;
and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.
(Descartes, 1996, I.5)

If even ones realistic experience of sitting by the re could be a dream,

then we can never rule out the possibility that we are dreaming at any

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

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 nd a very marked
difference between the two states. (Descartes 1996, VI.24).

Many of Descartess 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, 19751999).
To Descartess 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, 19751999).

This points to a deeper problem for Cartesian dream skepticism, namely

that cognition itself may be corrupted in the dream state. Descartes second
strategy for resolving the dream problem in the Fifth and Sixth Meditations
can be summed up by saying that although attempts at rational thought are
typically lacking in dreams, they are nonetheless reliable when they are based
on clear and distinct ideas (see also Grundmann, 2002). But although, in
truth, I should be dreaming, the rule still holds that all which is clearly presented to my intellect is indisputably true (Descartes, 1996, V.15).1

Descartess 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, 19751999) contradicts this point, as this would mean that
rational thought is not, after all, recognizable in the dream state.

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Early dream research supported the view that dreams are typically
single-minded and lack attempts at rational thought (Rechtschaffen,
1978). However, it is becoming increasingly clear that cognitive activities
such as thinking and speaking occur relatively frequently not only in lucid
dreams (in which the dreamer knows that she is currently dreaming and
can often voluntarily control the dream; see LaBerge & Gackenbach,
2000) but also in nonlucid ones (Kahn & Hobson, 2005; Meier, 1993).
Prelucid dreams, in which the dreamer wonders whether she is dreaming
but concludes that she is not, are particularly interesting because they
present evidence that reasoning itself can go astray in dreams (Brooks &
Vogelsong, 1999; for a philosophical discussion, see Windt & Metzinger,
2007). In dreams, one can have the impression of engaging in rational
thought or remembering something about ones waking life and be completely wrong. Just as genuine instances of reasoning and remembering
occur in dreams, so do instances of mock reasoning and mock memories,
in which the dreamer merely has the impression of being rational. The
phenomenology of knowing, thinking, and remembering seems to be particularly vulnerable to this type of corruption in the dream state, showing
that the mere availability of cognitive capacities says nothing about their
reliability. In many dreams, the evidence of reason is mere phenomenal
evidence, without epistemic value. This, in turn, invites a deeper epistemological problem: Even though rational thought is possible in dreams,
it may not be recognizable. If this analysis is correct, this presents an additional obstacle against solving the problem of dream skepticism and suggests that the threat posed by dreaming may be more extensive than
Descartes believed. If we cannot distinguish between real reasoning and
mock reasoning, we once more cannot rule out that we are dreaming at
any given moment. Moreover, dreaming would not only render sensory
knowledge of the external world dubitable but would also question ones
ability to recognize whether ones 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 Descartess exposition of the problem has proven to be much more inuential
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 deate 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 cant tell the difference between real and dream reasoning and so does
not solve the problem.

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

with. Indeed, Descartess theoretical position about dreaming in the Meditations may have been inspired by several dreams he had himself as a
young man (Hacking, 2002). False awakenings (realistic dreams of waking
up) are another example of how dreams can give rise to feelings of confusion and uncertainty to the point of generating philosophical doubt. Bertrand Russell (1948, p. 186) wrote that
It may be said that, though when dreaming I may think that I am awake, when
I wake up I know that I am awake. But I do not see how we are to have any
such certainty; I have frequently dreamt that I woke up; in fact once, after
ether, I dreamt it about a hundred times in the course of one dream. [ . . . ]
I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.

This shows that the classical philosophical problem of dream

skepticism is much more than an armchair exercise of purely theoretical
doubt. False awakenings, more so than other types of dreams, may
actually be the paradigm example of vividly experienced doubt and tangible dream deception. It also shows why skeptical arguments relying on
actual ASC, and dreams in particular, are more compelling than ones
using thought experiments such as the brain in a vat (Putnam, 1981) or
matrix-style scenarios in which subjects are kept in a state of permanent
deception by evil scientists or computer programs (Grau, 2005). Although
such examples may even be nomologically possible (it is not inconceivable
that future neuroscientists might be able to appropriately stimulate a disembodied brain in a vat), they do not have everyday experience on their
side. In contrast, it is the appeal to everyones commonplace experience
that makes dream skepticism so compelling.

Philosophy of Perception: Why Altered Consciousness Presents

a Problem for Philosophical Theories of Perception
Illusions, hallucinations, and dreams not only give rise to the epistemological problem of external-world skepticism but also threaten our
common-sense understanding of perception. Intuitively, perception is
characterized by its openness to the world, because it seemingly puts us
in immediate contact with mind-independent objects in the external
world and provides direct access to reality (Crane, 2005). This position
is often called direct or nave realism. The possibility of hallucinations that
are subjectively indistinguishable from genuine perception, however,
presents an important challenge for our commonplace understanding of
perception. Consequently, a philosophical theory of perception has to

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account both for the occurrence of hallucinations and the seeming openness of perception. Crane (2005) reconstructs the argument from hallucination as follows (see also Smith, 2002):
i. It seems possible for someone to have an experiencea hallucinationwhich
is subjectively indistinguishable from a genuine perception but where there is
no mind-independent object being perceived.
ii. The perception and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination are experiences of essentially the same kind.
iii. Therefore it cannot be that the essence of the perception depends on the
objects being experienced, since essentially the same kind of experience can
occur in the absence of the objects.
iv. Therefore the ordinary conception of perceptual experiencewhich treats
experience as dependent on the mind-independent objects around uscannot be correct.

Four main solutions to the resulting problem of perception have been

proposed. For reasons of space, I do not discuss sense-datum and adverbial theory here, as they are no longer widely discussed in the current literature (see Crane, 2005, for details).

The Intentionalist or Representationalist Theory

Intentionalism or representationalism holds that mental states are
characterized by being directed at or representing something in the world
(Brentano, 1874). In perception, we do not have direct access to the world
but experience the content of inner representations. The phenomenal content, or the qualitative character of conscious experience, can be described
in terms of intentional or representational content. In this respect, there is
no difference between beliefs and perceptual states, and some philosophers hold that the latter can be described as propositional attitudes
(Byrne, 2001) or a form of belief (Armstrong, 1968). One problem for this
view, however, is that illusions, pseudohallucinations, or lucid dreams do
not involve the belief that what is being experienced actually exists. Therefore, the phenomenal content of such states cannot be described in terms
of false beliefs. To address this problem, Armstrong (1968) suggested that
pseudohallucinations are more adequately described as the acquisition of
potential rather than actual beliefs. However, one would still have to
explain in exactly what sense lucid dreamers can be said to hold the
potential belief that they are experiencing the real world, even though they

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

currently realize that they are dreaming and are able to use this knowledge
to engage in dream control.
There are several problems for intentionalist theories of perception.
First, there is the question of how to explain the possibility of misrepresentation. To understand how representation is possible, we rst have to
understand how misrepresentation is possible. According to Dretske
(1994), for instance, interesting cases of misrepresentation stem from the
nonderived representational capacities of the system in question and
require a certain threshold of complexity.
Another problem for representational theories is that it is controversial
whether the qualitative aspects of phenomenal states can really be captured in terms of representational content. For pain experiences, for instance, there may be something over and above that which the pain
sensation is directed at, namely the sheer ickiness of pain. Many philosophers think this is something for which no representational analysis is
available (Block, 1997; Peacocke, 1983; Shoemaker, 1990; but see Tye, 2000).
A more general objection is that intentionalism fails to explain the apparent openness of perception (McDowell, 1987). If the phenomenal
character of perception is determined by representational content, how
does this explain the subjective experience of having direct and unmediated perceptual access to the world? Presentational content (Metzinger,
2003) may be a solution to this problem. Perceptual presence itself can
be described as a representational property by representing the object of
perception as present. From the third-person perspective, this representational property says nothing about the actual presence of such mindindependent objects: The experience could also be a hallucination. The
third premise of the argument from hallucination equivocates phenomenal and epistemological readings of experience: Phenomenal sameness
is not sufcient for sameness on the third-person, epistemological level
of description, and in this latter sense, hallucination and genuine perception are not the same kinds of experience. Presentational content thus provides a new way of conceptualizing the difference between perceptual and
belief states in terms of different forms of representational content. Beliefs
are experienced as representations. In thinking, you are always aware of
the construction process and know that your thoughts are not constrained
by the actual state of the environment but could be wrong. Unlike
thoughts, perceptual states have not only representational but also presentational content. This is why perceptual states, unlike belief states, are
experienced as providing immediate access to the world even when they
do not, as in hallucination and dreams.

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Disjunctivism
Unlike the intentional or representational theory, disjunctivism tries to
uphold the commonplace, nave realistic view of perception (Byrne &
Logue, 2009). To do so, it denies the common kind assumption (Martin,
2004), according to which hallucinations and genuine perception are fundamentally the same kind of mental event. The disjunctivist will argue,
rst, that subjective indistinguishability does not sufce for belonging to
the same common kind. Subjective indistinguishability is all that hallucinations and genuine perception have in common. Their most fundamental
common description is merely disjunctive: My experience of seeing the
ocean is either a genuine perception of the ocean or a hallucination of the
ocean. Nonetheless, each disjunct belongs to a more fundamental kind,
namely perception or hallucination, and there is no more fundamental
way of describing what they have in common.
What the disjunctivist has to explain, then, is the subjective indistinguishability between hallucinations and genuine perception. Martin
(2009) does this by introducing the distinction between how things seem
epistemically and how they seem phenomenally. Hallucinations and perceptions are epistemically indistinguishable, because the person undergoing them is unable to tell whether he is hallucinating or perceiving.
But it does not follow that hallucinations and genuine perception also
have the same phenomenal character. Whereas the phenomenal character
of genuine perception is determined by the perceptible properties of
mind-independent objects, no such characterization is available for hallucinations, because no such objects exist. Hence, the two can be regarded
as radically different types of states that are merely yoked together by
the subjective report and their epistemic indistinguishability (Martin,
2009, p. 96).
A central advantage of this view is the claim that perception is exactly
what it naively and pretheoretically seems to be, namely a way of gaining
direct access to the objects of perception. A positive account of hallucinations, however, is not the main goal of disjunctivism, and most disjunctivists focus on saying what hallucinations are not rather than what they
are (Dancy, 1995). Some disjunctivists even claim that it is not like anything to hallucinate, a view that contradicts the commonplace view of hallucination (Smith, 2002).
However, there are exceptions. Fish (2008, 2009) attempts to give a
positive account of hallucinations that integrates empirical ndings 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

indistinguishable, even though they do not have the same phenomenal

character. By contrast, Siegel (2008) claims that the epistemic account
proposed by Martin and Fish fails because it cannot explain the positive
facts of hallucinations, such as why one hallucination feels different from
another. Another objection is voiced by Nudds (2009, p. 344), who
argues that no positive account of the phenomenal character of hallucinations can be given within the framework of nave realism or disjunctivism
and that the attempt to ground indistinguishability in phenomenal similarity is misguided.
In sum, both intentionalism and disjunctivism are confronted with
serious problems in trying to accommodate hallucinations within a theory
of perception. My own position is that intentionalism is the more promising approach, in particular if an account of hallucinations can be defended
that can plausibly explain the difference between perceptual states and
beliefs, for instance by making use of the notion of presentational content.
The main problem for intentionalism is not so much to explain hallucinations as to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual states in general. Once a general account of misrepresentation is available, there
remains no special problem for hallucinations. There are convincing proposals for representational accounts of consciousness and selfconsciousness (see next section) that integrate empirical evidence from
various neuropsychological syndromes, indicating that the content of
experience results from complex information processing in the brain. In
the face of this evidence, the intuitive plausibility of nave realism is weakened considerably. This also means that the main advantage of disjunctivism turns out to be an important shortcoming. Also, the failure of
disjunctivism to give a positive account of hallucinations and its denial
that hallucinations can have the same phenomenal character as genuine
perception is unsatisfying.
Finally, it is important to point out that the discussion of hallucinations in the philosophy of perception mostly focuses on the logical possibility of hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from
genuine instances of perception. Logical possibility is not the same as
nomological possibility, as it does not yet show that such subjectively
indistinguishable hallucinations actually do occur or that the majority of
hallucinations can be described in this manner. Researching this question
in detail is an important desideratum for future theoretical and empirical
work on hallucinations. If there were good reasons to believe that realworld hallucinations typically do not resemble genuine perception in
terms of their phenomenal character, the challenge posed to theories of
perception by real-world hallucinations could be minimized and some of

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the discomfort involved in accepting that perception can go amiss would

be dissolved.3 For an empirically plausible philosophical theory of perceptiona goal that is becoming increasingly important in interdisciplinary
consciousness researchsuch ndings would, therefore, be relevant.
Nonetheless, as long as subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations are
at least logically possible, both the epistemological problem of dream
skepticism and the problem of perception will persist.

Philosophy of Mind: What Can Altered Consciousness Tell Us about

Consciousness and the Self?
In recent years, philosophy of mind has been increasingly characterized by its interdisciplinary focus, and one consequence is that both ASC
and pathological wake states are frequently discussed in the philosophical
literature, especially in the context of self-consciousness. Here ASC typically serve as a contrast condition. The systematic analysis of ASC and
the precise ways in which they differ from standard wake states can help
identify unquestioned intuitions and background assumptions about
consciousness and lead to theoretical insights and empirical predictions
about potential dissociations between different dimensions of selfconsciousness.
The self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT) proposed by Metzinger
(2003, 2004, 2009) is an example of such a strategy. Its central claim is
that the folk-phenomenological notion of what it means to be or have a
self should be rejected. SMT integrates ndings from psychology and the
cognitive neurosciences and formulates a number of conceptual constraints for a theory of self-consciousness. Instead of a self that is substantially distinct from the body, we have a self-model, which results from
complex information-processing mechanisms and representational processes in the central nervous system. Ultimately, the self-model depends
on processes inside the brain; it is a virtual simulation rather than something that could exist independently of such processes. The phenomenal
self or the experience of selfhood is the content of the self-model, a representational entity that we fail to recognize as a model because it is
3

Of course, empirical research results supporting the phenomenal similarity between hallucinations and perception could also increase the bite of the problem. This would be
the case if all or even some dreams can be conceptualized as global, multimodal hallucinations with the same phenomenal character as waking experience. It is interesting to
note, however, that dreams are not typically discussed in the context of the problem of
perception.

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

phenomenally transparent. In standard situations, we only experience the

content of the self-model but do not have access to the construction process and thus fail to experience its virtual character.
The assumption that the phenomenal self, including the experience of
being an embodied self, is a virtual simulation is supported by a number of
ASC. A rst example can be found in phantom limbs, or the experience
that the missing limb is still present following amputation. Sometimes,
patients also describe feeling pain in their phantom limb or complain that
it is paralyzed and frozen in an uncomfortable position (Brugger, 2006;
Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1998; for details on alterations of bodily consciousness, see Dieguez & Blanke, Volume 2).
In healthy individuals, the virtual character of the bodily self can be
demonstrated through a number of experimental manipulations. In the
rubber-hand illusion (RHI; Botvinick & Cohen, 1998; Tsakiris & Haggard,
2005), a fake rubber hand is placed in front of the participants while one
of their real hands is concealed from view. The experimenter then strokes
both the rubber hand and the concealed real hand simultaneously with a
probe. As the seen strokes in the rubber hand are aligned with the felt
strokes in the real hand, many participants report the sensation that the rubber hand is actually their own, sometimes including the sensation of a virtual
arm connecting it with their shoulder. There are also behavioral measures of
the illusion: When asked to close their eyes and point to the location of their
hand, participants tend to mislocalize it toward the rubber hand (Botvinick &
Cohen, 1998).
RHI is interesting because it shows that the sense of ownership (an
automatic form of self-attribution that allows one to experience ones body
as ones own) can be experimentally manipulated through conicting visual and tactile input (Metzinger, 2009). When the location at which one
visually observes the strokes is different from the location of tactile input,
the sense of ownership shifts to the source of visual stimulation, giving rise
to the sense of ownership for the rubber hand. According to SMT, this
means that the rubber hand is transiently integrated into the phenomenal
self-model, thus becoming part of the currently experienced bodily self.
An analogue of RHI can also be created for the whole body (Ehrsson,
2007; Lenggenhager et al., 2007). Through a head-mounted display, participants are presented with a visual image of themselves as seen from the
back, which is projected to a point in virtual space in front of them. The
experience is that of seeing oneself from behind. When participants are
stroked on their backs and simultaneously see these strokes on the visual
image of their own back in front of them, they often report the strange sensation of suddenly identifying with the virtual body and feeling that their

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location has shifted toward the observed strokes (Lenggenhager et al.,

2007). When asked to return to the spot where they were standing during
the illusion with their eyes closed, participants tend to drift toward the
position of the virtual body. This suggests that the experiment targets
two dimensions of subjective experience, namely self-identication 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 rst-person perspective (1PP), or the position
from which the person sees the virtual image of her body from behind.
Again, conicting visual and tactile information can lead one to mislocalize oneself in space and identify with a virtual body image. The position
from which I visually observe the world can be dissociated from the position at which I feel myself to be, and I can feel a sense of ownership for a
virtual body that is distinct from my real physical body.
The conceptual distinction between self-identication, self-localization,
and the visual 1PP may also be crucial for understanding the minimal conditions for the experience of selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009). Here,
three types of full-body illusions are particularly interesting (Blanke &
Mohr, 2005; Blanke et al., 2005): In out-of-body experiences (OBEs), the
person has the experience of having left her body, and a visual image of
the physical body is often observed from an elevated perspective. Some
individuals report having a phantom body during their OBEs, while others
report feeling like a disembodied point in space. OBEs can occur spontaneously, for instance during sleep onset, epileptic seizures, or stressful situations, such as after an accident or during an operation, but can also be
induced through electrical stimulation at the temporo-parietal junction
(TPJ). In autoscopic hallucination, the subject still feels localized in her
own body but sees a virtual double of herself standing in front of her.
In heautoscopy, there is also a visual double, but here, subjects report
switching back and forth between their real and the illusory body [see also
Cardena, Volume 2].
These three types of full-body illusions present different dissociations
between the visual 1PP, self-localization, and self-identication. Blanke
and Metzinger (2009, p. 12) conclude that, taken together, they show that
global ownershipfunctionally dened as availability of an integrated,
transparent and global representation of the spatiotemporally situated
bodyis the simplest form of self-consciousness. In contrast, agency, or
the phenomenal-functional property of being able to control and experience oneself as the author of ones thoughts and actions, is not necessary
for self-consciousness [see also Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardena, Volume
2]. The core of our experience of selfhood, which is sufcient for minimal

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

phenomenal selfhood, may be the passive, multisensory and globalized

experience of owning a body, and this can arise for ones physical body
or for a virtual one (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009, p. 12).
The conceptual distinction between ownership and agency can also be
applied to the theoretical analysis of hallucinations. The positive symptoms of schizophrenia are particularly interesting in this respect. They
involve auditory hallucinations, typically of hearing voices, as well as
thought insertion, in which patients report that someone elses thoughts
have been inserted into their mind, and thought control, in which patients
report that an external agent has taken control of their thoughts (for a
philosophical analysis, see Stephens & Graham, 2000). Although the phenomenon of thought control can be described as resulting from a disturbed sense of agency for ones thoughts, thought insertion involves the
additional loss of the sense of ownership for ones 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 ones cognitive processes, specically inner
speech. Many different theoretical models of auditory hallucinations have
been suggested, ranging from disturbances in perceptual processing to
higher-level cognitive disturbances in source monitoring and performing
self-other distinctions (Stephens & Graham, 2000).
Dreams are another example of how ASC can contribute to an empirically informed philosophical theory of self-consciousness. Most contemporary philosophers working on dreams (see for instance Ichikawa, 2009;
Metzinger, 2003, 2009; Revonsuo, 2006) agree that dreams are conscious
experiences because they are phenomenal states: There is something it is
like to dream, and (contra Dennett, 1976; Malcolm, 1956, 1959) dreams
give rise to consciously experienced imagery during sleep.4 According to
SMT (Metzinger, 2003, 2009; Windt & Metzinger, 2007), most nonlucid
dreams lack important layers of waking self-consciousness and thus should
only be regarded as subjective experiences in a conceptually weak sense
related to the cognitive 1PP, agency, and the narrative or autobiographical
self: Nonlucid dreamers cannot form a stable cognitive relation to the dream
world and often entertain delusional beliefs; they lack control over volition
and attention and cannot remember important facts about their waking lives
(Hobson, Pace-Schott, & Stickgold, 2000). False awakenings are a good
counterexample because they show a strong degree of coherence with the
4

However, philosophers disagree as to whether dreams involve complex hallucinations or

should rather be regarded as imaginative states comparable to daydreaming and waking
fantasy (Ichikawa, 2009; McGinn, 2004; Sosa, 2007).

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autobiographical self experienced in wakefulness. Lucid dreams

are another, and at least fully lucid dreams afford a vastly different interpretation in terms of self-consciousness (Metzinger, 2003, 2009; Windt &
Metzinger, 2007). Lucid dreamers, especially in lucid control dreams, are
attentional, cognitive, and behavioral agents in a much stronger sense than
nonlucid ones, related both to the phenomenology of agency and its functional prole. This is related to a stable 1PP and the ability to form a conscious cognitive model of ones current relation to the dream world,
enabling both the insight that one is currently dreaming and the ability to
engage in dream control. Mnemonic processing is also enhanced compared
to nonlucid dreams. All of this supports the view that fully lucid dreams are
subjective experiences in a stronger sense than most nonlucid ones, in some
cases even approaching the type of self-consciousness characteristic of standard wakefulness. Nonetheless, the contrast between lucid and nonlucid
dreams should be considered as continuous rather than exclusive, and the
degree to which a given nonlucid dream should be considered as a subjective experience will depend on the degree to which the phenomenalfunctional properties of agency and the 1PP are instantiated and on its
integration with the autobiographical self experienced in standard wakefulness. Distinguishing different elements of dream lucidity may help understand the gradual transitions between lucid and nonlucid dreams as well
as the different types of self-related processing involved (Noreika, Windt,
Lenggenhager, & Karim, 2010; Windt & Metzinger, 2007).
Another point that makes both lucid and nonlucid dreams interesting
for self-consciousness has to do with the bodily self. Dreams provide an
example of a rich and complex form of consciousness arising in a state of
near-complete functional disembodiment. Rapid eye movement (REM)
sleep, in which the most vivid dreams occur, is characterized by the sensory input and motor output blockade (Hobson et al., 2000). As a result,
the sleeping body is both paralyzed and deafferented during the dream
state, meaning that internally experienced behavior is not enacted in the
physical body (with the exception of patients with REM-sleep behavior
disorder (RBD) who literally act out their dreams; see Schenck, 2005)
and stimuli from the environment and the body are typically not integrated into the dream narrative. An interesting question is whether dreams
nonetheless give rise to the experience of having a body. Movement sensations are frequent in the dream state, but touch, pain, and thermal sensations are extremely rare (Hobson, 1988). The general conclusion that the
dream self is not only functionally disembodied with relation to the physical body, but also only phenomenally embodied in a weak sense seems

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

plausible (Windt, 2010). If it is true that dreams often lack a detailed body
representation including body parts, this may help elucidate the relationship between bodily experiences and their functional and neurophysiological correlates. It also suggests that the experience of fully embodied
selfhood can be dissociated from other levels of self-related processing
such as cognition, as in lucid dreams.
Finally, Revonsuos (2000, 2006) work on consciousness gives a particularly prominent role to dreams. Going beyond the contrastive analysis
between dreaming and standard waking consciousness (Windt & Noreika,
in press), he suggests that dreaming reveals consciousness in a very special,
pure, and isolated form (Revonsuo, 2006, p. 75) and thus can be used as a
theoretical and research model of consciousness. Dreaming depicts consciousness rst 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 ofine simulations
of waking consciousness, this means that consciousness itself is essentially a
process of simulation: [ . . . ] not only are dreams experiences but, in a way,
all experiences are dreams (Revonsuo, 2006, p. 55). Dreaming thus gives
rise to the virtual reality metaphor of conscious experience.
The modeling approach is controversial, and other researchers have
suggested that dreaming can be regarded as a model of the positive symptoms of psychosis, both on the phenomenal and the neurophysiological
levels of description, and differs in important ways from standard wakefulness (Hobson, 1999; see Windt & Noreika, in press, for a critical discussion). Nonetheless, Revonsuos approach is interesting, because it not
only shows how ASC can be used to inform a philosophical theory of consciousness and the self but also suggests that the use of altered consciousness as a model of standard wake states might lead to testable predictions.
Another theme that has been discussed in the context of pure consciousness is meditative states. Neurophenomenology (Lutz & Thompson,
2003; Varela, 1996) attempts to bring together aspects of Husserlian phenomenology with cognitive neuroscience. By training participants in introspective practice, the precision of rst-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, exemplies such a disciplined rst-person approach (for a review of meditative practices from a
neuroscience perspective, see Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008).

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The interesting point here is that trained meditators are seen as experts
regarding not just meditative states but conscious experience itself and
are considered as scientic collaborators rather than only experimental
participants. As in the discussion on dreaming as a model of waking
consciousness, however, it is an open question whether insights from
meditation research can actually be generalized to standard waking
consciousness [see Shear, this volume].

Mystical Experiences and the History of Ideas: From Altered Consciousness

as a Source of Knowledge to a Naturalized Account of Religious Beliefs, Myths,
and the Concept of the Soul
An old theme in both the philosophical and the popular discussion on
ASC is whether they enable insights that cannot be accessed in standard
wake states. In his introduction to the Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley
(2004, p. vii) writes that knowledge is a function of being. When there is
a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in
the nature and amount of knowing.
As Huxley suggests, the insights conveyed by AC might be related
to alterations in cognitive functioning or in the style of reasoning characteristic of AC. Indeed, before the 19th century, hallucinations were termed
apparitions or visions, suggesting a close relationship to higher sorts of
insight (Aleman & Lari, 2008). Interestingly, there was no clear distinction between nocturnal dreams and visions in antiquity, and they were
seen as tangible visits from the gods: Dreaming was the passive experience
of seeing, or being shown, a dream. Dreams play an important role in initiating religious insights in the Bible and the Talmud, as well as in Indian
tradition (Van de Castle, 1994). In ancient Greece, the practice of dream
prophecy played a prominent role in religious life, in particular at the Aesculap shrines, as well as for medical practice [see Ustinova, and Geels and,
this volume].
An even stronger variant of the notion that ASC provide access to deeper
forms of knowledge has to do with perennial philosophy. This idea, formulated by the 16th-century Italian monk Augustinus Steuchus and later taken
up by Leibniz, says that the same eternal truths are discovered by the mystics of all times and all cultures (Horgan, 2003; Huxley, 2004). These truths
transcend time, place, culture, and personal identity and are only accessible
during mystical experience [see Beauregard, Volume 2].
James (2003, p. 335) described mystical experience as the experience
of intellectual enlightenment, elation, and joy. He also noted that in

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

mystical experience, the eternal truths are apprehended in immediate

experience rather than as a result of rational deliberation. A related point
is that they are incommunicable, and according to James (2003):
This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism.
Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no
one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us in
sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. (p. 341)

The idea that ASC could be a source of knowledge and insight nicely
complements the epistemological problem of dream skepticism discussed above, and there is a tension in the literature on altered consciousness between viewing ASC as higher states of consciousness or,
conversely, as pathological conditions, the latter point predominating in
the psychological literature since the 19th century (Aleman & Lari,
2008) [see Lukoff, Volume 2]. Rather than viewing them as opposites,
the close conceptual relationship between madness, deeper forms of
insight, and prophecies of divine origin was already highlighted by Plato
in the Phaedrus. At the same time, the popular notion of ASC as conveying
heightened insight has always provoked philosophical skepticism. Aristotle
(2008) criticized the widespread trust of his contemporaries in prophetic
dreams, commenting that the only way in which dreams could foretell
future events was by coincidence and that this type of experience was
most likely to befall commonplace persons and not the most intelligent
[cf. Luke, Volume 2].
This theme was taken up by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. The main goal of his chapter on enthusiasm is to show that
revelation, by itself, is not reliable, as one can never be sure that it is a
genuine revelation rather than a product of enthusiasm:
Immediate revelation being a much easier way for men to establish their opinions, and regulate their conduct, than the tedious and not always successful
labour of strict reasoning, it is no wonder, that some have been very apt to
pretend to revelation [ . . . ]. Their minds being thus prepared, whatever
groundless opinion comes to settle itself strongly upon their fancies is an illumination from the spirit of God, and presently of divine authority [ . . . ].
(Locke, 1997, IV. XIX, 5, 6)

The point is that the mere strength of ones persuasions is not enough
to justify revelation; without outward signs to convince one of the truth of
ones persuasions, or without their withstanding the test of reason,

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revelation is not to be had, or at least cannot be recognized (Locke, 1997,

IV. XIX, 14, 15). Once more, phenomenal certaintythe experience of
persuasion or knowingis not the same as epistemic justication.
However, if Jamess 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 justied
through rst-person experience and cannot be disproved through rational
argument (James, 2003), such insights would lie outside the scope of epistemology, which focuses on rationally justiable 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
justied in terms of their phenomenal character alone is problematic, because
it rests on a category mistake (Ryle, 2000). Also, it may be impossible to distinguish genuine insight during ASC from mere feelings of knowing, such as
in delusional states. If at all, such insights present a completely different form
of knowledge, and one that requires a separate explanation of its own.
Aside from questions about the epistemological status of ASC, there is
another tradition in philosophy that has to do with investigating the
beliefs they have given rise to in the history of ideas. Commenting on the
reality of the unseen, James (2003) remarked that the belief in objects that
cannot be experienced with any of the senses is the foundation of many
religious beliefs. Our natural tendency toward abstraction provides us
with an ontological imagination, allowing us to experience such unpicturable beings [ . . . ] with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination
(James, 2003, p. 63). Importantly, this type of experience is not unique to
mystical or religious experience. Felt presence (FP), in which the person
has the strong feeling of an agent being located in her immediate vicinity
and which can arise independently of modality-specic 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

FP often occurs during sleepwake transitions and sleep paralysis (SP;

the experience of waking up and being unable to move, commonly
explained by the persistence of REM-sleep muscular atonia after awakening; see Hishikawa & Shimizu, 1995). FP has also been associated with a
number of conditions independently of sleep, including epileptic seizures
and lesions, especially in the temporoparietal areas; it can be induced
experimentally through electrical stimulation (Arzy et al., 2006) and
occurs spontaneously in periods of heightened stress and emotional
arousal (bereavement, accidents, post-partum, prolonged isolation, etc.;
see Nielsen, 2007). It is very interesting, because it may allow researchers
to investigate the neural correlates of such experiences and suggests a link
between mystical experiences and hallucinatory phenomena. Independently of their epistemological status, an analysis of these examples can
help give a naturalized account of why ASC have often been regarded as
a source of knowledge in the history of ideas.
Aside from FP, a number of other ASC are informative for the history
of ideas. Again, the hypnagogic state between sleeping and wakefulness
is particularly interesting. Cheyne (2003; Cheyne, Rueffer, & NewbyClark, 1999) found that reports of hallucinatory experiences during SP
are consistently grouped into three clusters: (1) vestibular-motor hallucinations, including sensations of oating, ying, falling, as well as autoscopy and out-of-body feelings; (2) intruder experiences, involving the
sense of presence as well as visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations;
and (3) incubus experiences, in which people have the feeling of being
choked by an incubus or an old hag sitting on their chest and experience
trouble breathing, pressure, and sometimes pain. This last cluster may
result from a sudden awareness of the shallow and rapid breathing pattern
associated with REM sleep, giving rise to the impression of being choked.
Reports of incubus and old hag attacks can be found in many different cultures and from many different times, and their highly stereotyped pattern
suggests that this is a culturally invariant form of experience. Linking the
phenomenological features of such experiences to REM sleep physiology
thus may allow for a naturalistic explanation of myths and legends about
alien abductions or evil witches coming in through the bedroom window
at night to attack their sleeping victims. Such beliefs in supernatural
beings might indeed have been fed and informed by such very real experiences of SP on the verge of sleep.
A similar strategy is proposed by Metzinger (2005, 2009) in relation to
OBEs. He suggests that OBEs are a highly stereotyped and culturally
invariant type of experience and may be a neuroanthropological constant,
or an experience that can be shared by all humans under certain

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conditions. The experience of leaving ones body in OBEs, which is often

described as highly realistic, may have given rise to a protoconcept of
the mind, according to which the mind is separable from the body and
may continue to live after death. This folk-phenomenological concept of
a soul may also explain the intuitive attractiveness of the theoretical position of mindbody dualism:
Taken as an ontological metaphor, the phenomenology of OBEs inevitably
leads to dualism, and to the concrete idea of an invisible, weightless, but
spatially extended second body. This, then, may actually be the folkphenomenological ancestor of the soul, and of the philosophical protoconcept of mind. (Metzinger, 2005, p. 81)

In addition to OBEs, the notion of the separability of mind and body may
have also been fed by nocturnal dreams. Although dreams often lack the
strong emotional impact and extremely realistic quality of OBEs, it may be
this more pedestrian character that commends them for the widespread
belief in the soul. Though often more impressive and impactful, OBEs are
comparatively rare, whereas most people are at least occasionally able to
recall dreams. This means that the protoconcept of the soul can truly appeal
to everyones rst-person experience of having glimpsed a world beyond the
real one and having left their physical body behind during sleep.
Of course, it is important to point out that such theories about the origin of beliefs in old hags or theoretical positions such as mindbody dualism say nothing about the epistemological status of these beliefs, nor do
they support any ontological conclusions. They explain the intuitive
appeal of such beliefs and maybe even our proneness to develop corresponding philosophical theories. At the same time, showing that such
experiences as OBEs can be explained in neurophysiological terms
and can even be induced experimentally through electrical stimulation
cannot, from a strictly logical point of view, disconrm 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 ConsciousnessAltering Consciousness Research?

As the above discussion has shown, ASC is a particularly good example
of a topic that can prot from a multidisciplinary approach and reects the

Altered Consciousness in Philosophy

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 clarication of the concepts involved in such
a project, help identify the implicit background assumptions, formulate
research questions, and illustrate the broader theoretical implications of
research results. At the same time, philosophical subdisciplines such as
epistemology and philosophy of mind can integrate empirical research
results and the philosophical discussion is marked by an increasing willingness to take such ndings into account. In this way, the discussion of
ASC may further the interdisciplinary integration between philosophy,
psychology, and the cognitive neurosciences and shows how these disciplines can be mutually informative.
This requires openness not only toward the ndings from other disciplines but also an integrative approach towards altered consciousness. In
particular, the comparison not only between standard states of wakefulness and ASC but also between pathological and nonpathological ASC is
of interest. Particularly good examples are the comparison between
schizophrenic hallucinations and those occurring during drug intoxication or spontaneously during sleep or at sleep onset, as well as OBEs,
which can occur spontaneously, following brain stimulation, during epileptic seizures, and so on. As recently suggested in a study conducted by
Hohwy and Paton (2010), it may also be possible to use experimentally
induced ASC such as RHI to investigate the role of experience in delusion
formation. The comparative study of pathological and nonpathological AC
raises many interesting questions and may lead to a better understanding
of both these alterations and standard states of wakefulness, as well as,
possibly, new therapeutic interventions. In this way, the study of AC
may itself be altered and broadened to a more integrative approach.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Thomas Metzinger and Sebastian Dieguez for
helpful comments on an earlier draft. This chapter was supported by the
Barbara-Wengeler Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation.

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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 dened thus, one can encounter mystical
dimensions within all religions of the world. Taoism, Zen, and other types
of Buddhism, as well as Hindu traditions like Kashmir Shaivism, Vaishnavism, and Advaita Vedanta, are basically mystical in the sense that they
all strive for transcendence from this world of multiplicity. In the case of
Theravada Buddhism, we would have to exchange the concept of God
with the ground of being or similar expressions [see Shear, this volume].
Other traditions within world religion also have a rm mystical tradition.
In the Islamic world, Susm is still among the popular expressions of
Islam, all the way from Morocco in the West to Indonesia in the East
(Ernst, 1998). Within Judaism, we can observe an increasing interest in
the Kabbalah, the Jewish expression of mysticism (e.g., Dan, 2002;
Laenen, 2001). As far as Christianity is concerned, it is probably no exaggeration to state that there is a renewed interest in the great mystics of this
tradition (Fanning, 2001). Thus, mysticism has been studied from a variety of perspectives. Let me take a very brief look at just a few of them, limited to viewpoints that are relevant to the psychology of religion.
Some psychologists, speaking from a Freudian perspective, appear to
be convinced of the reductionistic view that mystical experience is nothing
but a regression to early nursing experience (Prince & Savage, 1972,
p. 127), a sort of ashback to an original chaos that existed long before
the differentiation between the self and the outside world, and long before
language development; a regression to a time when the only way of relating to the world consisted of sucking on the breast (Prince, 1980,
p. 340). Followers of Jung seem to agree with the regression hypothesis,
but according to them, mystical experience can be described as regression
to the earlier pre-infantile level of the collective unconscious which is the
matrix of man (Owens, 1972, p. 142). Others, however, defend the position that this kind of experience has an adaptive dimension and has a

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potential for personality transformation. One of the possible consequences

of such an experience is that the individual concerned thereby creates
order in a life situation of crisis (Fingarette, 1963; Parsons, 1999).
Quite another approach, again often reductionistic, comes from biology. There is a tendency to reduce mysticism to nothing but effects of specic 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 & dAquili,
2001). There is an ongoing discussion between representatives of neuroscience and religion, giving rise to a new subjectneurotheology. A fundamental question, however, is what we may legitimately deduce from
the truth claims of religious experience from knowledge of its biological
correlates (Wulff, 1997, p. 112).
Psychological approaches include that of Ralph W. Hood Jr., who has
made a great impact on the scientic study of mystical experience. One
of his methods was to construct the Religious Experience Episodes Measure (REEM) based on literary reports as presented in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the classical study of William James. The narratives cover
a variety of religious experiences, including conversion experiences,
visions, and experiences of divine guidance. Informants are then asked
to what extent their experiences match the 15 short accounts presented
in the instrument (Hood, 1970; see also Holm, 1982). Other examples of
a psychological approach include the issue of personality traits such as
hypnotizability, absorption, and self-transcendence (Cardena & Terhune,
2008), the relation between near-death experiences and mystical states of
consciousness (Greyson, 2000), and that between deep hypnosis and
mystical experiences (Cardena, 2005). Also relevant are psychological
studies of meditation, including the work of the American psychiatrist
Arthur J. Deikman (1971, 1976), who proposed that meditation entails a
shift from an active to a receptive and deautomatized mode of consciousness [see Mishara & Schwartz, Volume 2].
Other scholars, especially those writing during the early years of the
research into mysticism, have taken a great deal of trouble in order to distinguish different types of mystical experience. In his classical comparative
study of the Indian mystic Shankara (8th century) and the German
Meister Eckhart (12601328), Rudolph Otto (1926/1971) differentiated
between the soul-mysticism of Eastern spirituality and the Godmysticism of the Western theistic traditions. The tripartite distinction of
Ronald C. Zaehner is well known. Motivated by the provocative book of
Aldous Huxley (1945)who suggested that hallucinogenic drugs are

Altered Consciousness in Religion

shortcuts to the experience of divine presenceZaehner (1957) did his

utmost to show that Huxleys experience should be regarded as an
expression of nature mysticism. This type should be distinguished
from both monistic mysticism and, most emphatically, from theistic mysticism, which Zaehner happened to regard as true (1957, p. xvi). Others
have severely criticized these types of distinctions. Zaehner appears to
have mixed up problems of classication 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 signicantly 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 Byrons Don Juan that the best of life
is intoxication? Can hallucinogenic drugs give rise to mystical experience? While some proponents of the biological perspective would say that
modern medicine provides us with excellent pills that will erase God from
our brain, advocates of the experimental approach (e.g. Pahnke, 1963)
seem to suggest the opposite: Take a pill and experience articial paradise, an expression taken from the French author Baudelaire (see also
Geels, 2003b).

Denitions 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 dene
the object of study. When we study classical denitions of mysticism, it is
striking that many scholars usually dene mystical experience (e.g., Clark,
1958; Leuba, 1925; Pratt, 1920); these three classical studies state that the
mystical experience is not related to perception and regard it as a nonrational, intuitive experience. This can be regarded as an obscurum per obscurum procedurein the denition of the problematic object, new obscure
concepts are introduced, putting a veil, so to speak, over the area.
It is important to note that the experiential dimension, although
heavily emphasized, is not the only one, for good reasons. After all, the
concept of mysticism covers more than just the special types of experiences reported by mystics. The concept seems to be just as general as the
word religion and equally difcult to dene. For that reason, we could
apply the ve dimensions of religion suggested by Glock and Stark
(1965) to the area of mysticism. In the vast eld of religious mysticism,

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one can therefore study (1) the experiential dimension, (2) the consequences of the mystical experience in the life of the individual, (3) different rituals or mystical exercises, (4) the intellectual aspect, that is, how the
mystic interprets his or her experience, and, nally (5) the ideological
dimension, that is, the religious tradition to which the mystic possibly
belongs. We will now have a closer look at these ve dimensions, with
an emphasis on the experiential dimension.
Mystical experience is the core of mysticism, at least from a psychological perspective. It has an enormous motivational potential, for example by
changing peoples lives or by being the incentive for the mystic to continue
on the long and arduous path of spiritual transformation. A fundamental
question, often debated in scholarly studies of mysticism, is whether socalled revelatory experiences, visions, and voices, should be included in
the study of mysticism. The classical study of Walter Stace excludes them
from the category of mystical experiences because they have the character
of sensuous imagery, whereas mystical experiences are nonsensuous
(Stace, 1960, p. 49; see also Wainwright, 1981, p. 1ff ). Another reason,
according to Stace, is that mystics themselves regard them as less important or even as an obstacle to spiritual maturity. However, neglecting
visions for this reason would be just as inappropriate as if a psychologist
neglected dreams for the dubious reason that the client regards them as
trivial or meaningless (see Moore, 1978, p. 119f ).
This prevalent attitude is the probable explanation of why there are so
few psychological studies of religious visions, which appear to be more
common among women than men. One of the major studies in this eld
is the monumental work of the Swedish scholar Ernst Arbman (1963,
1968, 1970), which denitely places religious visions in the study of mysticism. He even goes as far as to state: Mysticism may be said to be tantamount to visionary-ecstatic religious practice or religiosity (1963,
p. 547). In this chapter, visions and voices will be included. The examples
presented below do not appear within a Christian context, but the history
of Christianity is rife with visionary experience (e.g., Christian, 1981; Dinzelbacher, 1981; Zimdars-Swartz, 1991).
Religious visions belong to the category of kataphatic experiences, usually expressed in the language of personal relations. A second category is
called apophatic experiences, expressed for example in the impersonal language of innity. 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 outow 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

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

(Addas, 1993). The Essence of God (dhat), however, is beyond all psychological content and can only be expressed in negations. This abstract God
discloses himself through his attributes (sifat) and his works (afal). Attributes such as Life, Being, Desire, Power, Speech, Generosity, and Justice are
just a few of the 99 most beautiful divine names, immanent in creation.
The Power of God, for example, is reected 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 denition of mystical experience based on a
study of Robert S. Ellwood (1980, p. 29), but with several additions, here
marked in italics:
(1) Mystical experience is experience in a religious or a profane context (2)
that is immediately or subsequently interpreted by the experiencer as an
encounter with a higher or ultimate divine reality (3) in a direct, according
to the person, nonrational way (4) that engenders a deep sense of unity
and of living during the experience on a level of being other than the ordinary. (5) This experience is accompanied by far-reaching consequences in the
individuals life.

There are many examples of experiences that could be regarded as mystical in a profane context (Laski, 1961; Maslow, 1964). The direct, nonrational encounter with a higher reality underlines the fact that most
people report that the experience comes suddenly and that they were both
surprised and overwhelmed by it. The dimension of unity appears to be
one of the most common characteristics of the mystical experience of the
apophatic type. According to Walter T. Stace, this is the one basic, essential, nuclear characteristic, from which most of the others inevitably follow (1960, p. 110). Although the experience itself may last only
minutes, life may never be the same again. After these transforming
minutes, the mystic usually reevaluates his or her life, dividing it into a
before and an after.
We are now touching upon the second dimension of mysticism, the
consequential one. The sense of the presence of God or the ground of being
leaves no person unaffected. A visionary experience of, for example, light
or of Jesus or the Virgin Mary may lead to a radical change in life. In my
studies of visions in contemporary Sweden (Geels, 1996, 2003a), some
of the informants nished their secular jobs and started a spiritual career.
Some of them studied theology and became priests in the Swedish church.
Quite another type of consequence is the fact that an overwhelming vision

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creates order in chaos. Some of my informants were on the verge of committing suicide (Geels, 2008) [see Lukoff, Volume 2].
The third dimension of mysticism, of special relevance to the psychologist of religion, is related to behavior: the ritual dimension. Here the reference is to different techniques used in order to reach beyond the world
of multiplicity. In the great mystical traditions, there exists a variety of
techniques: isolation, meditation, contemplation, different types of prayer,
mystical weeping, and techniques of visualization. Through contemplative
devotion, attention (kavvanah), and meditative prayer, the Jewish mystic
approaches the divine; Teresa of Avila describes the seven stages of prayer
in her Interior Castle. A special type of repetitive prayer occurs not only in
the Greek Orthodox tradition (the Jesus prayer) but also in Pure Land
Buddhism in Japan, as well as in mystical Islam, where dervishes monotonously repeat the prayer La ilaha illa llah (there is no god but God) and
other divine names.
The fourth dimension is the intellectual one, the cognitive processing of
the mystic as presented in his or her texts. An apparent paradox is the fact
that although most mystics declare that the experience is ineffable, they
nevertheless devote considerable time to its description and systematic
analysis.
Intellectual processing is closely related to the ideological dimension, or
the tradition to which the mystic belongs such as branches of the Jewish
Kabbalah, the Su tradition, Zen, Vedanta, and so forth. These traditions
not only inuence the experiences itself, they also color the descriptions
presented by the mystics. What kind of relation does the mystic have to
the religious tradition that he or she belongs to? Within their religious traditions, mystics not infrequently are regarded as radicals, drawing on the
profound consequences of their personal, intense, transforming experiences. In some cases this leads to serious disputes with representatives of
orthodoxy. The martyrdom of al-Hallaj in Islam, executed in Baghdad
(922) for his extravagant utterances, is well known. He was far from the
only mystic who was accused of heresy, especially during the period up
to al-Ghazzali (d. 1111), when Susm reached consolidation with the
orthodox Muslim faith. Jewish Kabbalists have always been regarded with
a certain suspicion, and Chassidim have been condemned on several occasions (Scholem, 1954/1971, 1974). In the context of Christianity, the
German Meister Eckhart and the Dutch Jan van Ruusbroec had to defend
themselves for uttering certain phrases that were seriously suspected of
being pantheistic. A number of Eckharts 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

on mysticism, after nearly half a century of research, wrote that institutionalism and mysticism have always been uneasy bedfellows (1947/
1969, p. 21). We should not forget, however, that most mystics within
the great religions of the world do their utmost to be loyal and faithful
interpreters of their own tradition.

Paradigms in the Scientic Study of Mystical Experience

During the last decades, there has been a vehement debate on the
nature of the mystical experience. The different viewpoints have been
labeled as constructivism and its counterpart as decontextualism, deconstructivism, or postconstructivism (Forman, 1998b, p. 6). A third paradigm,
called perennialism, dominated research during the greater part of the
20th century.
The dominant perspective in the earlier scientic study of mysticism,
ranging from William James (1902) to Walter T. Stace (1960), can be designated as perennialism. The perennial point of view is that the mystical
experience has some transcultural, homogenous core characteristics,
which afterward are shaped into a culturally dened conceptual framework (e.g., Huxley, 1944; James, 1902; Marechal, 1927; Pratt, 1920;
Stace, 1960; Underhill, 1911). This was the dominant view during the
rst 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 inuential work of Stace, perennialism has been criticized for lack of literary criticism of primary texts and
unproved assumptions about the similarities of the mystical experience.
The strongest attack, however, came from an inuential new perspective
within the humanities and social sciences: constructivism. According to
this new paradigm, all experiences, including religious, artistic, and mystical experiences, are constructed by the beliefs and linguistic backgrounds that the subject brings to them. The strongest weapon carrier of
this view is Steven T. Katz, who is convinced that there are no pure (i.e.
unmediated) experiences (Katz, 1983, p. 4). In order to defend his position, Katz attracted a considerable number of philosophers, all sharing this
basic constructivist view. So far, four volumes have been edited by Katz
(1978, 1983, 1992, 2000).
A growing number of scholars put forward their alternative view in
several other volumes. The rst of them is called The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (1990), edited by Robert K. C.

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Forman, the foremost proponent of the alternative called deconstructivism. Just like his colleague, Forman gathered a great number of scholars,
most of them philosophers of religion, who supported him. In his introductory essay, Forman convincingly criticizes the constructivist approach,
stating that the history of mysticism is rife with cases in which expectations, models, previously acquired concepts, and so on, were deeply
and radically disconrmed (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 rst 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), dened as wakeful contentless consciousness, the existence of which has been established beyond a reasonable
doubt (1990, p. 21).
The position of Forman and others really reminds us of the older perennialist view, the idea that there is a common core in all mysticism. Forman gives this view a psychophysiological twist by suggesting a perennial
psychology, a common structureconsciousness itselfthat is not created by culture but comes with the machinery of being human. We all
have an innate capacity to get in touch with this nonconceptual dimension. The title of his second edited volume, The Innate Capacity, points at
this human aspect. In consciousness itself and in the way it encounters
the world intentionally, we may have something that transcends cultures
and eras (Forman, 1998b, p. 27f) Instead of emphasizing common
denominators in mystical philosophy, Forman strikes a blow for similar
psychological processes, uniting an 8th-century Korean with a 14thcentury Dominican friar (Forman probably refers to Meister Eckhart, of
whom he has written an insightful study, published 1991) and contemporary meditators.
From a psychological point of view, the paradigms mentioned above
are not incompatible. The constructivist approach is a truism. A humans

Altered Consciousness in Religion

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
insufcient way of studying the variety of mystical experience. The present
author has devoted 5 years to studying the concept mors mystica, mystical
death, in the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Geels,
1998, 1999, 2000, 2003a). The idea that you must die before you die is,
to the best of my knowledge, one of the most important common denominators in the great mystical traditions of the world. In other words, traditions such as the Kabbalah, Susm, 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
Sus state, is the war against your own self. The weapons used in this
struggle are the different spiritual exercises, especially repetitive prayer.
The Sus and other mystics do describe how we should deconstruct our
empirical world in order to unveil a spiritual reality. These texts, however,
are social constructions. A simple example of the mutual relation between
construction and deconstruction is the well-known Buddhist concept
Nibbana, which means extinction. Extinction of what? The answer is clear:
of all psychological processes. After an experience of Nibbana, expressed
differently, of course, in other traditions, the mystic returns to a empirical
world, which is then reconstructed in accordance with the spiritual reality
just experienced.
Forman and some his colleagues talk about a forgetting model,
another way of expressing the process leading to mystical death (1998a,
p. 7; see also Franklin, 1998, p. 236f.). What is needed is a model of personality enabling us to understand different types of mystical experience,
including visions and voices. Such a model should combine cognitive psychology with depth psychology. From the horizon of cognitive psychology, such an eclectic approach has been suggested by Ulric Neisser
(1967; see also Geels, 2006). The heuristic value of such an approach,
counting as it does with dynamic, associative ways of handling emotionally charged information, should enable us to understand new or unexpected features in reports of religious experience, whether it be Old
Testament prophets combining, in their visions, contemporary iconographic elements with verbal data, or Christian mystics like John of the
Cross, using sensuous, erotic imagery in his poetry while simultaneously
stating that the mystical adept has to reach beyond the senses.
The conclusion of all this is that the constructivist point of view is
insufcient to analyze mystical experience. Humans construct most but
not all of the time. It is the task of the psychologist of religion to describe

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those processes that lead to new and unexpected constructions of a world

that, most of the time, can be consensually shared with other human
beings. The model should also account for the possible negative effects
of using spiritual exercises in mystical traditions.

A Model of Personality and the Varieties of Mystical Experience

This model focuses on perceptual-cognitive processes without neglecting psychological functions that belong to depth psychology. It will be
presented as succinctly as possible. The model will then be applied to
the analysis of visions and the pure consciousness event. Following A.
Rothstein (1981), and in connection with developments in object relations
theory, M. Epstein (1988) distinguishes between the representational and
functional aspects of the ego. With the help of the former, the individual
constructs a differentiated view of himself and the outside world. Here
we encounter again the constructivist perspective, impossible to neglect.
This subsystem can be further divided into object- and selfrepresentations. The functional system consists of adaptive, defensive,
mediating, and synthetic functions.
The adaptive function is responsible for adaptation to reality. It has at
its disposal a number of abilities or dispositions that are inherited, for
example perception, memory, intelligence, and language. The defensive
function of the ego also in one way serves our adaptation to the environment, more particularly to our psychological environment. In contrast to
the former function, however, the egos defense mechanisms are not
inherited but are acquired under the inuence of the socio-cultural milieu.
The mediating function corresponds to the classical psychoanalytical view
of the ego, acting as a mediator between the id and the super ego, or
between the id and the environment.
An interesting function is the synthetic one, which is an organ for equilibrium that strives for balance in a constantly shifting psyche. The synthetic function assimilates alien elements (both from within and from
without), and it mediates between opposing elements and even reconciles
opposites and sets mental productivity in train (Nunberg, 1961, p. 122).
The most important synthetic functions, according to Nunberg, can be
summarized with the following concepts: assimilation, simplication,
generalization, and unication. 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

The other large substructure in this ego-psychological model of

humans is the representational system, or the process of relating to and representing objects. An object can be a thing, a person, or a happening. This
theory belongs to the great landmarks of psychoanalysis during the 60s,
70s, and 80s. It is my impression that the distinction between the egos
functional and representational systems no longer is a point of great controversy (Epstein, 1988; Hartmann, 1958; Jacobson, 1964; Rizzuto,
1979; Rothstein, 1981; Sandler & Rosenblatt, 1962; Schafer, 1968).
According to Rothstein, the two systems are related to each other in an
important way. He mentions, for example, that this relation facilitates
our understanding of intrasystemic conicts (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 specic situations. The end of this process is called a
representation. This means that a representation cannot be regarded as
an isolated happening. In the words of Rizzuto: it is the result of the synthetic function of the ego organizing a multitude of memorial experiences.
The nal synthetic result of that most active process is a highly signicant
representation for the needs of a particular moment (Rizzuto, 1979,
p. 56). She mentions here another example of the relation between the
functional and representational systems. The representational system consists of self- and object representations in ever changing states of integration (Rothstein, 1981, p. 440). The basic task of this system is to make us
psychologically viable people in the real world. In other words, it serves
the overall need of adaptation.
During the course of development, a self- or I representation will
be developed within this inner representational world. This means that,
in this model, the I is not identical with the ego. The I is rather one component in a composite structure. The I is described as the self-representation
as agent. The I is developed from the egos continuous sensation of itself
(Epstein, 1988, p. 64; Rothstein, 1981, p. 440). Development means
increased differentiation and integration [see Granqvist, Reijman, &
Cardena, 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 Leuners concept
of autosymbolic representation of intrapsychic conicts (Leuner, 1977,
1978). According to him, this psychological process is often activated in
situations of extreme emotional stress. From a psychoanalytical perspective, it belongs to the category of primary process activity, characterized

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for instance by a free ow of imagery and thoughts (Leuner, 1977, p. 74f.;

see also Loewald, 1978). It can be used by the egos synthetic function,
striving for homeostasis.
Now, let us see if this model sheds more light on the analysis of visionary experiences. The rst 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, rmly 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 difcult 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 rst safe. The years went by and Reidar went in
and out of jail. During many occasions, he thought that there must be a
better life to live.
During the 60s Reidar became a heroin addict. In 1965, when he was
in prison, a group of young Christians visited the place on Christmas Eve.
They sang and played music to the prisoners. To the surprise of most people, Reidar wished to talk with somebody in the group of youngsters. One
of them read from the Bible about the sinner who received a second
chance in life. The message appealed to Reidar. I did not become a
decided Christian that Christmas Eve, but something changed inside me.
A few years later, Reidar moved to Sweden. Eventually he settled down
in Gothenburg in an area where many buildings were scheduled to be
demolished, in the middle of dope nests. When he met an old friend from
prisonhis name was Jallehe 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

faeces, and when I vomited there was blood. He nally 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 nal
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 ofcer tried to talk to him,
using a megaphone, while simultaneously trying to reach for Reidar. At
this desperate moment he both heard and saw Jesus:
In front of me I saw the outline of a face. Was I hallucinating again? But the
outline became clearer. I did not see clear features, but I saw that there was
a crown of thorns on top of the head and that the hair was curly and shining
gold. It sort of radiated light from it, and I saw two hands, the palms of
which were wounded, stretched out to me. And I heard a voice, so soft
and fatherly loving, as I have never heard before. Reidar, Reidar, I heard.
You have tried everything in life. You have lost everything. There is nothing more left. The only thing you look forward to is to take your life. If
you decide to do that, you will be lost eternally and there will be no
memory of you. But you have forgotten to count with me. Put what is left
of your life in my hands and I will heal and save you.

Reidar does not know how he managed to climb down from the
bridge. From that moment on, his life became organized. About 18 months
later he married, and had two children. Reidar still visits prisons, but now
as a pastor, preaching the gospel of Jesus.
Bearing the model of personality in mind, a few general remarks on the
psychology of visionary experience can be given. The acute crisis prior to
the vision activates the synthetic function, which uses autosymbolic representations as a psychological process that is most suited for its goal: homeostasis, equilibrium. The result is a religious vision, establishing order in a
chaotic system. In other words, religious visions can be understood as autosymbolic representations of intrapsychic conicts, a dynamic process
chosen by the synthetic function in order to establish homeostasis. It is
striking that the content of the informants visions t so well into their situations of disorder. The religious visions immediately establish order in chaos.
The vision not only shapes the crisis, it solves it as well. Religious visions, or
object representations like Jesus, Muhammad, the Goddess Kali, or Angels,
are symbolic representations of order instead of chaos.1
1

A similar model has been proposed by Arieti (1976), who suggested a creative integration
of primary and secondary thinking, leading to a magic synthesis in what he calls the
tertiary process.

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In the case of Reidar, we can observe a childhood characterized by

loneliness and an often-absent father. His longing for peace and harmony
attracted him to the small group of young Christians, full of energy.
Shortly prior to the vision, he met his old prison friend Jalle, who told
him about the forgiving Christ. It is therefore not surprising that it is
Christ that Reidar encounters in a vision. Christ spoke to him in a soft
and fatherly voice, most probably related to the absent father. The vision
and its auditory feature is naturally also related to his need of peace and
harmony in his life. This harmony was established in a few transforming
and integrating seconds, when the synthetic function used autosymbolic
representations as a means to obtain homeostasis.

Case Study II: Encounter with Jesus in the DormitoryGertrud of Helfta (12561301)
In Germany, southwest of Magdeburg, stood a Benedictine convent in
a little place called Helfta. The convent was founded in 1229 and is known
for having been the residence of several of the most important female mystics in Germany. One of them was Gertrud, later known as Gertrud the
Great of Helfta. One of her main occupations was writing, especially on
mystical themes, both in Latin and German.
We know very little about Gertruds early life (see Marnau, 1993). It is
highly conceivable that she was placed in the convent when her parents died
when she was 5 years old. In the convent, she received an excellent education. The nuns studied not only great church fathers such as Augustine but
also important contemporary authors such as the Victorines and Cistercian
masters.
In her autobiographical writings, we nd some information about
Gertruds conversion and spiritual experiences. Just like many other
mystics, she divided her life into a before and an after, referring to her
conversion. In Gertruds 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
gure, 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 gure.
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

Is it because you have no one to conde 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 ne, holding
her hand, as though to plight a troth. Then the young Jesus added:
With my enemies you have licked the dust (cf. Ps. 72:9) and sucked
honey among thorns. Come back to me now, and I will inebriate you with
the torrent of my divine pleasure (Ps. 35:9). In the passage following
these words, the bridal mysticism of her writings is even more pronounced:
As he was saying this, I looked and saw, between him and me, that is to say,
on his right and on my left, a hedge of such length that I could not see the
end of it, either ahead or behind. The top of this hedge was bristling with
such large thorns that there seemed no way to get back to the youth. As I
hesitated, burning with desire and almost fainting, suddenly he seized me
and, lifting me up with the greatest ease, placed me beside him. But on
the hand with which he had just given me his promise I recognized those
bright jewels, his wounds, which have canceled all our debts. (Col. 2:14)

From now on she received numerous revelations. It is interesting to note

that despite the cataphatic character of the vision described above,
Gertrud now and then uses a type of language that clearly connects with
the apophatic tradition. Writing about the necessity of following Christ,
the soul can be led deeper into mystical union. Gertrud then formulates
some phrases that have the clear mark of apophatic language, using concepts like the abyss and mystical death:
Let me be submerged in the abyss of the sea of your most merciful goodness. Let me perish in the deluge of your living love, as a drop of the sea
dies in the depth of its fullness. Let me die, let me die, in the outpouring
of your immense mercy, as dies the spark of ame in the irresistible force
of the ood.3

Gertrud became known as a humble and wise woman, often visited for
spiritual guidance. Her spirituality centers around the concept of love,
Gods love to mankindHe loved us rstand, as a result of this gift,

Gertrud of Helfta, Documenta spiritualum exercitionum, 4, quoted in McGinn (1998,

p. 274).

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our love to God. But her writings are focused on the second person of the
Trinity. God is love and Jesus is Gertruds spouse. Inuenced by the Song
of Songs, the Book of Esther, and the language of human love, Gertrud
describes her spiritual experiences, sometimes in unvarnished erotic language. The bridegroom prefers to be alone with his bride, in the nuptial
chamber, where they can delight one another with the charm of intimate
converse and tender embraces (in Marnau, 1993: 32f; see also 28ff ).
In her later writings, Gertrud did not ascribe her spiritual experiences
such great importance. The more positive, tangible, cataphatic character
of her descriptions altered into a more abstract, apophatic language. Could
it be that one no longer is aware of ones 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 lifein 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, inuenced by what has been called the new mysticism (McGinn, 1998). It involved lively visualizations of the life of Jesus,
especially the Passion. Considering these circumstances, it comes as no
surprise that Gertruds trouble found a solution in a vision of Jesus.
According to the proposed model of interpretation, the vision can be
described as an autosymbolic representation of her need of consolation.
The content of the vision is clearly related to the spirituality of her time:
bridal mysticism and visualization as a main spiritual exercise.

Case Study III: A Trained Experience and Concluding Remarks

The model can also be applied to other types of religious experience.
The examples of visions, both contemporary and historical, illustrate spontaneous experiences, striking the visionary with surprise and wonder. How
about trained experiences during, for example, meditation? Let me present
a case that I know of well. It concerns a friend and colleague of mine, we
can call him Frank, who during a period of his life devoted himself to
Zen meditation. One day, when he already had quite a bit of experience,
he was shocked by getting in touch with a terrible anger he did not know
he possessed. He was about to break down all the furniture in the room.
What was the object of your anger? I asked him. He then told me a story
I partly knew. It was about a bad and long lasting relation to another

Altered Consciousness in Religion

colleague, working in the same eld. 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 ones
breathing, means that the adaptive functions of the ego structure are partly
shut down or inhibited. This means two things. First, the mediating functions weaken, they cannot adequately regulate the balance between the
unconscious id and the superego. Second, this in turn means a weakening
of defences. In such a state, the green light has been given for the constant
pressure of the unconscious id towards the ego.4 Metaphorically speaking,
when the defensive forces are absent, and when there is no one in the
observation tower (the adaptive functions), and the negotiators rest (the
mediating functions), then foreign powers (unconscious needs) can
invade the landscape. In the case of Frank, it concerns a strong emotion,
suppressed for years. Other emotions can, of course, also be actualized.
In addition, meditative practice can also lead to creative solutions. A state
of receptivity allows for other cognitive processes to break through, for
example associative processes, so needed in creativity.
Now, does this model also have a heuristic value when it comes to the
so-called pure consciousness event? Yes, I think so. These experiences do
occur spontaneously, as Robert K. C. Forman has shown in his books. In
such cases, they are retrospectively interpreted. In most cases, however,
they are reported by so-called classical mystics in the great mystical traditions. We again touch upon the concept of mystical death. A denition 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 denes mystical
death as:
the deep absorption in the object of belief which completely wipes out the
mystics waking consciousness or mental life, the whole of his normal
human self, but at the same time makes him go through an incomprehensible inner transformation corresponding to his highest religious and ethical strivings and ideals.

Here I am using the word ego in the classical psychoanalytical sense, as a component in
Freuds 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, 133189, and 379ff. Unfortunately, the monumental
work of Arbman in three volumes did not receive the international attention it deserves.

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Arbman not only describes what Forman depicts as the pure consciousness event, he also mentions the other side of the picture: the transformed self, perfect man (Susm) or the true human being (Meister
Eckhart), or whatever that state has been called in the mystical traditions.
However, Arbman did not present a psychological interpretation of mystical death. With the aid of the organismic model of the ego structure, as
presented above, we can explain it. Mystics in different traditions do
describe mystical death and spiritual transformation as the goals of the
mystical life. In order to reach these goals, they use a whole range of spiritual exercises or techniques. These techniques usually aim at a narrowing
of the eld of awareness through meditation, prayer, isolation, or a combination of them. In terms of our model, these techniques lead to an
inhibition not only of the egos adaptive functions but also of its defensive
and mediating functions. This is a process of extinction or annihilation,
resulting also in the inhibition of our inner representations and the experience of the I as an active agent. Most of us are aware of the fact that
we do things best when we are not aware of doing them. The mystic
describes a similar process, but more radical, and in a religious context.
But the experience of no-self (Roberts, 1982) does not mean that
the whole ego-structure has been inhibited. The experience of nothing
(Meister Eckhart uses the medieval German word niht) is also a something
(medieval German iht). From a scholarly perspective, Stace (1960) mentioned the vacuum-plenum paradox. This concept agrees with Eckharts
distinction between iht and niht, or Saint John of the Crosss 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 Formans position can be fruitfully combined with the constructivist
view as defended by Katz. Humans construct most of the time, but
during exercises in for example relaxation or meditation, religiously
motivated or not, we do our best to deconstruct. When we are successful
and reach the goal of our strivings, the ground or perhaps counterpoint of our personality, we will eventually return to the world of phenomenaand 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

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CHAPTER 13

Colored Inklings: Altered States

of Consciousness and Literature
Wendy E. Cousins
Science arose from poetrywhen times change the two can meet again on a
higher level as friends.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Dawn of the Storytellers: A History of Writing

The need to tell and hear stories seems to be an essential part of human
nature, and the point sometime in the 4th millennium BCE when such stories
began to be written down marks a distinct shift in human development. History is dened by the written word. The fact that it is written is the crucial illuminating aspect; behind that vast swathe of unrecorded prehistory lies a dark
ocean of suppositions. Until a few thousand years ago, all of humanity was
illiterate, yet the children of all human cultures are able to acquire literacy if
given a chance. Literacy skills were a response to the invention of external
symbols, entirely cultural in origin, but this literate culture had the capacity
to capitalize on untapped cerebral potential and reprogram the human brain
in its own image. Literacy is a cultural add-on to the normal preliterate state
of the brain, yet it determines a great deal about how the normal operations
of the individual conscious mind are carried out, affecting both the growth
and synaptic richness of the brain. And the effects of literacy do not stop
with the reorganisation of the individual brain; it transformed the collective
architecture of cognition and how the larger human community thinks and
remembers. For the rst time, humans were able to separate the spoken from
the speaker and thereby to assess the material of thought in a detached manner, furthering the scope for critical activity and rational thought (Goody,
1977). With consciousness liberated from the limitations of the brains biological memory systems by the existence of a system for external storage,
humanity acquired an entire new realm of possibilities (Donald, 2001).

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

cultural storehouse of books, maps, legal manuscripts, text messages, timetables, twitter, calendars, computers, and the World Wide Web. The development of literacy effected a shift in human experience second only to the
development of language itself by extending our capacity to think beyond
the here and now. Individual awareness can be preserved and made accessible
to the masses in a way that was never possible in preliterate societies in a form of
everyday telepathy, for as Schopenhauer once said, reading is thinking with
other peoples minds. Spells and other attempts to control the course of events
are dependent upon the magic of words (Goody, 1977, p. 149). With text, writers may pass on their thoughts to a reader across the void of the centuries and
the dead speak to the living. Small wonder that reading and writing were once
skills regarded with awe as nonordinary aptitudes and that the popular imagination associated books with magic (Atwood, 2002).
The phrase stream of consciousness to indicate the ow of inner experience was rst used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890). Writers throughout the ages have described the altered states of consciousness
(ASC) that arise when this stream is diverted from its normal courses, from
the visions and dreams described by mystics in the earliest religious texts to
modern accounts written by neuroscientists [see Ustinova, and Geels, this
volume]. Sigmund Freud described Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians
as his masters and maintained that the essential themes of his theories were
based on the intuition of the poets (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 460). In Modern
Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung (1933) also declared that it is obvious that
psychology can be brought to bear on the study of literature, yet long before
the development of modern psychology, humans had used literature to
reveal the human psyche. Literary traditions in both the East and West have
continually returned to the question of consciousness and description of its
characteristics. The Vedic literature of India is one such textual reference
point, as in Vedic Science the levels of the mind are correlated to the levels
of language (Grace, 2007; Haney, 2002) [see Shear, this volume]. A lesserknown Western literary perspective (and from a mathematician at that)
was put forward by Lewis Carroll, who believed that human beings were
capable of various psychical states with varying degrees of consciousness
and devised his own three-layer taxonomy of ASC, with a ne distinction
between feeling eerie and being in a trance1 (Carroll, 1893).
1

Carrolls three-layer taxonomy comprised the ordinary state, which precludes the admission of the fantastic, the liminal eerie state in which there is consciousness of both
quotidian reality and the otherworldly, and the trance state in which only the extraordinary world is perceived.

Colored Inklings

Actively engaging with literary works should uncover something

important about the nature of human consciousness. This point of view
is endorsed by Martin Heidegger in his Poetry, Language and Thought:
If we reach and enter that course, it will lead thinking into a dialogue with
poetry, a dialogue which is of the history of Being. Scholars of literary history inevitably consider that dialogue to be an unscientic violation of what
such scholarship takes to be the facts. Philosophers consider the dialogue to
be a helpless aberration into fantasy. But destiny pursues its course
untroubled by all that. (Heidegger, 1971, p. 96)

From its earliest days, writing has been part of the human quest to express
our being, and it is striking that the earliest writings tell stories of the
development of conscious awareness and the fear of that consciousness
ending at the moment of death. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale inscribed
on stone tablets a thousand years before the Iliad and the Bible, the poet
tells of how Enkidu the wild man makes love to Shamhat the harlot priestess for 6 days and 7 nights, an event that awakens his consciousness as a
human being rather than an animal, for now he had reason, and wide
understanding (George, 2003). Similarly, in the Bible (Genesis 3:3),
Adam and Eve partake of the forbidden fruit, their eyes are opened, and
they realize that they are nakedanother story of sudden consciousness
and self-awareness, but followed in this instance by shame, a selfconscious emotion indicating the underlying presence of Theory of Mind
Ancient scriptures may not give accurate accounts of the evolution of the
species Homo sapiens, but perhaps they can shed more light on our awakening into conscious awareness.
The creation of literature has been long thought to involve other, nonordinary states of mind. In the Ion, Plato suggests that poetry is art of
divine madness, or inspiration. The Muse speaks and the poet is only
her mouthpiece; the authorial voice is not that of the normal person but
mysterious and other. Yet in The Philosophy of Composition (1846), Edgar
Allan Poe poured cold water on this notion of writers composing in a species of ne frenzyan ecstatic intuition, pointing instead to the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought . . . at the cautious selections and
rejectionsat the painful erasures and interpolations . . . which, in
ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio. Nevertheless, Freud returns to the idea of the writer operating
outside a normative state of consciousness in his 1907 lecture Creative
Writers and Day-Dreaming. For Freud, there is an analogy between the
activity of literary creation and the world of daydreams, play, and fantasy

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indulged in by children. He argues that the writer creates a world of

phantasy which he takes very seriously (Freud,1908/1962, p. 144) and
that readers derive pleasure from literature by identication with this ctional world and through experiencing the release of pent-up psychic tension brought about by the writers skill in freeing them to enjoy these
daydreams without self-reproach or shame. Thus, the writers experience
of imaginary worlds can also open doors for readers to experience their
own kind of altered consciousness. A peculiar transitivity, one that confounds distinctions between self and other (Clark, 1997) and a possible
explanation for the peculiar power of ction 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
(Pensees no. 147).

The Gift of the Gods: Writing and Religious Experience

Writing emerged independently in many different cultures and in
numerous locations throughout the ancient world and was not the creation
of any one people. Early myths attributed its invention to divine intervention. The Sumerians believed it was one of the arts of civilization brought
from heaven by the goddess Inanna, while Egyptians believed it was the creation of the goddess Seshat, whose titles included Mistress of Books and
Foremost in the Library, and it was taught to mortals by her masculine
counterpart Thoth, later known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus.
Unsurprisingly, given these apparently divine origins, writing was profoundly interconnected with religion and associated with a priestly class
who often carefully guarded this knowledge as a sacred or magic power.
The divine word was revealed in the form of holy books. All major world
religions produced sacred texts, often in highly unusual circumstances,
which strongly suggest ASC. The Torah was given to Moses on Mount
Sinai amidst thunder, lightning, and blaring of trumpets and we are told
his face was shining as he returned with the tablets of stone. The Quran
was rst 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 Quran was revealed to him, the
Prophet told of two distinct ways:

Colored Inklings

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. 4445)

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 rst of his visions, he was in
the Spirit when he heard a loud voice bidding him, What thou seest,
write in a book. While the meaning of the expression in the Spirit is
open to interpretation, it does seem to imply some altered state of awareness. Tradition has it that Saint John received his apocalyptic visions while
living as a hermit in a cave on the island of Patmos. A state of isolation
potentially resulting in the kind of sensory deprivation that facilitates the
production of an ASC through the reduction of extroceptive stimulation
and/or motor activity (Tart, 1990).
At rst 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 denition inexpressible) into words. Nevertheless, it is striking
that the recipients of such spiritual favours often write copiously in their
attempt to describe them. The incommunicable seems to create the drive
to communicate, but why would descriptions of mystical and creative states
be similar? James Joyce once commented that I like the notion of the Holy
Ghost being in the inkbottle (Ellmann, 1976, p. 100). Alternatively, Alice
Flaherty (2004) has proposed four possible explanations drawing on her
dual experiences as a neurologist and as a person with both bipolar disorder
and hypergraphia, the overwhelming urge to write. It may be that because
creativity and mystical experience are both pleasing and culturally valued
experiences, metaphors from one pleasure are freely used to describe
another, just as love might be described as warm or sweet. A second hypothesis, the one shared by the previously mentioned saints and prophets, is that
writing is driven by God. A third possibility is that literary and religious
inspiration use a similar language because of the ancient link between the
arts and religion. For the greater part of human history, most art has been
sacred art. Finally, it may be that literature and religious experience arise
from similar brain regions, a hypothesis that complements but does not necessarily replace the previous three explanations.
Religiosity in general and dissociated states in particular, have been
found to be associated with activity in the temporal lobes (Bear & Fedio,

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1977; Geschwind, 1983; Mandel, 1980) and hypergraphia sometimes also

coupled with hyperreligiosity and hyposexuality has been described as
characteristic behavior seen during an interictal phase in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (Waxman & Geschwind, 1975) [see Noirhomme &
Laureys, Volume 2]. It has been suggested that hypergraphia occurs more
frequently in patients with right-sided nondominant temporal lobe lesions
(Roberts, Robertson, & Trimble, 1982). However, both language and
rhythm are particularly associated with the contralateral left hemisphere,
and it is possible that hypofunction in the right hemisphere may lead to disinhibition in the left hemisphere, with release of literary abilities (Mendez,
2005). Saint Pauls dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus has often
been attributed to epilepsy; his prodigious letter writing to the churches he
subsequently founded might also have its origin within the temporal lobes
(Landsborough, 1987). Flaherty (2004) is persuaded that Lewis Carroll also
had temporal lobe epilepsy and notes that several of his peculiarities, including his capacity for what he called looking glass writing, his love of violet ink,
and the 98,721 letters he wrote from his late 20s until his death at the age of
65 also point to hypergraphia. His descriptions of hookah-smoking caterpillars and the surreal experiences induced by nibbling on a mushroom in
the Alice books (Carroll, 1865, 1871) have also led to the conclusion that
Carrolls fascination with altered states may have been aided by his own
empirical investigations into the chemistry of mind alteration (Plant, 1999,
p. 94) [see Presti, Volume 2].

Fierce Chemistry: Writing on Drugs

Drugs have also been used to alter brain chemistry and intensify the
visionary experiences sought by the devout and the curious. Noting that
some plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules
as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared, Shanon (2008) has even queried
whether Moses may have been under the inuence of hallucinogens when
he brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai [see Mishor,
McKenna & Callaway, Volume 2]. Portrayals of drug use in literature can
be traced back to the earliest times, with Homer telling in the Odyssey
how Helen of Troy had learned the use of narcotics during a visit to the
land of the Pharaohs, a skill put to good use during a particularly depressing party when as an antidote to grief she slipped a substance called
nepenthe, assumed to be either an opium or hemp derivative, into the
wine of morose Greek soldiers, bidding them instead to take ye joy in

Colored Inklings

the telling of tales, and I will tell you one that ts 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 Su 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 Shakespeares mention in Sonnet 76 of Invention
in a noted weed. Thackeray (1999) argues that Shakespeares use of the
term weed is not only a veiled reference to hemp but also a reference to
the perception that the use of hallucinogenic compounds was a source of
inspiration for the invention of verse. In Sonnet 38, Shakespeare appeals
for a Tenth Muse in addition to the nine classical Muses as sources of
inspiration, and it is suggested that this Tenth Muse was cannabis. Thackeray et al. (2001) claim to have found further support for this theory, with
the chemical analysis of organic residues in clay pipes from StratfordUpon-Avon in England uncovering chemical indications of cannabis.
Shakespeare may or may not have been a stoner, but in the early19th-century Romantic period, an explosion of drug use certainly erupted
among writers. This phenomenon was perhaps most famously recorded
by the essayist Thomas De Quincey in his largely autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821/1994), in which he gives an account
of his early life and the growth and effects of his opium addiction. In a
foreshadowing of Freuds thoughts on literary creativity and dreams, De
Quincey notes that the main phenomenon by which opium expressed
itself to him permanently, and the sole phenomenon that was communicable, lay in the dreams and the peculiar dream scenery that followed its
use: Here is the briefest possible abstract of the total caseThe nal
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 inuence of opium and laudanum, a
mixture of alcohol and opium derivatives, easily available without prescription. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge invited a friend to come for a
visit, he coaxed him to bring along some drugs and I will give a fair trial
to opium, henbane, and nepenthe . . . By the bye, he added, I have
always considered Homers account of nepenthe as a banging lie2 (cited
in Ebin, 1965, p. 103). Opium excited Coleridges fascination with the
2
A pun perhaps on the word Bhanga preparation of cannabis used in India and
Pakistan.

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potential for dreams to unlock the secrets of creativity and poetry,

memory, and imagination. He became convinced that not all dreams could
be explained away in terms of reections and confused echoes of waking
thoughts and experiences; the most intense seemed to have their source
in a very different world. Writing in his Shakespearian Criticism, he noted
that it was not a mere dream but takes place when the waking state of
the brain is recommencing, and most often during a rapid alternation, a
twinkling, as it were, of sleeping and waking (cited in Plant, 1999, p. 19).
The intermediate states between waking and sleep that so fascinated
Coleridge are now known to be conducive to hypnagogic (prior to sleep
onset) and hypnopompic (upon arousal from sleep) hallucinations, both
visual and auditory, often of a nature and intensity enough to convince the
percipient of their reality (Sherwood, 2002). Coleridge famously claimed
to have perceived the entire course of his phantasmagoric poem Kubla Khan
upon awakening from an opiate-induced sleep whereupon, having a distinct recollection of the whole work, he took up his pen and began to write,
getting only as far as line 54 before he was interrupted by the notorious person on business from Porlock (an individual whom De Quincey speculates
might have been Coleridges 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 Coleridges 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 inuence on Coleridges 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 sawwith shut eyes, but acute mental visionI saw the pale
student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy,
half-vital motion.

Of course the use of drugs was not conned solely to English writers;
19th-century French writers such as Theophile Gautier, Arthur Rimbaud,

Colored Inklings

and Charles Baudelaire were to become collectively known as the Hashish

Club, and the inuence of drugs on literature stretched into the 20th century and beyond. The rapid development of pharmacological research in
the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries led to the discovery of new
drugs and the synthesis of the active principles of familiar ones. Among
these new drugs was mescaline, a drug derived from the peyote cactus, a
plant with a long history of ritualistic and medicinal use by Native Americans [see Schaefer, Volume 2]. Mescaline was isolated in 1895 and synthesized in 1919 and became the latest successor to opium and cannabis
as a creator of articial paradises. Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis published accounts of their experiences with mescaline emphasizing its aesthetic and metaphysical properties and pointing out that the intellect was
relatively unimpaired (Ellis, 1897, 1898; Mitchell, 1896). It has been proposed (Durr, 1970, p. vii) that the similarities between the world of psychedelic vision and the world of imaginative literature are so numerous and
striking because they share a similar mode of being and of apprehension.
The drug gained popularity in literary bohemia, inspiring Aleister
Crowley and W. B. Yeats, but peyote had somewhat less of a visionary
effect on William James who, when he sampled some, found its only effect
was stomach cramps and vomiting. In a letter to his brother in 1896, he
wrote, I took one bud 3 days ago, vomited and spattered for 24 hours . . .
I will take the visions on trust (Skrupskelis & Berkeley, 1997). The rather
more adventurous surrealist Antonin Artaud travelled to Mexico on a voyage of shamanic tourism and after participating in an all-night peyote
ceremony with Tarahumara people came to value the dangerous dissociations it seems Peyote provokes, and which I had for 20 years sought by
other means (Artaud, 1936/1988, p. 391); Coleridge, he felt, could be
written off as a weakling because He got scared.
It was Aldous Huxley who rst drew attention of the wider reading
public to the properties of psychedelic drugs. Although rumours persist
that it was Aleister Crowley who rst introduced him to peyote after dining together in Berlin in 1930, his experimentation with psychedelics
began in earnest in The Doors of Perception3 (1954/2004). He relates his
rst experience of an afternoon under the inuence of a single pill of mescaline and the startling shift in his conscious awareness:

The title is a reference to William Blakes 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, innite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all
things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

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I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of
poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me
on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not
present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object . . . . To those in whom
the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously
drab, limited and uninteresting. (p. 5)

An hour an a half later, looking a simple ower arrangement in a glass vase

could provoke the realisation that: I was seeing what Adam had seen on
the morning of his creationthe miracle, moment by moment, of naked
existence.
Huxley argued that the human brain in its normal state functioned
mainly as a lter to screen out the vast quantities of perceptual information not relevant to biological survival and that the mind was primarily a
reducing valve that excludes the total content of Mind at Large, but
when subjected to psychedelic drugs, glimpses of the innite were possible. He believed that mescaline and lysergic acid were drugs of unique
distinction that should be exploited for the supernaturally brilliant
visionary experience they offered. Yet despite the hallucinogenic success
of The Doors of Perception, Walt Disney still rejected his screenplay for
the animated version of Alice in Wonderland (1951) because it used too
many big words. Huxleys faith in psychedelics remained strong and he
died, as per his written request, with 100 micrograms of LSD running
through his system.
For the 1960s generation, Huxley represented a new freedom to explore
other realities distinct from the Western industrial complex, an opportunity
that was not lost on Peruvian writer Carlos Castaneda. Starting with The
Teachings of Don Juan (1968), Castaneda wrote a series of books that
describe his purported training in traditional Yaqui shamanic practices
under the tutelage of sorcerer Don Juan Matus, a native expert in the cultivation and use of psychotropic plants as a means to reach states of non
ordinary reality. The anthropologist Edith Turner described Castanedas
work as a liberation for, He has taken uslike Dantethrough 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 Castanedas 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 ction, if
it is that, is authentic (Drury, 1989). An adept author, Castaneda had

Colored Inklings

enchanted his public, and his invented tradition masterfully conjured up

the experiences of those who had tried hallucinogens and those who experienced the impact of a more mystical and less rational view of the world
(Hardman, 2007).
Not every author has been quite so enthusiastic about psychedelics;
stimulants such as tobacco and caffeine remained (and remain) longtime companions to literary endeavour. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde during 6 days and nights of a
(medically prescribed) cocaine high, and this story of a man who takes a
drug to give life to a previously hidden side of his own character only to
nd it uncontrollable also carries the particular avor of Stevensons own
drug experience. Perhaps all writers on drugs become ghost writers for
drugsor stranger stillperhaps 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 theres no wisdom there. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning forgot what it was. (Leary, 1983, p. 61)

It has been argued that alcohol can give writers condence 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 conrmed alcoholic, once dubbed
alcohol the Giant Killer of American Letters, and it is perhaps signicant
that ve of the rst seven American-born writers awarded the Nobel Prize
for literature had problems with alcohol: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene ONeill,
William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck (Oyebode,
2009). Thankfully, other addiction-free methods for altering consciousness were conveniently available.

Mesmeric Revelations: Writing and Hypnotic States

Induced by suggestion, hypnosis serves as a noninvasive, drug-free
method of achieving a shift in conscious awareness, including access to a
particular state of mind hovering between sleep and wakefulness that
authors have found to be conducive to creativity. Hypnosis and its antecedents, mesmerism and animal magnetism, have been incorporated into
literary works ever since Franz Anton Mesmers charismatic career rst

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commended them to persons of fashion [see Cardena & Alvarado, this

volume]. The Romantic eras fascination for psychic displacements and
disturbances is reected in Shelleys early poem A Magnetic Lady to her
Patient (1832), in which he reverses the conventional gender roles and
gives the woman dominion over the man. Sending her subject into a mesmeric sleep, she invokes amnesia as a cure for heartbreak, bidding her
thwarted lover to Sleep, sleep on! forget thy pain; My hand is on thy
brow, My spirit on thy brain.
In a similar vein, Robert Browning published a 27-stanza poem (incidentally one of his shorter verses) entitled simply Mesmerism, a work
shaped around the uidic 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 Poes
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 scientic report (South, 1846/2010).
Hypnosis also serves as a theme in the two best-selling novels of the n
de sie`cle, Bram Stokers Dracula (1897) and George du Mauriers Trilby
(1895). In Dracula, the eponymous Count uses hypnotic abilities to satisfy
his lust for blood and to control the mind of heroine Mina Harker. However, these powers are turned against him, when via hypnotic guidance
from the Dutch doctor Van Helsing, Minas telepathic ability to read Draculas thoughts allows the vampire-hunters to track the eeing 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 artists model becomes an operatic diva, performing in an
amnesiac trance under the spell of the egotistical mesmerist Svengali and
acquiring acclaim through a voice not entirely her own. When Svengali
is stricken with a heart attack at a public performance, the hapless Trilby
is unable to sing in tune and subjected to laughter, hisses, and cat-calls
from the cheated audience.
Apart from providing lurid subject matter for authors, hypnosis has
been used as a method for stimulating literary creativity and has been suggested as a treatment for writers block (McGuinness, 1998; Stanton,
1986). In French surrealist circles, hypnosis also played a key role. The writer
Andre Breton drew inspiration from psychoanalysis, particularly Freuds
emphasis on the importance of dreams and the unconscious, and French
dynamic psychology, particularly Jean-Martin Charcots study of
hypnosis and Pierre Janets observations of spiritualist mediums
(Gibson, 1987). Breton dened surrealism as a certain psychic automatism, a near equivalent to the dream state, whose limits are today quite

Colored Inklings

difcult to dene (Breton, 1924/2005a, p. 729) and noted that in 1919, his
attention had been called to the more or less fragmentary sentences that
arise from unknown origins when sleep is near. Considering these fragments with their remarkable imagery to be rst-rate poetic material, he
and others began to contemplate how to induce such material into existence
by voluntary means.
Breton and Soupaults publication Les Champs magnetiques (1920) was
his rst 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
rst day of this experiment, they had about 50 sheets of writing conveying
a very special sense of the picturesque. Explicitly stating that the source
of this magical dictation was the unconscious, Breton noted its elusiveness and its tendency to ee at the slightest intrusion from the outside
world (Breton, 1922/2005b).
Automatic writing (or psychography) is itself surprisingly difcult to
dene in a satisfactory manner, but it is generally considered to be the production of scripts that do not arise from the conscious thoughts of the
writer. Considered by some to be evidence of spirit communication or
incidents of thought transference (i.e., telepathy), alternatively, some psychologists and psychiatrists have considered automatic writing as a pathologic disturbance indicating evidence of an untoward splitting or
dissociation of the personality. Breton also held some reservations about
its employment; his own immoderate use of it had led to some disturbing
hallucinatory experiences, and at times he detected the intrusion of conscious elements that defeated the purpose of the experiment.
Following Freud, the surrealists made a regular practice of recording
dreams for interpretation, but these too were suspect and susceptible to
the failings of memory. Rene Crevel proposed hypnosis as a solution; he
had been taught techniques of inducing an ASC or hypnotic sleep by a
spiritualist medium, a certain Madam D., and had been impressed by the
results. Although rejecting the principles of spiritualism outright and
denying the possibility of communication with the dead, the surrealists
were nevertheless fascinated by the mental phenomena involved. They
determined to hold a seance. The proper conditions were created: darkness and silence in the room with a chain of hands across the table. Breton
and two friends watched as Crevel entered a hypnotic state and began a
declamatory diction, with sighs and the sing-song stressing of words and
slurring of others. On awakening, Crevel reportedly had no recollection

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of what he had said, and the experiment was repeated without him. This
time Robert Desnos, who had previously believed himself to be impervious to hypnosis,4 let his head drop onto his arms and began scratching
the table compulsively. On awakening of his own volition, he was
unaware of his behavior; however, the scratching was interpreted as indicating the desire to write. At the next session, in similar circumstances,
Desnos was provided with pencil and paper and, without moving his
head, began to write; interrogated by the others, he answered with cryptic
phrases and drawings (Breton, 2005a).
So began an extraordinary outbreak of altered states among the surrealists, an epoque des sommeils. Hypnosis, dreams, and automatisms seemed
different paths converging on the ancient realm of visionaries and savages,
poets and prophets, but events soon began to take a disquieting turn.
Desnos could no longer be easily recalled from the fantastic otherworld.
He sank at will into weird ASC, purported to be in telepathic communication with artist Marcel Duchamp in New York, and, in a t 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
surrealite in which the contradictory states of dream and reality would
one day be resolved and proclaimed an approach to literature that deed
logic and satised the basic human yearning for the marvellous (Browder,
1967). The Manifesto also contained a certain number of practical recipes,
entitled Secrets of the Magic Surrealist Art, such as the following instructions for composition (Breton, 1924/2005a, p. 731):
After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you.
Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget
about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep
reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to
everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough
so that you will not remember what youre writing and be tempted to reread

Breton records that Desnos had frustrated two public hypnotists (Messrs Donato and
Benevol) several days previously.
5
An echo of the grisly events of Crevels 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

what you have written. The rst sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence
unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard. It is
somewhat of a problem to form an opinion about the next sentence; it
doubtless partakes both of our conscious activity and of the other, if one
agrees that the fact of having written the rst entails a minimum of perception. This should be of no importance to you, however; to a large extent, this
is what is most interesting and intriguing about the Surrealist game. The fact
still remains that punctuation no doubt resists the absolute continuity of the
ow with which we are concerned, although it may seem as necessary as the
arrangement of knots in a vibrating cord. Go on as long as you like. Put your
trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur . . .

The French surrealists were not alone in their experiments with hypnosis,
dreams, and automatic writing. In previous decades, Irish writers in the
circle surrounding the visionary poet George William Russell (AE) had
learned from him meditative techniques to access ASC and used these to
assist with their writing, although in their case it was with distinctly more
supernaturalistic overtones. Writers as diverse as W. B. Yeats, the duo
Somerville and Ross, and James Cousins were variously involved in mysticism, spiritualism, Theosophy, and ceremonial magic; automatic writing
mediums Hester Dowden, Eileen Garrett, and Geraldine Cummins were
also features of the Anglo-Irish literary scene (Cousins, 2008). James
Joyce, with his disdain for the mystical overtones of the Celtic Twilight
(which he punningly referred to as the cultic toilette), was a notable
exception, but nevertheless his stream-of-consciousness style of writing
owes something to this milieu. Geraldine Cummins, who had enjoyed
some success as a playwright before achieving fame as one of the most prodigious automatic writing mediums, described the experience of such
apparently spirit-directed communications in terms that might have
sounded familiar to the French surrealists and yet harks back to the
concept of ancient poets listening for their muse:
I am in a condition of half-sleep, a kind of dream-state that yet, in its peculiar way, has more illumination than ones waking state. I have at times distinctly the sensation of a dreamer who has no conscious creative control
over the ideas that are being formulated in words. I am a mere listener,
and through my stillness and passivity I lend my aid to the stranger who
is speaking. It is hard to put such a psychological condition into words.
I have the consciousness that my brain is being used by a stranger all the
time. It is just as if an endless telegram is being tapped out on it. (Cummins,
1955, pp. 144145)

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To produce the writing, she would sit at a table, cover her eyes with her
left hand and concentrate on stillness. She would then fall into what
was described as a light trance or dream state. Her hand would then begin
to write. Usually, her spirit control (a rather imperious entity called
Astor) would make some introductory remarks and announce that
another entity was waiting to speak. Because of her ASC, and also because
of the speed at which the writing was produced, an assistant would sit
beside her and remove each sheet of paper as it was lled and quickly lift
her hand to the top of the new page, where the writing would continue
without break or punctuation. It is claimed that in one sitting, Cummins
wrote 2,000 words in 75 minutes, whereas her normal compositions were
laboriously put together, perhaps 800 words in 7 or 8 hours.
Although Cummins laid some claim to her own modest abilities as a
hypnotist, she noted the more remarkable hypnotic aptitude of her Dublin
contemporary, W. B. Yeats (Cummins, 1951). Moving on from his youthful n de sie`cle experimentation with hashish and mescaline and despite
early misgivings with regard to hypnosis, Yeats had become somewhat of
an expert in altered states and their practical applications for the poet in
achieving inspiration. The inuence of hypnotic techniques in Yeatss
writing is particularly apparent, with the use of subtle rhythm and repetition deliberately employed as a hypnotist might use the recurring ash 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 x
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 didnt mesmerise me (cited in Epstein, 2007).
In Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918/1959, pp. 343346), 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 Yeatss lifetime, was his collaboration with his
mediumistic wife George, rst through automatic writing and then
through a succession of hypnotic sleeps during which messages were

Colored Inklings

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 Yeatss 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. 277278)

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 dened as a psychiatric diagnosis, Poes tale of
William Wilson (1845/1990) and Stevensons story of Jekyll and Hyde
(1886) are well-known examples of this literary trope. Nor was Yeats the
only writer to conjure up storytelling alternates; Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet James Merrill (working with his partner David Jackson) did the same
in the Changing Light at Sandover (1992), a trilogy invoking a cast of otherworldy narrators including Dante, Goethe, Blake, and even (perhaps
appropriately) W. B. Yeats himself. Atwood (2002) has argued that all
writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet
the author of the book you have just read, for with the passing of time,
things have changed and the person who wrote the book is now a different
person. You can never step into the same stream twice.6 In his supernatural tale The Private Life (1893), Henry James explored what he felt was the
contrast of Robert Brownings unremarkable personal presence in comparison to the glorious appeal of his poetry by creating an equally celebrated ctional writer whose cheerfully bland public persona is
compensated for by a ghostly and private alter ego, writing alone in a

James Joyces 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 Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us
by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. The river, consciousness and the narrative are circular and cyclical, potentially ever-repeating.

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darkened room, utterly absorbed in his brilliant work. Jorge Luis Borges
took this metaphor of the literary double to its furthest, yet most personal,
point when in a piece called Borges and I he went so far as to split
himselfBorgesin two.
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk
through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps
mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork
on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list
of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps,
18th-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson;
he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the
attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive
his literature, and this literature justies me. It is no effort for me to confess
that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to
the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, denitively,
and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom
of falsifying and magnifying things . . . I shall remain in Borges, not in
myself . . . I do not know which one of us has written this page. (Borges,
1964, pp. 246247)

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 fora unity
writing disrupts (Goody, 1977). Max Weber memorably remarked upon
the progressive disenchantment of the world, but a powerful countercurrent to the forces of rationality is also evident (Landy & Saler, 2009),
and the sense of wonder engendered by religion and myth in earlier times
has not disappeared. In their explorations of multiplicity and fractured
identity, it seems that Yeats, Merrill, and Borges created strategies for
enacting a literary re-enchantment.

Conclusions
The sheer variety of consciousness-altering techniques employed by
such a diversity of authors across the ages may lead one to the tempting
conclusion that the method of achieving an altered state is less important
than the fact that such a state can be accessed and yet there is a paradox.
In achieving the ASC that lift writers beyond their habitual state; apart

Colored Inklings

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. 6465).
Yet moving beyond the requirements of artice and endeavor, good
writing demands something more from the artist. Literature is redeemed
from triviality by the fact that it does not just describe the world around us,
quotidian realities or the catalogues of information that might be found
in encyclopedias, but because it engages with all the conditions to which
the human spirit can come. All good writers express the state of their
souls, even (and perhaps especially) if that soul is in a state of damnation
(Chesterton, 1911/2008). Literature is an interim report from the consciousness of artists (Rushdie, 1991) and from their forays into altered
states, writers have sent back dispatches from the furthest edges of conscious experience, but the work does not end there. Literature can itself
induce ASC. The psychic dissolution of space that occurs when we read,
the experience of being neither here nor there, the liminal state between
the inside of a book and the outside world simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both by mixing them together (de Certeau, 1995, p. 159)
can be extended to the point where through artistic form of language, frail
humanity, subject to death, becomes capable of accessing, experiencing,
and being something of an entirely different nature, something not subject
to death (Grossman, 2009). A description that seems perilously close to
St. Augustines description of God.7
Writing in the rst century BCE, the Roman lyric poet Horace closed
his third book of odes with the poem conventionally entitled The Poets
Immortal Fame. In it he makes the claim that I shall not altogether die,
but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on shall
I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time. This implicit likening of literary achievement to spiritual transcendence and immortality is one of the
most extravagant claims that Western culture has made for such an
achievement (Braden & Taylor, 2000, p. 96). But more than two millennia
later, rather than mere boast, the claim seems almost modest.

O most high and most near, most secret, yet most present . . . wholly everywhere, and
nowhere in space (Confessions, Book VI).

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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my thanks to the Perrott-Warrick Fund, administered by Trinity College, Cambridge, for their nancial support and to
the late Professor David Fontana for his wise and inspirational guidance
and his luminous integrity. This work is dedicated to his memory.

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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 denitional problems surrounding consciousness (Austin, 1998; Block, 1995,
1997, p. 227; Carden a, 2009; Di Benedetto, 2010; Nunn, 2009), for
purposes of this essay, I assume that there are ordinary states of consciousness (or modes of conscious awareness) and that there are transition or
borderline experiences between and among these ordinary states of consciousness (Austin, 1998; Tart, 1975b). Cardena (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. 306307), 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 specic approaches to performer training and performance,
patterns that reect systemic logics, ways of perceiving and experiencing
assumed to be different from ordinary consciousness and that may lead to
a transformation of consciousness.

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What Is Performance?
Derived from the Middle English verb parformen, performen, performance is the act or process of enactment, of bringing something to completion. In the eld of contemporary performance studies (Schechner,
2006), performance refers to a broad spectrum of human activities including discrete genres where an act or process is brought to completionritual/shamanic performancesaesthetic performances across a range of
activities including contemporary mind-altering, participatory secular
festivals such as the Burning Man Festival (Bowditch, 2010; Di Benedetto,
2010); [see St John, this volume]; performances in everyday life (Goffman,
1959); embodied practices such as sports, martial arts, yoga, and other contemporary forms of body work; the use of drama techniques in applied/
therapeutic contexts (Woods, 2009); forms of imaginative play (Huizinga,
1970; Winnicott, 1971); and contemporary mediated performances, among
others. In this essay, I focus on discrete types of live performance (ritual/
shamanic and aesthetic performances) and embodied practices used to train
performers today.
Ritual/shamanic and aesthetic performances are usually framed or set
off from daily life in some way as a time out of time. They possess a
structure and performance score shaped by performance conventions. A
performance score consists of all the specic tasks/actions that constitute
the visual, auditory, enacted, tactile elements made available in the performance by the performer(s) for the audience/participants. (In improvisatory performance, the score may be a set of rules that delimit and
shape what it is possible for the performer to do.) When enacting a score,
the performer embodies and deploys an optimal mode of embodied consciousness, a state that may be described as an extraordinary discrete ASC.
Well-established genres of ritual/shamanic and aesthetic performance
often have processes of initiation, training, or apprenticeship through
which the performer is initiated, achieves virtuosic performance skills,
and attains the ability to actualize the extraordinary ASC necessary for a
successful performance. Although there are underlying biological commonalities to the states of awareness/consciousness discussed here, the
nature of altered consciousness in performance is also shaped by cultural,
contextual, aesthetic, and religio-philosophical factors. Depending on the cultural and historical context, the performers optimal mode of embodied consciousness may or may not be self-consciously articulated or reected upon.
Given the highly reexive 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 reected

Altered Consciousness in Performance

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 efcacy of ritual/shamanic performances, anthropological, ethnographic, and ethnopsychological studies often focus on its nature and how the performers/participants
actualize or are transported into these extraordinary states (Besmer, 1983;
Goodman, Henney, & Pressel, 1974; Hobart, 2003; Kalweit, 1988; Kim,
1998; Laderman, 1993). Until recently, studies of aesthetic theatre in the
West have only occasionally studied theatre as a phenomenon and focused
directly on issues of consciousness. In the past, studies of Western literary
theatre often assumed that meaning resided in dramatic texts, to be appropriately conveyed by the actors to an audience that would understand particular meanings. This limited semantic/semiotic view of performance did
not provide an adequate account of the performance experience. In addition, the dominant view of theatre in the West has historically been framed
within representational and mimetic discourses; therefore, considerations
of acting have often conated 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 Roachs examination (1993) of how historically variable scientic and medical discourses and paradigms have shaped theories
and practices of acting. The issue of the actors awareness or consciousness
is explicitly in the foreground when Roach discusses the actors double
consciousness in Diderots paradox of acting, and in subsequent
Western theories and practices (1993, p. 147ff.).
Given that non-Western paradigms of acting are usually informed by
nonrepresentational aesthetic theories and practices, there is a recognition
that aesthetic sentiments are not the same as moral, real-life emotions
(George, 1987, p. 156); therefore, non-Western acting processes are understood as potentially open[ing] the doors to other states of being (George,
1987, p. 156). Research on non-Western theories, practices, and aesthetics
of acting often address issues relevant to the consciousness of the actor
and audience (Quinn, 2005; Ortolani, 1995; Riley, 1997; Zarrilli, 2000).
When Max Hermann in Germany began to focus in 1914 on theatre as
an embodied phenomenal event, he called attention to the importance of

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addressing issues of the experience within the theatrical event (Carlson,

2008; Fischer-Lichte, 2008). This shift was reected in theatre and
performance practices of the 1960s as they moved away from a literary
understanding of meaning residing in texts to a completely new, desemanticized understanding of how meanings arise during a performance
event. As Fischer-Lichte explains, perception grasps something as something. Hence something is not rst perceived as something to which
meaning is subsequently attributed. Rather, meaning is generated in and
through the act of perception (2008, p. 141).
In the moment of experiencing a performance event, the spectators are
affected physically by their perception throughout that event and the associations that arise from it. They are experiencing the performance as phenomenal beings and cannot, in the actual moment experiencing the
event, understand it (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 156). Any attempt at
understanding, interpretation, and/or criticism takes places retrospectively. In addition to Fischer-Lichtes research, other researchers have utilized a postMerleau-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 Stanislavskys words, reach unconscious creativeness through conscious technique
(2008, p. xii). Di Benedetto explores how theories drawn from cognitive science and physiology affect live art practice and the experience of those who
attend performances and how the senses shape our consciousness (2010,
pp. 1, 5). The most sustained of these contributions is Soto-Morettinis interrogation of mainstream Western assumptions conceptualizing and questions
about acting. She focuses on the difculties of conceptualizing our inner life
(2010, p. 90), the actors self or multiples selves in performance (2010, pp.
91103), and emotion (2010, pp. 115155). She questions and reviews various models of consciousness assumed by paradigms/theorists of acting such
as Stanislavsky and Chekhov (2010, pp. 6970).
Before addressing issues of consciousness in performance and performer training directly, I provide a brief overview of some of the complex

Altered Consciousness in Performance

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 efcacious, that is, to
allow access to certain powers or to effect a change or an end such as healing
or initiation. Some ritual performances achieve their effects and also please
the gods, ancestors, and/or humans gathered to participate or witness. To
achieve their ends, rituals are performed by cultural specialists understood
to possess the ability to access special powers to diagnose and/or heal an
illness, read signs of the future, conquer an opponent or an enemy army,
or uphold the universe itself. Therefore, many ritual specialists are understood to enter an ASC. In some cultures, these ritual specialists are known
as shamans, a term deriving from the original Siberian Tungus word, saman,
meaning one who is excited, moved, raised (Laderman, 1993, p. 7).
Shaman refers to a traditional branch of religious specialists believed to be
able to heal a variety of illnesses, counteract misfortune, or solve personal
or social dilemmas after entering an ASC to communicate with powers in
the unseen world [see Winkelman, this volume].
The issue of the performers consciousness is usually one of the important ways of differentiating ritual/shamanic performance from aesthetic performance. As Besmer states with regard to the ASC of the Hausa performer,
When a medium enters possession-trance he is believed to be inhabited
in Hausa terms, riddenby a supernatural being, and this is evidenced
by one or more of the following: talking and acting like the possessing spirit; lapsing into a comatose state; speaking unintelligibly to the observer
though subject to translation by adepts or musicians; exhibiting such
physical symptoms as twitching, wild dancing, acrobatic displays, frothing
at the mouth and nose, and heavy perspiring. During this time the mediums 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 seances

in Papua New Guinea as highly entertaining, even thrilling events

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where if anything, it is the spirits themselves who perform; the spirits

speaking through a medium have more of the character of a telephone
conversation than the trappings of an aesthetic performance (1998,
p. 203).
Schieffelin provides the following description of the effects of the relationship between dancers and spectators in the Gisalo ceremony of the
Kaluli of Papua New Guinea:
In Gisalo, the dancers sing nostalgic songs about the lands and rivers of their
audiences community. Members of the audience are moved so deeply they
burst into tears, and then, becoming enraged, they leap up and burn the
dancers on the shoulder blades with the resin torches used to light the performance. Indeed, this remarkable response could be interpreted as virtually
necessary to the performance, since if the audience is not moved and the tension between the performers and audiences does not rise to the pitch of violence, the ceremony falls apart and is abandoned in the middle of the night
[ . . . ] [A]fter a successful performance, the dancers pay compensation to
those whom they made weep [ . . . ] It is real grief and rage that are evoked
[ . . . ] The performers are held accountable for the painful emotions they
evokeand the retaliation upon them (and the compensation they must
pay) return that accountas well as those emotions being an indication of
the beauty and effectiveness of the performance. The dancers and song composers [ . . . ] are extremely pleased if they have managed to provoke numbers
of the spectators to tears, despite the consequences to themselves. (1998,
p. 203; 1976, pp. 2125)

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 ctional. The modes of alternative consciousness performers utilize to achieve aesthetic affects are similar to but usually different from, those of ritual/shamanic performance. George argues
that the view of aesthetic theatre in the West has long been informed by
a classical western logocentrism and that theatre creates its own forms
of a strange reality in that its space, time and persons are all radically
different from those we experience in other realities (1998, p. 13). Until
recently, these other realities have been ascribed some greater degree of
truth (1998, p. 13) than reality effects achieved aesthetically. Studies of
theatre should therefore recognize the complex cognitive feat assumed
in aesthetic performance:

Altered Consciousness in Performance

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 difcult 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 theatres 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 performers consciousness
is not understood to be altered in the same way as in spirit possession. Unlike
the Hausa example above where another entity takes over, in aesthetic performance the performer is usually assumed to remain him- or herself, able
to recall and reect upon ones performances. This distinction is of course
not absolute, and there is a vast phenomenal territory ranging between the
amnesic paradigm of forgetting at one end of the spectrum and the aesthetic paradigms assumption of remembering and reection.

Between Ritual and Theatre: The Historical Problem

Until recently, theatre historians accepted the argument that theatre
was born out of ritual. This theory was put forward by a group of Cambridge University classics scholars known as the Cambridge Anthropologists: Gilbert Murray (18661957), Francis Cornford (18741943), and
Jane Ellen Harrison (18501928). These arguments have been revealed
as spurious, since they are based on a mistaken notion of social Darwinism. Underlying social Darwinism is the assumption that cultures have
evolved, so they can be viewed hierarchically from the primitive culture
at the bottom to the great civilizations at the top, with such Western
genres as tragedy considered the pinnacle of theatrical culture. This
theory of the origins of theatre is now thorough discredited (George,
1998; Noel, 1998; Rozik, 2002; Schechner, 2006; Zarrilli et al., 2010).
The assumption that it is possible to nd a single origin of theatre is in
itself a problematic proposition. Theatre is not one thing but rather a
complex set of human communicative activities involving, as does the
practice of ritual, fundamental human desires to imitate, play, imagine,
and structure the experiences of both actors/performers and audiences.

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Although the origins of all theatre are not in ritual or shamanic performances, in a few instances it may be argued with a certain degree of historical certainty that there is a direct relationship between early forms of
ritual/shamanic practice and the development of a specic genre of aesthetic theatre that emerged, in part, from these earlier practices. The clearest example is Japanese noh theatre, discussed below.

Asian Psychophysical Modes of Altering Consciousness

As Tart asserted long ago, direct experiential knowledge is central to
many non-Western modes of psychophysical practice (1975b). The daily
practice of psychophysical training processes in Asia is one of the primary
means of attaining actualization of a certain type of virtue and/or self, as
well as a potential means of transformation or enlightenment. Across Asia
there exist an array of techniques for altering consciousness including
yoga, Zen meditation, martial arts (Chinese taiqiquan; Kerala, Indias kalarippayattu), and performance genres such as Indias kutiyattam and kathakali and Japanese noh [see Maliszewki et al., and Shear, this volume].
As Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo explains, the concept of personal cultivation (shugyo) . . . is presupposed in Eastern thought as the
philosophical foundation because true knowledge cannot be obtained
simply by means of theoretical thinking, but only through bodily recognition or realization (tainin or taitoku) (1987, p. 27). As exemplied in the
Indian and Japanese descriptions offered below, an array of daily psychophysical practices are believed to actualize alternative, nonordinary,
extraordinary modes of consciousness or awareness appropriate to the
practice of that specic 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, t out . . . accomplish
(Monier-Williams, 1963, pp. 855856). Yoga encompasses any ascetic,
meditational, or psychophysiological technique that achieves a binding
or uniting of the bodymind. A variety of yogic pathways developed historically in South Asia including karma yoga or the law of universal causality;
maya yoga or a process of liberating oneself from cosmic illusion; nirvana
yoga or a process of growing beyond illusion to attain at-onement with
absolute reality; and hatha yoga or specic techniques of psychophysiological practice. Classical hatha yoga includes repetition of breath-control
exercises and forms/postures (asana) combined with restraints/constraints

Altered Consciousness in Performance

on diet and behavior. These practices are understood to act on both the
physical (sthula sarira) and subtle body (suksma sarira) most often identied with Kundalini-Tantric yoga.
As early as the Rig Veda (1200 BCE), ascetic practices (tapas) are mentioned. The earliest use of the specic 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). Yogas psychophysical/spiritual practices have therefore never been
conned to any particular sectarian afliation or social form (Flood,
1996, p. 94). As a consequence, both yoga philosophy and practices are
ubiquitous throughout Southern Asia (Feuerstein, 1980; Varenne, 1976;
White, 1996), and inform all modes of embodied practice including
Indian wrestling/martial arts and moving-meditation practices such as
the Tibetan trul khor (magic circle), as well as the visual, plastic, and performing arts.
From the earliest stages of its development, yoga developed as a practical pathway toward the transformation of consciousness (and self) and
spiritual release (moksa) through renunciation by withdrawal from the
world and the cycles of rebirth. Some yogic pathways provide a systematic
attempt to control both the wayward body and the potentially overwhelming senses/emotions that can create disequilibrium in daily life. Rigorous
practice therefore can lead to a sense of detachment (vairagya) through
which the yogin withdraws completely from daily life and its activities
and is understood to achieve a state of kalalita where s/he transcends time.
However, yoga philosophy and its practices have also informed and
been adapted by non-renunciants, those who keep both feet rmly in the
spatio-temporal world. Traditionally, this included Indias martial artists
in the service of rulers and a wide variety of performing artists who lived
and acted in/upon the world. Performers were expected to bring pleasure
and aesthetic joy both to the diverse gods of the Hindu pantheon and to
those they were serving and entertaining.
In contrast to the yoga practitioner-as-renunciant who withdraws from
everyday life, for practitioners of psychophysical disciplines such as martial and performing artists, psychophysical techniques quiet the ego and
the emotions so that the practitioners 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
Indias Dhanur Veda (the science of archery), the yogic paradigm is a
leitmotif in the earliest extant text (Agni Purana) dating from the 8th century (Pant, 1978, pp. 35). Circumscribed by rituals, the martial practitioners training progresses from preliminary body postures through

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mastery of specic 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 Keralas kalarippayattu
(Zarrilli, 1998).
A yogic paradigm also underlies the traditional Indian performers
assumptions about the performers state of embodied consciousness. Consider the following example from the kutiyattam style of staging Sanskrit.
In 2004, when Usha Nangyar began to instruct Gitanjali Kolanad about
how to enact a set piece known as head-to-foot acting within this tradition, Usha instructed Gitanjali how to visualize and thereby become or
transform into the goddess:
Breathe through the eyes whenever there is a point of emphasis, as in
this solo acting when visualizing the goddess. Close off all other avenues
of breathdo not use your nostrils, but inhale/exhale through your eyes.
Hold all the orices closed, and close your ears. It is like looking as
in yoga. (Zarrilli, in press a)

Ushas instructions focus on the actors relationship to and use of the

breath. In South Asia, the breath, wind, or vital energy (prana-vayu)
is the conceptual and practical link between the gross, outer, physical
body and inner experience of the subtle, yogic body. Taking the goddess
in through the breath awakens, enlivens, and communicates the connection between the actor/character and the goddess before her in order to
provide the audience with an experience that itself transports them into
a nonordinary aesthetic reality. Only through long-term forms of psychophysical training is the Indian performer able to achieve the type of virtuosic alternative mode of embodied consciousness required to become
(Zarrilli, 2000, in press a).

From Shamanism to Acting in Japanese Noh

The earliest pre-Buddhist/pre-Chinese forms of performance in Japan
are Shinto-inspired shamanistic propitiatory ceremonies and dances.
Shinto is a set of utilitarian ritual practices intended to harness the natural
forces of the environment in which it is assumed that everything (trees,
birds, seas, animals, mountains, wind, etc.) has its own soul or spirit
(kami), sometimes identied as a divinity. When Buddhism came to Japan,

Altered Consciousness in Performance

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 inuence of Daoism and Confucianism.
The centrality of supernatural beings and ghosts and the traces of shamanic practices in the early development of noh theatre is seen in mugen
nohphantasmal or dream dramas (Ortolani, 1984, 1995). It was under
the leadership of Kanami (13331384) and his son Zeami Motokiyo
(13631443) that noh evolved into a unique form of Japanese theatre
and drama. In phantasmal noh, the shite (doer/central performer) often
appears as a restless female spirit who remembers a past event through a
dream or unsettling memory, encounters the waki (sideman/secondary performer, usually a wandering Buddhist priest) who reveals what is troubling
her, and is pacied or transformed in some way. Inspired by a chapter in
The Tale of Genji, Lady Aoi (c. 15th century as revised by Zeami) enacts the
story of the mortally ill and pregnant wife of Prince Genji, Princess Aoi, represented on stage by an elaborate folded robe in the middle of the polished
wooden oor. She has been possessed by the angry, restless spirit of Lady
Rokujo, Genjis former mistress, whose living spirit leaves her body when
she sleeps. A female shaman performs a ritual to call forth the spirit possessing Lady Aoi. At the far end of the bridgeway (hashigakari), the curtain is
lifted by stage attendants, and from the green room emerges the spirit of
Lady Rokujo, performed by a male actor in an exquisitely carved female
mask. Lady Rokujo eventually reveals her true identity:
In this moral world ephemeral as lightning,
I should hate nobody,
nor should my life be one of sorrow.
When ever did my spirit begin to wander?
Who do you think this person is
who appears before you now
drawn by the sound of the catalpa bow!
I am the vengeful spirit of Lady Rokujo.
(Goff, 1991, p. 135)
Since the female shaman only has sufcient 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 pacied.
Although phantasmal noh dramatically enacts such transformation
scenes, the actor-dancers state of consciousness in performance has been
shaped by Zeamis concerns with the development of the performers

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superior artistry informed by Buddhist and Daoist thought and practice.

One of the fundamental aesthetic principles that Zeami utilized in shaping
noh is yugen. Although yugen can not be translated, it has been described as
mystery and depth and as what lies beneath the surface; the subtle, as
opposed to the obvious; the hint, as opposed to the statement (Hare,
2008, p. 472). Phantasmal noh may be likened to an echo chamber of
allusions (Quinn, 2005, p. 14).
Ultimately, Zeami located the source of yugen in the underlying sensibility of the actor himself, the informing, embodied intelligence that
mediates all stage techniques (Quinn, 2005, p. 10). As he developed his
approach to noh performance, Zeami moved away from imitation and
mimesis toward poiesis (production of something new). To embody,
express, and enact this poiesis, Zeami developed a nuanced, subtle, and
sophisticated process of cultivating and attuning the actor-dancers voice
and bodymind through progressive stages of development. Following the
pathway of Buddhist meditation-based pedagogies [ . . . ], selfcultivation of the body can lead to a higher epistemological perspective
[ . . . and] such a perspective, in turn, is correlative with the ontological
status of reality (Quinn, 2005, p. 17). The training and cultivation of
the actor-dancer is, like Buddhist meditation, fundamentally a transformative process in that it creates a new mode of being that is removed from
everyday ego consciousness (Quinn, 2005, p. 17). The transformation
of the actor-dancers consciousness from ordinary modes of being/doing
to an extraordinary state of being/doing in aesthetic performance is fundamental to noh training as developed by Zeami. According to him, the performer ideally reaches a state of nonduality where striving for effects is
something that is not part of the actors conscious orientation (Quinn,
2005, p. 5).
Although Shinto, Daoism, and shamanism played an historical role in
the development of noh, for Zeami the noh performers ideal state of consciousness is a fully embodied state of nondual awareness/consciousness.
To attain this state, the actor must train until he reaches a level at which
his innermost intent is beyond his own discriminating consciousness
(Quinn, 2005, p. 229), an active state of mushin (no-mind) that lies
beyond active intellectualization and where the effects of a performance
are not the result of the actors conscious intention (Quinn, 2005,
p. 226). Zeamis treatises and the example of noh illustrate the fact that
performers and master teachers of embodied practices have long reected
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

Contemporary Performer Training: Psychophysical Techniques

for Accessing Alternative States of Consciousness
Since the late 19th century when the Russian theatre director Konstantin
Stanislavsky (18631938) began the revolutionary process of developing
a systematic approach to training the Western actor, a vast array of techniques and processes (yoga, Asian martial arts, songs, night running,
dynamic exercises, or ritual/shamanic techniques) have been utilized
to explore how the performer might transcend bodymind dualism
and secure a dependable process for actualizing the ASC required of the
performer.
Stanislavskys use of the term psychophysical for acting was an innovative, historically limited, and not always successful attempt to solve the
relationship between the psycho and physical elements of textually
based character acting. Roach explains how:
The Stanislavski System is a means of manipulating levels of consciousness
to achieve certain specic effects on the body, especially the illusion of
spontaneity. [ . . . ] He believed that an inner dialogue runs within us
without interruptiona 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.
206207)

In order to accomplish the task of living the role, Stanislavsky drew

on two main sources, the work of psychologist Theodule Armand Ribot
(18391916) and the limited versions of Indian yoga available in turnof-the-century Russia, ltered through then-popular occultism and spiritualism (Carnicke, 1993; White, 2006). Stanislavsky described how the
actors physical score, once perfected, must go beyond mechanical execution to a deeper level of experience that is rounded out with new
feeling and [ . . . ] become[s], one might say, psychophysical in quality
(1961, p. 66). In My Life in Art, Stanislavsky described the actors 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). Stanislavskys ideal was that in every physical action . . .
there is concealed some inner action, some feelings (1961, p. 228).
To help achieve this optimal state of awareness while living a role,
Stanislavsky drew upon and adapted his limited knowledge of yoga exercises and principles to heighten the actors sensory awareness in

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performance. Arguably the most important material element Stanislavsky

borrowed from yoga was prana, the breath(s), wind, vital energy, or lifeforce understood to circulate throughout the body from your hands to
your ngertips, from your thighs to your toes creating thereby an inner
rhythm (Carnicke, 1998, p. 141). Stanislavsky translated his work with
prana into the actors ability to radiate feelings as a character to communicate with fellow actors-as-characters.
After working with Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov (18911955)
developed psychophysical exercises, psychological gestures, and radiation in order to penetrate all the parts of the body with ne [ . . . ] vibrations (Chekhov, 1991, p. 43). Byckling (2005) quotes Chekhov as saying
that the training of the body is [ . . . ] a training in awareness, in learning
how to listen to the body, how to be led by it. Chekhovs actor works
from body awareness to psychophysical composition. The actor senses
and feels the form of the psychological gesture as she creates and inhabits
it. Although utilizing limited elements and principles of yoga, Chekhov
and Stanislavsky did so in order to develop the kind of alternative consciousness necessary for an actor to perform textually based character
roles in mainstream aesthetic theatre. As Soto-Morettini explains, the kind
of second order intentional thinking necessary to understand and analyze a dramatic text at the beginning of rehearsals must be forgotten once
onstage (2010, p. 206). Actors are engaged in a dual form of forgetting;
they both pretend to forget and they pretend to be the character (2010,
p. 206). This dual forgetting is the essential quality of acting and
requires of the actor ctional immersion (2010, p. 206). Quoting
McGinns (2004), ctional immersion occurs when the work disguises
itself as reality, while never concealing the fact that it is a disguise (SotoMorettini, 2010, p. 207).

Between Ritual and Aesthetic Performance: Artaud and Grotowski

During the 20th century, a series of practitioners working away
from mainstream Western realist theatreAntonin Artaud (18961949)
in France, Alexander Fersen (19112001) in Italy, Jerzy Grotowski
(19331999), and Nicolas Nunez (1946) in Mexico, among others
have drawn inspiration or specic techniques from ritual/shamanic practices in order to explore both alternative approaches to acting and/or
processes of audience/performer communion. These explorations have
often taken place over a lifetime in laboratories, spaces set aside for
focused, in-depth development of the performers consciousness. Most
practitioners divest their work of the traditional belief systems in which

Altered Consciousness in Performance

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 Cardena explains, Artaud
was one of the rst if not the rst theatre practitioner to explore the
territory of the performer as shaman (1986, p. 299). Artauds vision of
the performer was as a master of the attainment and induction of altered
states with the purpose of healing a degraded humanity (p. 299). In a
series of manifestos inspired in part by his encounter with Balinese dancers and visits to Mexico, Artaud called for actors to become crude empiricists who examine the material aspect of the expressive possibilities of
their bodyminds. Artaud postulated that the actor, through breath control,
would be able to place the breath in specic 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
actors body; therefore, for every mental action, every leap of human emotion, there is a corresponding breath which is appropriate to it (p. 236).
The actors 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 specicity of his vision of the actor as an
athlete of the heart, Artaud was never able to develop an actual psychophysical technique actualizing this vision.
Although he always viewed his work as a continuation of the explorations of Stanislavsky, Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski embraced
and actively engaged the territory between ritual and performance. As Wolford argues, Grotowski is not so much a person of the theatre as one whose
interests, for a certain period of time, passed through theatre, but always
with an orientation toward elsewhere (1998, p. 85). Schechner has
described Grotowskis 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 denite and particular kind of spiritual knowledge
(1997, p. 463). The psychophysical processes of actor training he explored

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early in his career provided a necessary structure for the performers 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 onso to saythe head,
the heart and the body of the doers (Wolford, 1988, p. 87). Grotowski also
described the work as a type of yoga, noting that while, in one sense, Art as
vehicle is very much concerned with elements of performance craft, the
interior goal of the work is analogous to that which is sought in meditative
disciplines (p. 88). This work is autotelic, focusing on the experience of
the doers. It becomes a tool by means of which the human being can undertake a work on her/himself (Wolford, 1998, p. 88).

Mnemodrama: An Actors 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 (19112001). From 1957, when he established a theatre laboratory for research on acting, he began a lifelong journey of exploring the mythopoetic territory between ritual and theatre. John Green
(1993) provides a comprehensive account of how Fersens years of practical research in the studio, inspired by the ecstatic gures of the shaman,
was eventually codied as mnemodramaa studio-based exercise in which
the actor progressively explores advanced steps in the techniques of abandon (Fersen, quoted in Marranca, 1984, p. 22).
The memory of the mnemodrama does not seep through the protective
lters 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)

Fersens research was based in part on exposure to Carnival, Samba,

and Candomble in Bahia, Brazil, and subsequent collaboration with Italian
anthropologist Alfonso Di Nola. Fersen claims that in mnemodrama, the
actor experiences an ASC where what one inhabits is not a life, nor a second life as a character, but It is a second state of mind, which has an
oneiric quality (Fersen, in Marranca, 1984, p. 20).

Altered Consciousness in Performance

Fersen characterized the exercise he was creating as an actors version

of the shamanic journey where the actor abandons himself [ . . . ] to
the unknowns of the possible event [ . . . ] (Fersen, 1980, p. 75). Modeled
on ritual practices, Fersen interprets his work as a dialectic operating
between abandon techniques and control techniques (1980, p. 65). Ultimately for Fersen, his attempt to allow the actors 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 Mexicos Nicolas Nunez.
Nunez founded the Taller de Investigacion Teatral or Theatre Research Workshop (TRW) in 1975 at the National University in Mexico City. Since founding TRW, Nunez and his collaborators have undertaken practical crosscultural research between ritual and theatre, actively exploring ASC accessed
by means of specic psychophysical techniques drawn from both preHispanic Mexican traditions such as the Nahuatl 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.
Nunez 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 Nunez, the actor and shaman alike are able to go into an altered state of consciousness [ . . . ] at
will and thus can perceive reality directly with no interference of any
kind of thinking (quoted in Middleton, 2008, p. 45). Middleton
describes Nunezs dynamics as follows:
Attention is focused in the moment-by-moment somatic experience
through intentionality, breathing technique or use of mantra. Receptive
consciousness is engaged through the necessity to remain within longdurational activities, abandoning end-gaining strategies and timeconsciousness. Conceptual activity is subdued, partly through intention,
and partly through the psycho-physically strenuous tools of running, energetic position, etc. Energies are dilated through physiological effects (such
as adrenalin and endocrine release), and this in turn intensies the somatic
nature of the experience. (2008, p. 48)

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Nunezs 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 inuenced by nonWestern principles and techniques, cultivating a state of nondual awareness so central to Asian modes of embodied practice has become a
main if unarticulated tenet of many approaches to performer training
today (Hodge, 2010b; Zarrilli, 2002). Daily training in Japanese butoh
(Fraleigh, 1999), Suzuki technique (Suzuki, 1986), Gardzienice Theatre
Association techniques (Hodge, 2010a; Staniewski, 2004), or Zarrillis
(2009) martial arts/yoga-based psychophysical training all provide indepth embodied experiences through which one can achieve the type
of nondual state of consciousness/awareness required in meditation
where one is both being attentive and not thinking (Blackmore, 2003).
Their modus operandi may be compared with concentrative meditation
(Blackmore, 2003). Citing recent cognitive scientic research, SotoMorettini differentiates between attention training and [ . . . ] attention
state training (2010, p. 214). The former attempts to control thoughts
while the latter induces a state of restful alertness, enabling a high
degree of awareness of body, mind and external instructions (2010,
p. 214). This is a state inducing or coming very near a meditative state
(Soto-Morettini 2010, p. 215). Each approach to training in its own way
awakens, shapes, focuses, and concentrates the performers energy,
attention and awareness through specic 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. Gardzienices night running takes the performer into an alternative mode of openness to others and the environment when having to
negotiate running without illumination (Hodge, 2010a; Staniewski,
2004). Like some forms of concentrated meditation, Zarrillis psychophysical training begins with breathing exercises and attentiveness to
the breath (2009). But these approaches also differ from forms of meditation that take the meditator out of the world into a different reality.
Here, the performer, like the martial artist, always remains responsive
to the immediate environment.

Altered Consciousness in Performance

Phenomenal Consciousness and Performance

Ned Blocks nuanced discussion of the differences and relationship
between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness (1995, 1997)
provides a useful way of describing aspects of the performers nondual consciousness. Block explains that phenomenal consciousness is experience;
what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something it is
like to be in that state (1995, p. 227). P-conscious states are sensations,
whereas the paradigm A-conscious states are propositional attitude states
like thoughts, beliefs, and desires, states with representational content
expressed by that clauses (1997, p. 384). Access consciousness serves
more of a functional process than phenomenal consciousness because it carries specic 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 specic forms of extraordinary nondual phenomenal consciousness that are different from ones ordinary states of consciousness.
Although the performers phenomenal consciousness is shaped to
embody/enact the performance at an optimal level of attainment such as in
the example of the noh actor, since a performance score is a repeatable structure when the performer is not performing the score one can self-consciously
review that score mentally. The performer uses access consciousness to
review and reect upon the performance of a score or structure or to reect
more generally on his or her artistry as an actor/dancer. When performing,
a specic score is available as representational content at the periphery of
ones 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
ones own states (1997, p. 390). Because performer training techniques and
performance are highly repetitive modes of embodiment, P-consciousness
may be characterized as conscious awareness where an embodied, sedimented relationship to the performance or doing is experienced as a residue,
an echo, or resonant shadow. At the periphery of P-consciousness in the act
of doing is an inner perception, sensory awareness, or consciousness of the

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doing, sometimes described by performers as the feeling of the form. There is

often a what it is like for me state viewed from the rst-person perspective
inside the process of embodying a specic performer training process and
when enacting a specic performance score. This mode of inhabitation is different from ones ordinary mode of consciousness, it is experienced as extraordinary. Performer training and performing can therefore be described as a
special form of P-consciousness with awareness where the performer inhabits an awareness of the doing at the same time the actor remains completely
inside the feeling of the doing. The feeling of the doing is the additional
layer of resonance within the performers consciousness. For actors, it is the
listening or hearing within oneself in the act of speaking. It is what makes
a performance that may look like everyday life more than everyday life.
Two caveats are in order. First, the description provided above is the
optimal ideal assumed in virtuosic performance and therefore is often
not achieved during initial training or in performance. Second, in this process the performer ideally never becomes self-conscious, the actor does not
think about what she is doing but remains within the ow of phenomenal consciousness as appropriate to the training or the dramaturgy of a
specic performance (see also Cardena & Cousins, 2010).
The actors 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 specic performance to the stimuli in the performance environment moment by moment (Blair, 2008; Yoo, 2007; Zarrilli, 2009).
From the performers perspective inside this embodied process, as one
practices, performs, or plays within the structure of a process, there is
often a strong autotelic element to that engagement. One enjoys the practice/act of performing.
Systems of actor training like those described above are designed to
shape the performers phenomenal consciousness to achieve an extraordinary discrete alternate state of nondual consciousness. The phenomenological account that concludes this essay provides one example of how
the actor shapes and focuses her or his energy, attention, and so on in
order to enact a particular dramaturgy/performance score.

A Phenomenological Account of an Actors Performance Score

Cocreated by Kaite OReilly, 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

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 Shogos theatre of quietude, and the minimal work of Samuel Beckett. It is a fragmentary performance piece consisting of 10 structures, described by critics as hypnotic,
a meditation, dreamlike. Throughout the performance, a Female and a
Male Figure are onstage but never make direct visual contact. There is no
dialogue per se, but Male Figure delivers fragments of suggestive text during
4 of the structures. Female Figure occasionally mouths words that either
remain unsaid or are barely whispered and remain inaudible. Male Figures
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 rst 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 gures only make subtle,

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slight physical adjustments to their positions as they listen in the silence.

This is my description of the actors work and consciousness in playing
this nonverbal structure:
When Jo Shapland and I step into the playing space and are seated to begin
Structure 1, our initial performance task is to open and engage our peripheral awareness to the possible presence of an other in the environment.
From my perspective inside the performance, the act of opening my
peripheral awareness means using indirect visual focus, my eyes do not
attempt to focus specically 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 specic 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 specic name, identity, or history. Rather,
I psychophysically engage my embodied consciousness in subtly responding to the impulse of a question or possible presence if/when/as each
question/possibility emerges in the moment of performance. It is important
that this embodied process of questioning/probing remains indeterminate.
My focus/attention should not land or resolve itself. It is a constant process of active searching/questioning.
Half way through Structure 1, this initial probing becomes more specic
as both Shapland and I attune our auditory awareness to our possible
other. We actively engage psychophysically in what may be described as
attentive listening, opening our ears to the sonority of the immediate environment. The psychophysical task here is to let go and abandon oneself
completely to this state of deep, profound listening where all that exists
is a question. Nancy asks, What secret is at stake when one truly listens
and thereby encounters sonority rather than the message? (2007, p. 5).
We are listening, but what is there remains a secretunknown 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 ones embodied consciousness

Altered Consciousness in Performance

is woven in the moment. Optimally, this process of embodied, aural attunement absorbs and re-directs our energy and awareness in a process of taking in, searching, and questioning . . . We are still but not frozen; rather,
each of us is animated from the inside-out by constantly being active and
reactive. Our performative engagement with deep listening may be
described as opening a space of possibility within us as performers/stagegures. (see Zarrilli, in press b)

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

nondual awareness/consciousness.

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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 Cardena has noted,
It could be argued that we have not gone further than Platos classication
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. (Cardena, 2009, p. 313)

For Plato, poetry was a possession experience as the Gods spoke

through the artist [see Ustinova, this volume], but he disliked visual art
because he considered painting and sculpture to be copies of what are
already copies of a higher reality that could not be apprehended through
the senses. The Platonic paradigm for the poet became the Romantic
notion of genius beginning in the early 19th century, in which music
and the visual arts could result when the artist was possessed by higher
creative forces. A play later turned into a popular movie that illustrates this
Romantic notion genius is Amadeus (1984), in which Mozart becomes a
mere scribe for the music that pours through his obviously imperfect person. Of course, not all musicians are possessed, as the example of the composer Salieri, with his well-crafted but pedantic musical ideas, attests in
the movie.
The relationship between altered states of consciousness (ASC) and
works of art has not been sufciently addressed by philosophers, art historians, and psychologists. The word inspiration, which basically means
to breathe in an exalted idea, has been much used in Romantic circles

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and by modern artists as a lighter, less charged term than possession with
its implications of spirit mediumship. Inspiration, along with possession,
however, is mostly involuntary and artists, including Salieri in Amadeus,
have agonized when it does not occur. In this chapter, I will discuss only
a few of the artists and works of art that involve altered consciousness
other than possession where the artist experiences being taken over by
another entity. There are a small but signicant number of visual artists
from the early 19th century to the present, the period that denes 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 (Cardena, 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,
reecting the experimental art of their respective periods, and
typically do not imitate the styles of traditional religious or tribal art.
There is also artwork inuenced 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 oaters, blue elds, bowtie or hour glass patterns, images of retinal blood vessels, and the like. In an ASC, individuals
may be more susceptible to these phenomena than under normal conditions, but entopic phenomena have not been of interest to most professional artists and have not had a direct or even indirect impact on the
avant-garde stylistic imagery of modern art. Nor have hypnotic states been
a matter of concern for most professional artists, although they have
received serious attention by Ana Eva Iribas and others (Iribas-Rudn,
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 uid distinction and sometimes it overlaps, as in the cases of Vincent van Gogh
and Alex Grey. For the most part, the SSC that I will be talking about here
is the shamanic journey or soul ight that is induced by drumming, psychedelic substances, or dreaming. The shaman experiences that his or her
soul leaves the body and goes to the upper and lower world of nonordinary reality and then returns with information for the spiritual and therapeutic benet 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 ones surroundings, and positive or negative emotions. On
the other hand, the calming of the mind and emotions and acute

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

awareness of ones surroundings in multiple dimensions usually accompanies meditative states. Art induced by shamanic methods is different than
art engendered by meditative states. Usually, in shamanic art there is profusion and/or succession of dreamlike images that may embody shape
shifting, dislocations of time and space, connections with power animals
and other spirit allies, and so forth. In art induced by meditation, there
is often a reduction of imagery and sometimes no imagery, as in the genre
of metaphysical abstraction. Through both meditative techniques and shamanic techniques of induction, however, it is possible to see light lines or
energy lines.
It is important to note here that I am making this broad distinction
between art induced by meditative states and SSC as an art historian,
artist, and a serious practitioner of both meditative and shamanic techniques of induction for more than three decades, not a scientist who has
systematically veried the results through research. In this article, Vincent
van Gogh, Salvador Dal, Remedios Varo, Alex Grey, Joseph Beuys, and
Sha Sha Higby are examples of modern artists who employ shamanic techniques of induction, whereas Kasmir Malevich, Agnes Martin, Robert
Irwin, and Jamie Brunson are meditators. I have chosen these artists as
representatives of some of the broad range of styles and approaches within
these two general categories of altered states. For a more thorough analysis
that included more artists, see my books, Technicians of Ecstasy: Shamanism
and the Modern Artist (1993) and Void/in Art (2005).

Modern Artists and Shamanism

To be sure, Vincent van Gogh (18531890) was not aware of himself
as a shaman. Although there is much speculation about van Goghs precarious mental health and physical condition, it is difcult to determine
the exact nature of his mental states of consciousness from the existing
documentation on his life. He was probably lucid when he drew and
painted, and his correspondence shows that he would carefully think
about and plan his paintings; he was able to apply paint directly from a
tube to the canvas with a palette knife in an extraordinarily skillfully manner, unlike the typically unsophisticated painting and drawing styles of
individuals aficted by various disorders. Biographical accounts concur that
he had erratic eating and sleeping habits and drank large amounts of
absinthe, a beverage of alcohol mixed with wormwood and sometimes other
psychoactive substances favored by artists and poets in late 19th-century
France. No wonder he had visions! Sleep deprivation, fasting, and hallucinogens are traditional induction techniques for shamans.

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Figure 15.1 The Starry Night, 1889, Vincent van Gogh, Museum of Modern
Art, New York, oil on canvas, 73.792.1 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 lookingwhat I call habitual observationto seeing. The poet
Rainer Maria Rilke was also an adept at this technique that for him involved
special breathing techniques at the solar plexus. In his late letters, he said
this focal point was a gateway in regards to the visible, as well as the invisible (Rilke, 1948, p. 320). G. I. Gurdjieff (18661949) 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 Gurdjieffs 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 Goghs painting of a chair to be an astounding portrait
of the Ding an Sich [Kants thing in itself] (Huxley, 1963, pp. 2829).

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

And even the sober Martin Heidegger, in his essay The Origin of the
Work of Art, said that van Goghs painting of peasant shoes is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This
entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being (Heidegger, 1964,
pp. 665666). 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 Goghs later work such as Starry Night,
1889 (Figure 15.1), in which he depicts this landscape as a wavy eld of
incandescent and interconnected energy or light lines in varying intensities
and congurations. To see the world as a universal matrix of interconnected
vibrating lines is shamanic seeing that goes beyond normal sensory apprehension to reveal another level of reality. Of course, there are other levels
of meaning in Starry Night, including a representation of the village of
St. Remy or Nuenen, and symbols, such as the combined image of the sun
and moon, which have engendered much scholarly interpretation.
In the painting Squid and Turtle Dreaming (1972) (Figure 15.2) by the
Australian aboriginal artist and shaman Liwukang Burkutlatjpi (born
1927), we observe cross-hatchings representing a similar net of interwoven energy lines that may be invisible except in an ASC. This is the primordial matrix of the Dreamings, the original creators who wove the fabric of
existence at the beginning of the Dreamtime, which signies both this primordial time of creation and nonordinary reality. Like Starry Night, Squid
and Turtle Dreaming is replete with many levels of meaning, but the most signicant aspect of these two paintings is the energy transmitted from the
painted lines. An aboriginal friend of mine, on seeing a reproduction of Squid
and Turtle Dreaming, remarked, when I feel these lines my gut is happy.
The light lines in the Aboriginal painting are also the product of prolonged looking. It is an aspect of the strong eye technique that was rst
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 shamans ability to
see spirits, several different aboriginal informants who did not wish to be
quoted have elaborated it to me. The strong eye practice entails standing
in a particular pose while trying to maintain nonfocused attention on a
landscape over an extended period of time. Nonfocused attention causes

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

diminution of the internal dialoguethe projections that overlay experiencebringing 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

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 eld 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 owing: it was in this state that I imagined Theologuethe 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
ames symbolizing the re of the Kundalini shakti (energy), and in the
far distance are semitransparent mountains that appear to both simultaneously emerge and dissolve from the grid. As Grey explains, I was seeing
both the perceptual grid of my mind on which space and time are woven,
and the universal mind which was both the source and the weaving loom.
At this moment, faintly, Himalayan mountains appeared (Grey, 1990, pp.
9495). He conded to me that this deep meditation that enabled him to
see the light lines was an LSD trip but that subsequently he was able to
eventually reach a similar level of experience through Tibetan meditation
techniques.

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Figure 15.4 The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Salvador Dal , 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 ight, a journey into nonordinary reality and through which the shaman retrieves
information for the community. There are several techniques that promote
shamanic dreaming, including dream incubation and lucid dreaming
the ability to become reectively conscious of the dream without waking
up. Simply recording dreaming in artwork, in a journal, or among friends
is a way of remembering dreams and was promoted by the Surrealists. Salvador Dal (19041989), for example, would always have paper and pencil by his bedside and even a canvas and brushes in easel where he would
record images from his dreams of the night. For the lm Un Chien Andalou
(1929), a collaborative effort with the avant-garde lmmaker Louis
Bunuel, he and Dal shared their dreams of the night before in the morning and then tried to realize them during the day in their lm.
For The Persistence of Memory (1931) (Figure 15.4), one of his bestknown paintings during his Surrealist period, Dal developed a precise
and detailed style of realism in which he meticulously recorded the information from a dream or a recurrent series of dreams of a landscape with
ants crawling on the surface of limp watches. According to Dal,

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

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. (Dal, 1969, p. 113)

This ambition was shared with other Surrealist painters of the dream, such
as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst. For
these Surrealists, dreams were as real as or more real than ordinary reality.
Indeed, there is a hyperlucidity and intensity in Dals style that, in conjunction with the content, transports the viewer to a timeless realm of nonordinary reality. The numinosity of Dals painted realm in The Persistence of
Memory recalls shamanic places of power that I have experienced in shamanic journeys and dreams and to my mind accounts for the continuous
ongoing attention given to this painting since its creation.
Remedios Varos painting is also replete with numinous places from
nonordinary reality but has a broader range of shamanic themes than
Dals, including dismemberments in nonordinary reality and other initiatory references, dreams within dreams, visitations from animal and other
spirits allies, journeys to the upper and lower world, shape shifting, and
so forth [the covers for both volumes include reproductions of Varos
works]. Like Dals, Varos style is very precise; her father was an engineer
who made meticulous drawings of hydraulic systems and she trained at
the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, which offered a rigorous academic curriculum emphasizing drawing and composition. She was
not merely interested in recording the dream, however, unlike the other
academic Surrealists painters, including Dal, who also trained at the
San Fernando Academy.
In The Encounter (1962) (Figure 15.5), Varo shows a woman meeting
an owl gurea 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
Varos 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 others night

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Figure 15.5 The Encounter, 1962, Remedios Varo, Private Collection, vinyl
paint on cardboard, 64 44 cm (Drawing of The Encounter by Malka Helfman
for this article)

dreams. Varos The Fern Cat (1957) makes reference to one of Sulzers
dreams. With Leonora Carrington, Varo even concocted various exotic
dishes in her kitchen to ward off bad dreams!
Performance art, which I shall dene as live multimedia art by artists
who are mostly oriented toward the visual arts, emerged as a genre beginning in the early 20th century among the Dadaists and the Futurists and
has been greatly expanded by contemporary artists. Although much of performance art is purely secular, a signicant number of artists have in effect
created sacred ritual dramas that compare to traditional performance

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

art genres. Indeed, in genres such as the Wayang Kulit (the shadow puppet
play) in Indonesia, the Noh performance in Japan, the masquerades in
Africa, and so forth, performers use percussion, repetitive gestures, chanting, and the like to move themselves and their audiences from ordinary to
nonordinary states of reality. In the Wayang, for example, the audience
and the performers may enter into an ASC and experience being transported to the magical spirit realm of the puppets for healing and insights
into the future. As I discuss in Wayang Kulit: Indonesias Shadow Puppet
Plays as a Model for Performance (1989), this puppet play functions as a
sacred ritual.

Figure 15.6 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, November 26, 1965, Joseph
Beuys, photograph of the performance at the Galerie Alfred Schmela, Dusseldorf

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During the Second World War, as tail gunner for a Stuka plane, Joseph
Beuys (19211986), was shot down in the Crimea and rescued by a group
of Tartar nomads, who wrapped him in fat and felt to preserve his body
heat. These actions saved his life. Later, Beuys recognized that his neardeath experience was a shamanic initiation and his role was to be an
artist/shaman.
So when I appear as a kind of shamanistic gure or allude to if, I do it to
stress my belief in other priorities, and the need to come up with a completely different plan for working with substances. For instance in places
like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a
kind of enchanter to appear, Beuys exclaimed. (Tisdall, 1979, p. 23)

Although there is an ongoing debate about the authenticity of his

Crimean experience and his subsequent role as an artist/shaman, Beuys
critics fail to recognize that it is not unusual for traditional shamans to
fabricate aspects of their identity to enhance the healing effects of their
work, and there is no doubt that many individuals had a profound healing
experience in conjunction with Beuyss work. Shamanic authenticity in
tribal societies is judged by the shamans ability to affect the recipient(s)
in both the nonordinary and ordinary levels of reality, and Beuys work
has that effect on some people. Although many of Beuys sculptures manifest an interest in shamanism, particularly those where he references his
own healing experience by working with the nontraditional materials of felt
and fat, he believed that performance art was his most effective medium as
an artist/shaman.
Beuys always appeared for his performances wearing a shermans
vest, heavy boots, and a crumpled businessmans hat. This was his
shamanic outt. Although this outt was not particularly strange by contemporary standards, it contributed to the aura of mystery around him;
it became, to use a phrase of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski,
part of the coefcient of weirdness (Malinowski, 1935, p. 220) that furthered his efforts as an artist/shaman. Beuys hat has received more attention from the press than any other element of his costume. Following the
Aachen meeting between Valery Giscard dEstaing 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

By the mere fact of donning it [the hat], or manipulating the objects that
deputize for it, the shaman transcends profane space and prepares to
enter into contact with the spirit world. Usually this preparation is almost
a concrete introduction into that world: for the costume is donned
after many preliminaries and just on the eve of shamanic trance. (Eliade,
1964, p. 147)

For the most part, Beuys performances involved the use of repetitive gestures and/or sounds over a lengthy time period, presumably putting both
him and his audience in an ASC. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
(Figure15.6), at the Galerie Alfred Schmela (in Dusseldorf, on November 26, 1965), Beuys rhythmically tapped the iron sole attached to his
shoe on the hard stone oor as he walked around the gallery gesticulating
in front of his pictures. This tapping may have induced a sonic ASC since
his explanations to the hare, lasting some 3 hours, were mute. Beuys
explained that How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare was
a complex tableau about the problem of language, and about the problems
of thought, of human consciousness and the consciousness of animals. This
is placed in an extreme position because this is not just an animal but also a
dead animal. Even this dead animal has a special power to reproduce . . .
even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition that some human
beings with their stubborn rationality. (Tisdall, 1979, pp. 103, 105)

The hare was important in the context of this performance as a countervailing force to rationality because of its relationship to the earth and fertility. Moreover, Beuys applied a mask of honey and gold to his head that
symbolized his transformation and moving out of the realm of reasona
necessary prerequisite to understanding the hares 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 thinkto produce ideas. In this way the deathlike character of
thought is made living again. Honey is doubtlessly a living substance.
Human thought can also be living. (Adriani, Konnerts, & Thomas, 1979,
p. 32)

Shamans often converse in ASC with their power animals and the animals
respond using body language or sounds or taking the shamans to places of
power in nonordinary reality. In the shamanic worldview, animals have

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Altering Consciousness

Figure 15.7 I like America and America Likes Me, May 1974, Joseph Beuys, photograph of the perfomance at the Rene Block Gallery in New York

wisdom and can convey this wisdom by nonverbal means if asked in the
proper ritual way.
In another performance, I Like America and America Likes Me (Figure
15.7), May 1974, at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, Beuys communicated for 7 days with a live coyote that had just been taken from the wilderness. Beuys said about this work,
I believe I made contact with the psychological trauma point of the United
States energy constellation; the whole American trauma with the Indian,
the Red man . . . You could say that a reckoning has to be made with the
coyote, and only then can the trauma be lifted. (Adriani et al., 1979, p. 28)

Beuys knew that for the American Indian, especially the Pueblo Indians, the
coyote is one of the most powerful animalsa 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

trauma of American relationships with the Indians, which is a form of sickness, Beuys was taken directly from the airport to the gallery in an ambulance, completely wrapped in felt. Over the next 7 days, Beuys repeated
over and over a series of complex rituals with the coyote accompanied by
sounds made by Beuys by hitting a metal triangle attached to his waist.
Some witnesses attest that a deep level of communication took place
between Beuys and the coyote, which greatly moved them.
Sha Sha Higby (born 1952) spent several years studying traditional
performance genres in Asia, although she transforms the ancient languages of these genres into her own unique and contemporary language.
In 1972 she stayed in Japan for 1 year, absorbing ideas from the Japanese
Noh and Butohan extremely slow, primordial, and visceral form of
dance that emerged in Japan following the Second World and in which

Figure 15.8 Clouds of Tea, December 2009, Sha Sha Higby, at Live Oak Theatre,
Berkeley (Photograph of costume, permission and image courtesy of the artist)

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the performers are almost naked [see Zarrilli, this volume]. From 1977 to
1982, she was in Indonesia studying various forms of Javanese puppetry.
In the rst stage of Higbys 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, ber, 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 rened, the equally wellcrafted costumes are much more earthy and organic. Mask and costume,
however, mesh together into a funky latticework of abstract shapes that can
include puppets as Higby moves. As she is almost completely absorbed by
the mask and the costumea kind of wearable environment, in the words of
one criticshe 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
costumea 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 Higbys, Folded Under a Stone Sleeping, accompanied by her husbands music, can be seen on YouTube at http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF66U4EGfy0. Notwithstanding the slow
unfolding of Higbys work, the viewer is greeted by succession of otherworldly images that seem to be in a constant state of metamorphosis like
those in a shamanic journey.

Modern Artists and Meditation

Kasmir Malevichs (18781935) reductivist paintings mirror his own
practice of meditation, in which he attempted to gradually reduce his
own sensations and dissolve into the Void. In the 1960s, he would be
acknowledged as one of the precursors of the art movement known as
Minimalism to which Agnes Martin has been related too by critics and
art historians. Malevich was a member of a small circle of artists and intellectual friends who practiced raja yoga as described in the book Sverkhsozhnanie I putti k ego distizheniuu (The Super Consciousness and the Ways
to Achieve It) by M. V. Loyzehnski, rst published in 1911. The author
shows how prolonged states of nonconceptual awareness bring about
various levels of samadhi (see Douglas, 1989, pp. 186187). Unfortunately,

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

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 Malevichs 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 eld, the Void beyond sensation
(Herbert, 1964, p. 96). In this pioneering work of metaphysical abstraction, there are just the sensations embodied in the minimal color, texture,
and geometrical elements, of the rough matte texture of the black square
superimposed on the more rened surface of the white background. For

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Malevich, The Black Square was the new icon of the time that he hoped would
replace the traditional Russian icon in the upper corner of a room. Malevich
was well aware that there are no traditional [Russian] icons in which the
Saint is a zero (Douglas, 1975, p. 128). The Black Square is the embodiment
of the absolute, the formless Void that Malevich probably apprehended in a
state of samadhi (see Shear, this volume). If anyone has comprehended
the absolute he has encountered Nothing, wrote Malevich (1969, p. 224).
In Suprematist Composition, White on White (1918) (Figure 15.9), a white
square tilted on a diagonal ground, Malevich goes even further in approximating the experience of the void in samadhi. The sensation of black on white is
much stronger than the sensation of white on white, where sensation is more
rareed.
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 (19122004) 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 inuence 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 Martins 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 rst examine ones own mind. According to Martin, When [at rst] you look into your own mind you nd it
covered by a lot of rubbishy thoughts(Martin, 1992, p. 154) and then
by bringing my thoughts to the surface of the mind, I can watch them dissolve (Martin, 1992, p. 41). This methodology is very similar to the rst
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 artists path as well. You have to penetrate these [rubbishy ideas]
and hear what your [deeper] mind is telling you to do. Such work is original work . . . My main intention is the destruction of the ego (Martin,
1992, pp. 41, 154).
Martin learned than an important requisite for deep listening and surrendering was solitude. It is necessary to practice being quiet to empty

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

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 lm 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).
Martins goal was to nd an abstract vehicle to convey the essence of
pure mind in painting. The subject of painting therefore is not in the
objective world: Not nature but the dissolution of nature (Martin,
1992, p. 117). She wrote that her artistic paradigm was two late Tang

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dishes, one with a ower image, one emptythe empty form goes all the
way to heaven (Martin, 1992, p. 35).
Beginning in Martins 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 at monochromatic surface (Figure 15.10). In the
major part of Martins oeuvre, the tiny rectangles created by the intersecting lines are in Martins words non hieratic and non-relational . . . holding
every part of the surface in perfect equilibrium (in Haskell, 1992, p. 142).
Also, as Martin maintained, in art as in reality, the plurality of varied and
similar forms annihilates the existence as forms as entities. Similar forms
do not show contrast but are in equivalent opposition. Therefore they
annihilate themselves more completely in their plurality (Michelson,
1967, p. 46). Moreover, the little rectangles also counterbalance the
square formats of the paintings, in effect erasing the overall grid.
My formats, Martin pointed out, are square but the grids never are absolutely square, they are rectangles a little bit off the square, making a sort of
contradiction, a dissonance, though I didnt 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 Martins painting is very similar to Tantric yantras, as she

acknowledged in an interview (Simon, 1996, p. 87). The Shri Yantra diagram, a classic visualization diagram or yantra used in Tantric meditation
practice, has a balance of four triangles going up and four triangles going
down (Figure 15.11). The upward-pointing triangles represent male
energy and the downward-pointing triangles represent female energy.
This creates an equilibrium that calms and focuses the mind so that the
meditator can enter the Void, symbolized by the bindu point at the center
of the intersecting triangles. Eventually, after prolonged looking, the thinly
drawn and slightly quivering rectangles in Martins painting, which are
fragile to begin with, dissolve. As the more perceptive critics have noted,
Martins 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 Martins painting creates the feeling of an endless eld, obliquely reminiscent of the level plains of Saskatchewan where Martin grew up, as well

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

Figure 15.11

(Drawing of the Shri Yantra by Malka Helfman for this article)

as the deserts of New Mexico. These elds open and expand the mind of
the viewer in preparation for the experience of the Void. While this kind
of expansion does not happen in the Shri Yantra diagram, it occurs in Chinese landscape painting and Zen gardens, where an attempt is made to
create the illusion of innite space. Also, unlike the Shri Yantra diagram,
the space anterior to the grids in Martins works is not empty but is carefully painted, giving her work a presence not found in the Shri Yantra.
Of course, the Shri Yantra is primarily a diagram to assist the meditative
process and is only secondarily a work of art.
Critics have compared Martins pale elds to a Taoist womb matrix,
but for me Martins spatial elds are an approximation of the etheric or
chi body of Taoism that connects to the uncovered block, the ultimate
Void matrix of Taoism, but is not this matrix. In Taoism, the energy or

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chi body is a condensation of this ultimate matrix, more like a breath or a

vapor than the clear, formless Taoist Void that is referenced by the blank
empty space of the paper or silk in traditional Chinese painting. In fact,
the art critic Hilton Kramer aptly characterized Martins elds 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 nd 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 fteen
hours a day in the studio, seven days a week (Weschler, 1982, p. 70).
He further told his principal biographer, Lawrence Weschler, I started
spending the time just sitting there looking. I would look for an hour,
sleep for half an hour. It was a pretty hilarious sort of activity (in
Weschler, 1982, p. 73). Irwin later recognized this process of looking
as being similar to Zen meditation because he had to transcend his own
boredom and restlessness as well as his mental and emotional projections to make progress. Eventually the lines on the canvas merged with
the energy lines of the room and then Irwin found that he was connected
to the underlying eld of pure vibrating energy. Irwins Disk series of
1967 is an attempt to recapitulate this experience of the Void in sculpture. Untitled (Figure 15.12) is a white-painted Plexiglas circle measuring
53 inches (134.62 in diameter). The depth increases from 2.5 inches at
the center to 1/16 inch at the edges. The disk is suspended by a hidden
armature extending 2 inches from the wall and is lit by four lamps of
equal intensity that create a horizontal shadow about 10 feet wide at
the center of the disk. For the observer to actually see the piece, he or
she has to slow down the mind and emotions and surrender boredom
and restlessness. After some time, the disks gradually lose their material
structure and gure becomes indistinguishable from ground. The apparent interchangeability of substance and void is the result. To my mind,
the disks are successful embodiment of the famous line of the Heart
Sutra in Mahayana Buddhism, form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Also, the energy-lled empty white space that emerges as the disk dissolves is an effective simulation of samadhi. Indeed, Irwin has created a
mandalalike device that tends to eliminate itself as an object while giving
the viewer an aesthetic simulacrum of the Void.

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

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 Irwins 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, Irwins formal sculptural language is abstract, avant-garde, and not
representational like the Tibetan mandala, which was conceived according
to standard formulae for mandalas and the representation of deities in mandalas. Yet, for the Tibetan mandala to work, the adept has to be initiated by
a guru into the complex visualization practices of Chakrasambhara, while
an uninitiated individual can get a simulacrum of the meditative experience
of the ultimate Void if he or she takes the time to contemplate Irwins disk.

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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 Brunsons (born 1955) practice of meditation

is more systematic and intense than that of the other artists whose work I
have discussed thus far in this article. She is an adept of Kundalini meditation who has managed to nd visual equivalents for her meditation practice in her artwork, albeit in the traditional medium of painting. Kundalini
meditation involves breathing techniques that open the so-called chakra
centers of energy and consciousness that comprise the subtle body. In
Kundalini meditation, a form of Tantric practice, the adept opens the
subtle body though pranayama techniques and then merges his or her
internal energies with the Void.

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

Brunson describes her painting in relation to Kundalini meditation as

follows:
Kundalini is an open-eyed meditation based on rhythmic, cyclical breathing that allows unfocused seeing and deep concentration. In deep meditation, its sometimes possible to enter an altered state that has specic
physical and visual qualities. The sensations in Kundalini are ones of opening or expandingas if the boundaries between oneself and the external
world were dissolving. Simultaneously, its 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 theyre the closest visual analogues I could nd. In
this body of work Ive taken a process-oriented approach, using the physical qualities of paint to mimic perceptual phenomenablurring, overlapping, dissolving edges, and radiancethat come from meditation.
(Brunson, 2010)

The experience of the subtle body realm as it moves into the Void body, at
the very edge of the senses, is an exquisite visual spectacle in continual
metamorphosis, and the forms, which are indistinguishable from the qualities of the paint and paint application, mirror the experience of this realm.
Brunson has developed a highly rened paint formula including a mix of
oil paint, alkyd medium, and rened beeswax on canvas stretched over
panels to create the deliquescent saturations of the surface that are the distinguishing elements of her work. Brunson rightly argues that the [painting] process demands a level of consciousness and presence that reects
the engagement that meditation practice similarly demands (Brunson,
2010). Brunsons paintings are the product of the overlap between meditation and shamanic seeing as an underlying web of energy is revealed. In
the Veils, this display of energy is not manifest in actual lines but evanescent, amorphous skeins of paint that seem to pulse in and out of the surface of the painting. In meditation, the Kundalini adept becomes aware
of the spanda or vibration of the subtle body and links this vibration to
the spanda of primordial Void. An allusion to this linkage is an element
of the Veils, although this series, like Brunsons other bodies of work, also
functions as an open-ended metaphor that allows for multiple associations. In the Lattices, such as Braid (Figure 15.14), lines are more noticeable as microcosmic cellular forms coalesce into tubes reminiscent of the
internal channels of energy, particularly the central and side channels that
go up the spine and become noticeable to the Kundalini adept as she
wakes up the subtle body through pranayama.

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Figure 15.14 Braid, Jamie Brunson, oil and alkyd on paper, Andrea Schwartz
Gallery, 57.15 57 22.5 cm (Permission and image courtesy of the artist)

Conclusions
The tendency of visual works in the period from the nineteenth to the
twenty-rst century has been to celebrate the idea of art for arts sake, culminating in the notion of postmodernist play. Artworks from this period
have also reected popular culture, political ideologies, and the angstridden zeitgeist of the modern and postmodern eras. The artists in this
chapter, however, are exceptional mainly because they offer a respite from
the materialist xation 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-rst-century art.

Altered Consciousness and Modern Art

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, 3236.
Bogzaran, F. (2008). Dreams of alchemy. Five keys to the secret world of Remedios
Varo. Mexico City: Artes de Mexico.
Brunson, J. (2010). Statement. Retrieved January 17, 2010, from http://www
.jamiebrunson.com/paintings/lattices.html.
Cardena, E. (2009). Beyond Plato?: Toward a science of alterations of consciousness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Clarke. D. (1988). The inuence of Oriental thought on postwar American painting
and sculpture. New York: Garland.
Dal, S. (1969). Conversations with Dali. (J. Neugroschel, trans.). New York: Dutton.
Douglas, C. (1975). Suprematism: The sensible dimension. Russian Review, 34,
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Douglas, C. (1989). Beyond reason: Malevich, Matiushin and their circle. The
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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. Martins.
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
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Iribas-Rudn, A. (2009, June 1114). Hypnosis in contemporary art. Poster presented at the international conference Toward a Science of Consciousness
2009. Investigating Inner Experience. Brain, Mind, Technology. Hong Kong.
Levy, M. (1989). Wayang Kulit: Indonesias shadow puppet plays as a model for
performance. High Performance, 46, 3852.
Levy, M. (1993). Technicians of ecstasy: Shamanism and the modern artist. Putney,
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Levy, M. (2005). Void/in art. Putney, VT: Bramble
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trans). Copenhagen: Borden.
Malinowski, B. (1935). Coral gardens and their magic, Vol. II (pp. 213222). New
York: American Book.
Martin, A. (1992). Writings/Shriften. Winterthur, Switzerland: Editions Canz.
Michelson, A. (1967). Agnes Martin: Recent paintings. Artforum, 5, 4647.

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Rilke, R. (1948). Letters: 19101926. (J. Green & H. Norton, trans.). New York:
W. W. Norton.
Simon, J. (1996). Perfection of the mind: An interview with Agnes Martin. Art in
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Smith, R. (1975). Reviews: Agnes Martin. Artforum, 13, 7273.
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Tisdall, C. (1979). Joseph Beuys. New York: Guggenheim Museum.
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Herald Examiner, p. 6.

CHAPTER 16

Time Is the Key: Music and

Altered States of
Consciousness
Jorg C. Fachner
Music and consciousness are things we do. . . . Achieving consciousness,
from the Latin con (with) and scire (to know), is the central activity of human
knowledge. At the heart of the word is a concept of mutuality, knowing with
others. Our consciousness is a mutual activity; it is performed. (Aldridge,
2006, p. 10)

Introduction
In this chapter, I will summarize the literature on how music and altered
states of consciousness (ASC) are connected. Essential aspects include
induction and expression of emotions and rhythmic body movements to
music and how an altered experience of music is connected to states of
altered temporality. Winkelman (2000) stressed the human capacity for
experiencing ASC as a fundamental biological function. Studies on brain
functions of altered music experience and temporality (Fachner, 2006b,
2009; Shanon, 2001) convey the natural bases of these phenomena, which
have been utilized in shamanistic practice for ages. As Rouget suggested:
To shamanize, in other words to sing and dance, is as much a corporeal
technique as a spiritual exercise. Insofar as he is at the same time singer,
instrumentalist, and dancer, the shaman, among all practitioners of trance,
should be seen as the one who by far makes the most complete use of
music. (Rouget, 1985, p. 319)

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Music and the Alteration of Consciousness

Music functions in many different contexts to alter consciousness,
while the same music can be listened to without altering consciousness
per se (Becker, 1994). Music can be fast, loud, and with a steady beat, as
for example in gospel music, leading to religious rapture, or the music
can be slow, solemn, and spherical to accompany contemplative worshiping (Sohngen, 1967). For Rouget (1985), music creates emotional conditions and structures time processes of symbolic events, especially in
ceremonial settings in which it is intended to alter consciousness states
for individual or group ritual purposes [see Ustinova, and Zarrilli, this volume].
Rougets 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 overstimulationnoises, music, smells, agitation
ecstasy, on the contrary, is most often tied to sensorial deprivationsilence,
fasting, darkness (Rouget, 1985, p. 10) (see Table 16.1). The literature
includes many different and partly contradictory denitions of the terms
trance and ecstasy (also see Cardena, 2009; Fachner, 2006a; Matussek,
2001; Meszaros, Szabo, & Csako, 2002; Pekala & Kumar, 2000; Winkelman, 1986). Rougets concepts of trance and ecstasy are linked to the amount
of body movement to music. Trance music in Rougets terminology is connected to rhythmic body movements, to dance, excitement, and hyperarousal, and in certain rituals it may also lead to possession trance. Ecstasy,

Table 16.1

Differentiation of ecstasy and trance according to Rouget, 1985, 11.

Ecstasy

Trance

Immobility

Movement

Silence

Noise

Solitude

In company

No crisis

Crisis

Sensory deprivation

Sensory overstimulation

Recollection

Amnesia

Hallucination

No hallucination

Time Is the Key

meanwhile, happens in hypoarousal and immobility and seems to be

more concerned with pure mental activity, like meditation, contemplation,
and the like. A recent inquiry on out-of-body experiences has shown
that such ASC occur more often in immobility, when lying down supine
or sitting (Zingrone, Alvarado, & Cardena, 2010), when the focus of
attention can turn inward, and more afferent information is processed,
a nding that corroborates Rougets concept of ecstasy [see Winkelman,
Volume 2].
Although the everyday connotation of the terms trance and ecstasy may
have diametrical or similar meanings when connected to music (Hess,
Fachner, & Rittner, 2009; Rittner, Fachner, & Hess, 2009), in the techno
music genre, trance still stands for dance and excitation and ecstasy refers
to a meditative chill-out music, representing the relaxation state after
exhaustive dancing (Hutson, 2000; Penman & Becker, 2009; Weir,
1996) [see St John, this volume].

Trance Mechanics: How to Explain Trance?

Neher (1961, 1962) proposed that epilepsy-like phenomena witnessed
in ceremonial drumming and healing rituals are based on the causal effects
of a certain sound and tempo. Successive elements are: (1) a distinct frequency spectrum, dominated by low and loud bass frequencies of drums
(Neher, 1962, pp. 152153); (2) repetition of distinct rhythmic patterns
(monotonous drumming) to ensure that such frequency spectra occur;
and (3) a certain tempo (beats per minute) of such drum beat sequences
in order to entrain brainwave patterns.
This would explain the extreme cases of unusual behavior in ceremonies
involving drumming. Neher proposed that this was the consequence of an
auditory driving effect analogous to the epilepsy-inducing effect of photic driving (brain convulsions caused by rhythmic light emissions at a frequency of
predominantly 10 Hz). He argued that the volume and energy of lowfrequency sound information traveling bottom-up the afferent auditory
pathways would induce sensory overstimulation and entrain other sensory
modalities and trigger convulsions. The drumbeat frequency (beats per second) would synchronize EEG frequency measured in cycles per second.
Neher (1961, p. 449) used strongly beaten drum beat frequencies performed at 3, 4, 6, and 8 Hz (beats per second), which in his homology
would be analogue to the EEGs theta range (38 Hz), while photic driving
was used in the range of alpha waves (813 Hz/ashes per second). The
8 to 13 beats per second are difcult to realize on drums by one player alone
because of the extremely quick pulsating sequence (cf. Neher, 1961, p. 449;

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1962, pp. 153154). 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. Nehers 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 Nehers 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 specic aim
and must be intellectually prepared for the experience (Rouget, 1985,
pp. 315326). 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, 105108).
Nehers work on auditory driving has inspired a lot of discussions,
critics, and enthusiasm (for a review, see Turow, 2005) and was a rst
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; Maxeld, 1990; Turow, 2005; Wright,
1991), Nehers interpretation (gained visuallynot quantitativelyfrom
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 Nehers
results was presented (see http://stanford.edu/group/brainwaves/2006/index.html).

Time Is the Key

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 ve major
models) and accordingly are a reection 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 reecting paradigmatic discourse of
biomedical and social science approaches in medicine: Is it the medicine
or the person that administers it that provides help (Fachner, 2007)? In
our topic here, we may also ask if it is the music itself that has certain
properties that per se induce ASC and healing or if music just accompanies
rituals that intend to induce ASC [see Mishara & Schwartz, Volume 2].

Sound and ASC

In music therapy approaches using ASC (see Aldridge & Fachner,
2006; Bonny, 1980; Hess, Fachner, & Rittner, 2009; Rittner, Fachner, &
Hess, 2009), the therapist strives for a non conventional, healing state
of consciousness (Haerlin, 1998, p. 238) in single or group sessions with
monochrome sound instruments such as sound bowls, gongs, and monochord, and pulsation instruments such as drums and rattles. Timmermann
(2009) emphasizes the signicance 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 Arrien, most individuals need 13 to 15 minutes in order to be inuenced or carried away by
drums (Haerlin, 1998, p. 239). Haerlin writes that the main effect of
ASC-inducing instruments is the induction of an empty trance matrix
that reduces the noise of thought and more or less suspends the normal
and pathological frame of beliefs and references (p. 240). Techniques that
alter the focus of attention, and thereby consciousness, offer a way to
empty the contents of memory (Dietrich, 2003), allowing for new information to enter (Matussek, 2001), safely guided by the therapist.
However, proposals that base ASC induction on the absorbing sounds of
instruments alone overlook the inuence of set and setting, the uniqueness
of situation and context, and the personality and history of the receiving individual, as well as the specic sociocultural situation and attitudes of the persons involved in performance in the therapeutic process (Fachner, 2007).
From a psychodynamic perspective, Strobel writes: Strictly speaking, it is

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not only the sound, but the therapist via the sound who affects the client,
and the client re-inuences the therapist with his responses (Strobel,
1988, p. 121).

Absorption, Imagery, and Musical Experiences

Listening to music as a sensual, aesthetic experience can completely
absorb people and completely cut off other sensory input, but absorption
seems to be linked to music preference, imagery, and hypnotizability.
Snodgrass and Lynn (1989) looked for correlations between persons
with high, medium, and low susceptibility to hypnosis (measured with the
Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A) and their degree
of imaginative absorption while listening to highly and less imaginative
music (imaginativeness of 12 pieces of classical music rated by 49 participants on a 7-point scale). Irrespective of imaginative qualities, highly hypnotizable persons reported markedly more absorption than persons with
low susceptibility to hypnosis. All test participants clearly revealed higher
imaginative performance with highly imaginative pieces compared to less
imaginative ones. Differences in imaginative performance were found
between persons with high hypnotic susceptibility while listening to
highly imaginative music, but not with less imaginative music. Highly
hypnotizable fans of classical music showed signicant correlations
between absorption and hypnotizability, a nding that was replicated by
Kreutz and coworkers (2008), showing the inuence of musical preferences on the intensity of emotions and absorption skills.

Music and Emotions in the Brain

Some very special pieces of music may send shivers down the spine; it
is exactly these shivers or chills felt in listening to our favorite music that
were used by Blood and Zatorre (2001) to demonstrate that musical information involves brain structures involved in conveying emotion. Listening
to our favorite melody, we register changes not only in the activity of the
autonomous nervous system, heart beat, muscle tension, skin resistance,
and depth of breathing but particularly in the blood ow in brain structures involved in processing emotional stimuli. The activation pattern
(blood ow) of brain regions (increased: ventral striatum, dorsomedial
midbrain, insula, orbitofrontal cortex; decreased: amygdala, left hippocampus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex) shows a surprising similarity to
activity patterns induced by drugs with a primarily euphoric effect similar
to that of cocaine. This suggests that the perception of favorite music

Time Is the Key

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 Zatorres PET scans, initiates dopamine release in response to music [see Previc, Volume 2]. They found that,
starting from the auditory centers, the cascade of activation initializes
changes in parts of the frontal cortex, the mesolimbic reward centers,
and nally 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 & Buchel, 2009). A skilled musician (or
shaman) may organize the sounds and rhythms played to culminate at a
certain important point in the ritual and trigger endogenous processes
(Katz & de Rios, 1971). Goldstein (1980) has already shown that the
amount of chills can be diminished by administering opioid receptor
antagonists such as naloxone to weaken the impact of the emotional
experience of music. Opioid receptors with a high density in the brainstem region around the inferior collicolus may mediate attachments
we develop to certain beloved sounds (Panksepp & Bernatzky, 2002,
p. 137), enabling us to focus our emotions on certain beloved objects.
An intense night in a club under the inuence of certain club-specic
music and drugs will be remembered and stored as such a beloved sound
and will act later as a cue for seeking these intense events again. Panksepp has described the generalized incentive-seeking system centered
on mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine circuits (p. 135) that are
activated when musical expectancies are coming into play and are
important for the processing of time passages for rhythmic body
movements.
A study on religious and deep listeners (people who have strong emotional reactions, like goosebumps or crying or are otherwise deeply moved
when listening to their favorite music) in comparison to controls showed
stronger responses in heart rate and galvanic skin response when listening
to self-selected, preferred music (Penman & Becker, 2009). Deep listeners
described their experiences in transcendent terms and responses occurred

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parallel to differing parts of the music that were of high subjective valence
for the listeners. This occurrence was not locked to specic parts of the
music; there was no straight connection of strong emotions to musical boundaries like returning chorus, a sudden change of musical registers, and so
forth. This study illustrates how music functions as a catalyst of strong emotions that may lead to trancing (Penman & Becker, 2009, p. 64).
Physiological reactions (chills) are connected to reward circuits in the
brain. They intensify the personal experience and mediate the meaning
of the musical events, which are time-locked in their occurrence with specic moments inherent in the preferred or beloved music but are not necessarily locked to specic musical elements such as certain keys,
harmonies, tempos, or loudness.

The Role of Music in Evolution and Information Transfer and Social Bonding
Matussek (2001) proposes that the cultural matrix and the physiological effects of music complement each other functionally to produce a state
of amnesia and a willingness to assimilate new information. Freeman
(2000) proposes that music and dance were related to the cultural evolution of human behavior and forms of social bonding. He saw connections
in the cultural transmission of knowledge during ASC caused by chemical
and behavioral forms of induction. Alterations of consciousness produced
in this manner served to break through habits and beliefs about reality and
increase alertness for new and more complex information. In times of primarily oral information transfer, memorization techniques were required
to stimulate all senses for storing and processing that information. Musical
abilities in particular seemed to be important for an effective transfer of
knowledge.
Human musical expressive abilities evolved as a prelinguistic communication medium (Cross & Woodruff, 2009) and a framework prior to
language that was utilized for communicating context-sensitive and complex emotional codings in an ongoing symbolic frame of reference in
group interactions. Winkelman (2002, p. 78) stressed psychoemotional
group bonding processes engaged by chanting, an affective vocalization
and rhythmic medium that played a central role in human cognitive evolution through engaging biological competences that create empathy, group
solidarity, and cohesion. Vocalizations communicate affective states and
may mark territorial claims. Chanting provides a communication medium
prior to speech, extending forms of affective vocalizations shared with
other primates as well. The difference in musical expression in humans
and animals involves referential symbolism and classication of musical

Time Is the Key

elements whereby animal vocalizations of affective states are immediate

expressions with nonsymbolic means, not planned nor integrated. Winkelman (2002) further stresses the advantage of music in strengthening
group cohesion and identity. Rhythm in particular provides an external
stimulation that coordinates and synchronizes group performances
through a rhythmo-affective semantics and expression (2002, pp. 79, 80).

ASC, Music, and (Rhythmic) Body Movements

During drumming as well as dancing, the rhythmic movements of the
body synchronize through the rhythm of the music. This occurs automatically during prolonged activity, without effort or control. This may give
the impression that one becomes united or one with the rhythm. For
many rave dancers, this is a well-known experience (Hutson, 2000).
Aaronson refers to the rave party as a ritual space of rhythmic cohesion
in which rhythm, sound, and light effects evoke a bodily expression of
gurative 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 uids, especially in the blood. In addition, respiration tends to synchronize with
movements and induces the heart rate oscillations known as respiratory sinus
arrhythmia. In this way, rhythmic movements may result in a respiratory
cardiovascular synchronization with increased blood pressure oscillations
that stimulate the carotid baroreceptors. The effects of baroreceptor stimulation are not conned to a slowing of the heart rate; they also reduce cortical
arousal and excitability, augment pain thresholds, reduce muscular reexes,
and increase theta activity, as has been shown in previous work. (Vaitl
et al., 2005, p. 107)

It is a known fact from hypnosis research that there are personalities that
are more hypnotizable and susceptible to hypnosis than others. Therefore,
psychometric tools such as the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (Shor & Orne, 1963) have been developed to preselect such individuals
and to measure the depth of hypnosis reached (Meszaros et al., 2002). However, it seems that different personality traits and physiological constitutions
may also have their root in genetic differences [see Cardena & Alvarado, this
volume; Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardena, Volume 2].
The genetic bases concerning dance were reported by BachnerMelman and collaborators (2005), who found that professional dancers

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(as compared to athletes and a control group) had greater facility for serotonin transport and vasopressin response (serotonin is a neurotransmitter
that regulates blood pressure in the vessels [see Nichols & Chemel, Volume 2], and the arginine vasopressin receptor 1a regulates vasoconstriction/expansion due to specic 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 Cloningers Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire. Serotonin activity
in particular is linked to ASC, and
Altered serotonin levels in carriers of the SLC6A4 promoter region allele
might predispose such individuals to a greater ability for imagery and attention to stimuli (especially to musical stimuli) that we hypothesize may provide part of the hard wiring that talented and devoted individuals need to
perform in an art form that combines a unique combination of both musical
and physical skills. (p. 399)

Taking a closer look at brain processes involved in dancing, Park and

coworkers (2002) reported changes in the EEG in the case of a male Salpuri
dancer, a traditional dance formerly performed by shamans in Korea, comparing rest, listening to pop music, and remembering a previous dance. In mentally recalling an altered state (sinmyung, expressing spiritual cleansing or
purication) of the dance, frontal and occipital low alpha (810 Hz) and theta
frequencies increased, as compared to power values at rest. Theta increases
were mostly obvious in the frontal midline, an increase that is normally seen
in relaxed concentration and heightened awareness (Mitchell, McNaughton,
Flanagan, & Kirk, 2008). Park supposes that the Salpuri dancer reaches the
ASC through suppression of frontal cortex functions and activation of
subcortical functions (Park et al., 2002, p. 961). This means that a
state-dependent recall of ASC experiences seems to be characterized by the
dominance of theta frequencies. Similar results were reported by Oohashi
and collaborators (2002), who recorded the EEG of a participant who experienced Kerauhan, a possession trance that occurred during a dedicatory ritual
drama called Calonarang in Bali. In the trance phase analysis, Oohashi and
coworkers found a distinct power increase of EEG theta and alpha frequencies
that differed clearly from patterns found in epileptic discharges and mental
disorders.
There are very few musicological studies on the music that is played
while being in or getting into ASC. Katz and De Rios (1971) transcribed

Time Is the Key

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 healers music
(p. 325). Musics function was compared to a jungle gym, giving a structure to control ASC and provide a series of paths and banisters to help
them negotiate their way (De Rios & Janiger 2003, p. 161) [see Mishor,
McKenna, & Callaway, Volume 2].
Becker (1994) described the stages of the music used in a Rangda/
Barong ritual in Pagoetan in Bali. Transcribing the music of a certain part
of the ritual, Becker demonstrated that short, loud temporal cycles with
no melodic elaboration are used in Balinese gamelan music to indicate
the presence of demons and ghting (Becker, 1994, p. 48). Her transcription exemplies how the pulsating rhythms of drums and cymbals, the
sounds of gongs and gangsa, become all rhythmically synchronized,
become one with the rhythmic synchrony experienced throughout the
central nervous system of the trancer (p. 49). Becker interpreted the effect
of music on ASC and discussed a coherent framework of rhythmic entrainment, connectionism, and neurotransmitter changes to explain the observations. But only Oohashi et al.s EEG study (2002) correlated ASC-related
brain changes over the time course of an authentic ritual performance.
Another musicological study correlated EEG, MIDI, and audio data of a
28-hour piano performance of Erik Saties Vexations (Kohlmetz, Kopiez, &
Altenmuller, 2003; Kopiez, Bangert, Goebl, & Altenmuller, 2003). Analyzing the music performance data (MIDI and audio recordings) during
the ASC period (between the 15th and 18th hours of performing the
piece), an increasing acceleration and disintegration of tempo and uncontrolled changes in loudness, which had previously remained stable over a
period of 14 hours, was observed. Overall, however, the sensor-motor
performance during the ASC remained remarkably stable. The pianist
was still able to play the piano, but the way he played the piece was different before and after entering the state. Throughout the 28-hour performance, EEG frequency slowing was observed in the left posterior
hemisphere, indicating less activity in the left parietal and more activity
in right parietal lobes.
Summarizing, rhythmic body movements in dance may induce ASC by
suppressing cortical and enhancing subcortical functions while slowing
and increasing alpha and theta brainwaves. The serotonergic system may
act differently in those experienced with dancing and ASC, leading to an
increased imagery and attention for musical stimuli, while motor programs used for playing music function quite normally in altered states,
but de- or acceleration of tempo and loudness may occur.

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The connection of ASC and music is dependent upon the personal

intention that is communicated with or attributed to preferred music.
Whether music becomes meaningful and intense while experiencing or
performing it depends on the situation or setting and the personal intention attached. Further, in the process of performing music, it may depend
on personal kairological (see below) processes that evoke an immediate
meaning and call for activity (as in Oohashi et al.s work). Again, this
stresses that the connection of music and ASC is connected to certain stations or stages in the time course of the ASC experienced.

ASC, Music, and Altered Temporality

Music is the art of time processes and requires time to be heard.
Brown, Merker, and Wallin (2000, p. 17) discussed the neurobiology of
metric timekeeping as a key evolutionary research question, as metrics
are central for language and music. Alterations of time perception,
whether induced by drugs, rhythmic body movements, intense emotions,
absorption, or being hypnotized, change the focus of attention or meaningful sequences attached to it during rituals, which is crucial for the
induction of ASC through music.
The drum has been central to discussions regarding timekeeping and
entraining movements to an external timekeeper, such as beating
a drum (Wallin, Merker, & Brown, 2000, p. 17). As Rouget (1985) and
Eliade (1964) described, the shaman has to build his drum, sanctify it in
a ritual according to his or her cosmology, and load it with the energy
and tradition needed for the shamanic journey. It is played constantly
during the treatment process, and the way it is played marks the stations
on the shamanic journey. This stresses that ritual purposes and meaningful intentions are connected to the playing. Therefore, the main role of
music seems to be to organize and synchronize time structures of group
processes in which certain stations in the ritual and intensity stages of
the process are phase-locked with specic content. The information units
are encoded and symbolized in gestures, in mimesis (compare Winkelman
2002, p. 80), as reected in rhythmic abilities and coherent movements of
the body in drumming and dancing and its ritual-specic gurations that
synchronize with the musical structure and the rhythms played. Rhythm
and tempo organize the external entraining sequences of information to
be transferred by ordering the sounds in their timely occurrence in rituals
through rhythmo-affective semantics. Rhythm organizes the time structure of the musical events. This includes the beat intervals with varying
accentuations, and interonset intervals of beats in the millisecond range

Time Is the Key

(elaborated upon in Nehers research), the length of melody tones or

vocalizations, and short phrasings in the second to minute range, and,
when sharing a certain tempo, the group temporal process into a shared
time structure. This seems to be more intense and effective when perception of time is altered, which is a common characteristic of ASC (Ludwig,
1966); but what about music makes changes in time perception from normal states of consciousness?
The research literature on timing reects the debate on subjective timing effects, especially when time is estimated (memorized) after an event
has happened. Poppel (2000) has called it the time paradoxontime periods with a dense event structure recalled in a narration are estimated as
prolonged when a lot of interesting things happened, even when the duration in physical time is objectively short. It seems that time judgments can
distort, recalibrate, reverse, or have a range of resolutions depending
on the stimulus and on the state of the viewer (Eagleman et al., 2005,
p. 10,370).
Tse has proposed a simple countermodel, arguing that the brain has
access to the approximate constant rate of its own information processing
(in Eagleman et al., 2005, p. 10,369). For example, if one bit of information processed is interpreted as one unit of objective time, then, in
moments of shifted or increased attention, two or three bits of information
would be counted again as one unit of objective time, creating the illusion
that time and motion had slowed down (p. 10,369). Our sense of subjective time uctuates in relation to clock time according to the amount of
information we receive per second. Only a specic, individually, and
situation-relevant excerpt of sensory data is accessible to our consciousness (upper limit are around 1520 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 casee.g., an exceptionally familiar
recordingthe rst bar might be grasped as one gesture, which in turn
would identify the entire piece, so it might be listened to in huge chunks
(i.e., a minimal number of bits.) At the other extreme, one note might be
heard as a composite of onset transients and sine tones with individual
envelope shapes. More commonly, a chord, an arpeggio, or even an entire
cadential gesture could be heard as one bit of information. Experience
and training thus have a direct relation to the amount of information that
can be grasped from a musical phrase. (Mountain, 1989, p. 4)

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

expectation, learning, attention, and memory functions in a dynamic process of chunking information units and their duration in the passage of
time. As already outlined when discussing intense emotions above, a wide
variety of endocrine and neurotransmitter activity changes in ASC interweave with these processes, enabling altered scaling of auditory events,
such as loudness (Globus, Cohen, Kramer, Elliot, & Sharp, 1978). Studies
that offer a physiological explanation are based on drug research and
emphasize the role of various neurotransmitter processes, such as serotonergic (Wittmann et al., 2007), cannabinoid (Fachner, 2009; Mathew
et al., 2002), dopamine, and cholinergic (Meck, 1996; Rammsayer, 1999)
interactions with perception and action in an altered temporality (Shanon,
2001). Studies on patient populations and drugs indicate variations in
scaling of musical events caused by de- and acceleration of internal clock
speed and internal representation of perceived elements when reproducing or estimating time intervals in the millisecond-to-second and the
second-to-minute range (Buhusi & Meck, 2005; Meck, 2005). Generally,
task-related and activated neural networks (discussed are thalamocortico-striatal circuits, i.e., basal ganglia, supplementary motor cortex,
prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex) serve as a timekeeper and
detect coincidences in synchronous brain activation and processing of different neural populations (Meck, 2005). Clock, memory, and decision
stages can be separated. Clock speed (pacemaker) can be inuenced by
dopaminergic manipulations, whereas memory processes (representation
of time durations) can be inuenced 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].

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

To summarize, an altered temporality results in a different metric scaling of sensory events in the musical time-space and has an impact on perceptual and attentional processes (Fachner, 2000, 2009, 2011). Thus, we
may expect that, if the information in the time course of music rituals
becomes meaningful for the listener or performer, the brain will offer various strategies to zoom into specic parts of the music in order to process
basic musical features, such as pitch, timbre, and pulse, as well as
higher-level musical features, such as tonality, meter, and form, focused
in a state of hypofrontality or enhanced sensory perception.
Dietrich (2003, 2004) describes the function of frontal cortex in ASC, proposing that hypofrontality (a reduction of frontal cortex activity) results in a
ooding 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 signies personal, individual time, and also a chronological structure oriented to the geophysical concept of time as conventional time by
the clock. Kairological time emerges from personal perception of time
and time intervals and signies the right time for doing something, deciding, or acting in the here and now (Aldridge, 1996). Anticipation of what
is coming up next and what is needed to be perceived is surely of vital
interest for humans so that it is not only important in terms of where to
place attention, but also when (Eagleman et al., 2005, p. 10,370).

Conclusion
Music and ASC are connected in various ways. One of the most
determining inuences seems to be the context, the personal set and

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

[see Whitehead, this volume]. Is music, then, only the soundtrack of a context in which participants aim to get into ASC, using music as a vehicle for
their intentions? Well, participants project their intentions onto the music,
but it needs to have the structure to serve them, such as: continuous intensications, mainly of tempo and volume; the deliberate use of accelerando
and crescendo (compare Rouget, 1985, pp. 8286), but also extreme consistence and monotony in the case of ecstasy; long duration (hours); simple
forms; minimal variations in many repetitions, Bordun, or ostinati; and no
precise motifs, but steps, tonal variations, slow glissandi, and a narrow tonal
range. Acoustic stimuli of trance are certain transitory developments and
accentuations, for example, slowly and consistently growing and fading volume. Music therapy research stressed that there is no music that has a clear
deterministic effect on physiology, but music can be used as a timeframe for
communicative events (Aldridge, 1989b). Music has diverse therapeutic and
also hedonistic meanings because the effects depend on processes of involvement, experience, and degree of information on the induction, references,
meaning, and purpose of ASC in the specic 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 signicance of ASC
depends on the respective cultural context and symbolic expression. Each
ASC induced in such contexts receives its power from music at the individual stages associated with the function and meaning of ASC in rituals
and ceremonies. The function of music here is to create a special emotional atmosphere, to stimulate processes of identication 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-specic vigilance changes combined
with the intensied, narrowed, or broadened focus of attention might
result in a different emotional prole 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

of ASC and altered temporality and might help to understand ASC processes in vivo.
Cognitive processing of music changes its modes of awareness on
musical elements during ASC. Rhythm, pitch, loudness, and timbre and
their sound staging in the perceptive eld of a person seem to culminate
in a certain sound which, corresponding to the cultural cognitive matrix,
induces ASC (Fachner, 2006a). Rouget (1985) proposed that music features such as repetition, long duration, monotony, volume, and density
do not provide clear causal explanations for ASC induction, but the connection of time and space perception alteration resulting from music is
important (Christensen, 1996). Therefore, rhythm remains the target of
discussion for music-related ASC induction.

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About the Editors

ETZEL CARDENA, 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 Scientic Evidence, to
which Science News dedicated a cover story. His webpage is at http://
cercaplund.blogspot.com/2010/01/about-cercap.html.
MICHAEL WINKELMAN, M.P.H., Ph.D., received his doctorate from the
School of Social Sciences, University of California Irvine, in 1985. Among
his publications are Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness
and Healing (2010), Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Approach to Religion (with John Baker, 2008), and Psychedelic Medicine (edited with Tom
Roberts, 2007). He retired from the School of Human Evolution and
Social Change, Arizona State University, in 2009 and currently lives in
the central highlands of Brazil, where he is developing permaculturebased intentional communities.

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Advisory Board

Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., is Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in San Francisco, California. In 2002 he received the
American Psychological Associations Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology as well as the Award
for Distinguished Contributions for Professional Hypnosis from the
Society of Psychological Hypnosis. In 2010, three of his co-edited books
were published: Perchance to Dream: The Frontiers of Dream Psychology;
Mysterious Minds: The Neurobiology of Mediums, Mystics, and Other Remarkable People; and Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human
Illusion. In 2010, an updated edition of his co-authored book Haunted by
Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, was published. Dr. Krippner
is a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams
(from which he received its Lifetime Achievement award) and the Parapsychological Association (which gave him its Outstanding Career Award).
Robert Turner worked on MRI with Peter Manseld at the University of Nottingham, 19841988. Between 1988 and 1993, at the NIH he developed the
neuroscience techniques of diffusion weighted MRI and BOLD functional
MRI. In 1994 he moved to London as cofounder of the Functional Imaging
Laboratory. In 2006 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive
and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, as Director of Neurophysics.
Max Velmans is currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths,
University of London and has been involved in consciousness studies for
around 30 years. His main research focus is integrating work on the philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology of consciousness,
and he has around 100 publications in this area. His book Understanding

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 20042006, Chair of
the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British
Psychological Society.

About the Contributors

Carlos S. Alvarado, Ph.D., is scholar in residence at Atlantic University, assistant professor of Research at the University of Virginia, and Research
Faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. His research work
has centered on out-of-body experiences and the history of parapsychology. Alvarado is the recipient of the Parapsychological Associations
2010 Outstanding Career Award.
Julie Beischel, Ph.D., is director of research at the Windbridge Institute for
Applied Research in Human Potential. She received her doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology (minor: microbiology and immunology) in 2003
from the University of Arizona. She is a member of the Society for Scientic
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.
Jorg C. Fachner, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the Finnish Centre of
Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at University of Jyvaskyla,
Finland. Dr. Fachner has authored a doctoral thesis (2001) on cannabis,
EEG, and music perception, and various publications on music and
altered states, music therapy, addictions, drug culture, and the social
pharmacology of music.
Antoon Geels, Ph.D., trained in history of religions and specialized in psychology of religion, in which he now holds a chair at Lund University,
Sweden. He is also an honorary professor in the psychology of

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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 signicance 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 Queenslands
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. An anthropologist of contemporary religion, performance, festivals, and movements, Grahams 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
signicance of Eastern meditation experiences and related scientic
research. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and Woodrow Wilson Fellow
and was Founding Managing Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Professor Moshe Sluhovsky teaches history at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, specializing in religious history of Europe. His latest book is
Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment of Sprits in
Early Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., is generally credited with reviving the study of consciousness with his 1969 classic Altered States of Consciousness. Author of
more than 200 articles in the professional journals, his 1975 classic Transpersonal Psychologies helped establish that eld. His latest, The End
of Materialism, explores the scientic foundations of paranormal aspects
of consciousness to show it is reasonable to be both scientically and
spiritually oriented.

About the Contributors

Professor Yulia Ustinova teaches ancient history at Ben-Gurion University

of the Negev, Israel. Main publications: The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan
Kingdom: Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God, (Brill, 1999) and Caves
and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for
Ultimate Truth, (Oxford University Press, 2009), as well as many articles
on various aspects of religion and culture in the Mediterranean area.
Charles Whitehead is an anthropological neuroscientist interested in
bridging the conceptual gulf dividing biological from social anthropology,
which he sees as related to the conict between scientism and spirituality.
He obtained his Ph.D. in anthropology and neuroscience at University
College London in 2003, has edited two volumes on Social Approaches to
Consciousness, and has published extensively on related subjects.
Jennifer M. Windt is an assistant lecturer/researcher in theoretical philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, at the Johannes Gutenberg University
of Mainz, Germany. In her Ph.D. thesis and in previous publications, she
has focused on dreaming and consciousness, integrating empirical ndings from psychology and neuroscience with philosophy of mind and
epistemology.
Phillip B. Zarrilli is professor of Performance Practice at the Drama Department, University of Exeter. A professional actor and director working
internationally, he is Artistic Director of THE LLANARTH GROUP
(Wales). His most recent books are Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural
Approach After Stanislavski (2009) and co-author of Theatre Histories: An
Introduction (2010).

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Index

(f indicates a gure; n indicates a note;

t indicates a table)
Abandon techniques, acting, 317
Aboriginal Men of High Degree
(Elkin), 331
Absorption, 5, 10
Access consciousness, performance, 319
Acting, double consciousness, 303
Actors: Asian training modes, 318;
cognitive neuroscience, 304; modern
training, 31318; noh performance
ideal, 312; phenomenal/access
consciousness, 319
Adaptive function, ego, 264
Advaita Vedanta: ASC experience, 141,
142; ASC states, 146, 147, 149;
mystical dimension, 255, 260
Aesthetic performance: described, 3023,
307; research, 303; and ritual
performance, 3056, 307
Affective mysticism, 77
Affective transcendence, 77
Afro-Caribbean religions, state of
consciousness, 90
Age of Enlightenment, reactive religious
movements, 8990
Agency, SMT, 240, 241
Aggregate vs. general function, 10
Al-Andaluz period, rational/empirical
philosophy, 89
Alcohol use, literary authors, 287

Alcoholic beverages, Neolithic period,

5051
Alert state, hypnosis, 95, 96
Allison, R., 37
Alpert, Richard, 206
Alpha brain waves, meditation, 33
Altamira caves, 46
Alterations of Consciousness (Baruss), 114
Altered pattern of phenomenal properties,
2, 128
Altered State Theory of Hypnosis (Kallio
and Revonsuo), 3
Altered States (movie), 6, 15
Altered states of consciousness (ASC):
Ancient Greece practices, 5565;
Ancient Middle East practices, 5255;
animal magnetism, 9093; biological
basis, 196; classifying, 57;
consciousness/self, 238244;
contemporary actor training, 31318;
culturally induced, 18186;
cyberculture/virtual reality, 2089;
diabolic spirit possession, 76, 7980;
divine spirit possession, 75, 7678;
early counterculture, 2038; Eastern
approaches, 13957; Eastern
performance traditions, 31012;
Enlightenment religious movements,
8990; epistemological issues, 23033;
evolutionary origins, 16364, 16416;
hypnotic somnambulism, 9397, 102;
and individual differences, 911; and

386

Index
induction procedures, 78; integration,
30; mediumship, 97103; modern art,
32754; and music, 35671; in
performance, 3012; mystical
experience, 24448; new millennium
research, 12629; 1960s research,
11416, 204; 1970s research, 11621;
1980s research, 12124; 1990s
research, 12426; perception, 23338;
performance research, 3034;
phenomenal/access consciousness,
31920; physical science anomalies,
27; pre-Christian European shamanism,
7476; prehistoric practices,
4651; principal functions, 188;
proto-historic practices, 5152;
recent publications, 11314; religious
experiences (REs), 18991; religious
literature, 28082; religious mysticism,
25572; ritual/aesthetic performances,
3057; Roman Empire practices,
6567; scientic status, 2425;
shamanism, 15963, 16577, 190;
social change, 19297; study of, 1113;
techno-rave/DiY consciousness, 203,
21012; temporary alterations,
18689; terminology, 25, 11415;
trance/psytrance, 21220; transition
states, 9; 20th-century survey, 1027;
universal manifestation, 23,
24; written works/literature, 27879,
28294
Altered States of Consciousness (Tart), 115
Altered States of Consciousness Induction
Device (ASCID), 119
Altering phenomenology, 128
Alvarado, Carlos, 14
Amadeus, 327, 328
American Psychological Association
(APA), ASC publications, 114
American Society for Psychical Research,
J. B. Rhine, 106
American transcendentalism, expansion
of consciousness, 106
Amnesia: dissociation in, 36;
hypnotic induction, 95
Amundsen, Reidar, vision
of Jesus, 26668

Ancient Greece, practices, 5565, 62f, 63f

Ancient Middle East, practices, 5255
Anger, ego-psychological model, 271
Animal magnetism, 9091; literary trope,
28788
Animal spirits, shamanism, 160
Animals: perspectival worldview, 184,
186; shamanic power, 33940
Animism, dened, 184
Anomalies: AC physical science 27; in
science, 26
Anomalous experiences, 3, 12
Anthroposophy, expansion of
consciousness, 107
Antistructural episodes, cultural change,
188, 196
Apter, Michael, reversal theory, 192
Apuleius, on Isis initiation, 65, 66
APZ-OAV Questionnaire, 12223, 127
Arbman, Ernst: consciousness, 271;
mystical death, 27172; religious
visions, 258
Arevalo, Guillermo, 220
Aristotle: on initiation rites, 60, 62; on
prophetic dreams, 245
Aronofsky, Darren, 15
Arousal, 1970s research, 120
Art: meditative induction, 329; shamanic
state induction, 329
Artaud, Antonin: actor training, 314, 315,
318; narcotic use, 285
Asian tradition, altering consciousness
techniques, 308
Auditory drive, ritual trances,
35758
Auditory hallucinations: 1980s research,
124; SMT, 241
Aurobindo, Sri, 204 n.1
Automatic writing: Bretons use, 289; and
mediumship, 9899; William James,
1034
Automaticity, Tart, 107
Ayahuasca shamanism, 214, 215, 282
Ayin (nothingness), 258
Baal-Shem Tov, emergence of, 90
Bacchus (Dionysus Bacchus), 61
Baruss, Imants, 114

387

Index
Baudelaire, Charles, 257; narcotic use,
28485
Beerbohm, Max, 292
Being, Vedanta tradition, 140
Beischel, Julie, 14
Berger, Hans, ACS research, 106
Bergson, Henri: life-force, 2045;
reducing valve, 205
Berlioz, Hector, 15
Bertrand, Alexandre, 95
Beuys, Joseph, shamanic techniques, 329,
337f, 338, 33941, 340f
Bey, Hakim, 21011
Bhagavad-Gita, pure consciousness, 155
Bible, spirit possessions in, 79
Biological cycles, and ASC, 1011
Black Square, The (Malevich), 34344
Blake, William, 285 n.3; perception, 106
Block, Ned, 319
Body, SMT, 23941, 242
Book of Revelations, 281
Boom Festival, counterculture, 203,
21516, 21920
Borges, Jorge Luis, 14; literary
double, 294
Borges and I (Borges), 294
Bourdieu, Pierre, Kabuli gender
relations, 185
Bourguignon, Erika, institutionalized
ASC, 190
Braid (Brunson), 35, 352f
Brain: and dancing, 364; information
processing, 367; literacy skills, 277;
musical stimulation, 36061, 362,
36465; mystical roots, 256; shamanic,
175; time perception, 368
Breath stops, 141
Breton, Andre, 28889, 29091
Breuer, Joseph, 105
Bridal mysticism, 269, 270
Bright light, initiation rites, 60, 65
Browning, Robert, 288
Brunson, Jamie, meditative induction,
329, 35051
Bucke, Richard Maurice, 204; mystical
experience, 262
Buddhism: East-Asian ASC experience,
139; in Japan, 31011; mystical

dimension, 255, 260, 263; meditation

mystical states, 121
Bunuel, Louis, 334
Burkutlatjpi, Liwukang, 331
Burning Man Festival, 205, 209, 302
Butoh training, actors, 318
Butsugen, ASC state, 149
Byron, Lord George Gordon, 257;
narcotic use, 283
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The (lm), 15
Caciola, Nancy, 76
Calendrical rites, rituals, 187, 188
Calonarang, ritual drama, 364
Cambridge Anthropologists, 307
Camisard prophets, emergence of, 90
Cardena, Etzel, 164, 315; hypnosis
research, 127; on manias, 327
Cargo cult, social change, 19293
Carrington, Leonora, surrealist painter,
33536
Carroll, Lewis, 278, 278 n.1, 282
Castaneda, Carlos, 214, 28687
Caves and subterranean passages, 47
Chakrasambhara Mandala, 349, 350f
Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill), 293
Chanting, shamanism, 169
Charas (hash), 213
Charcot, Jean-Martin, inuence of, 288;
work of, 101
Charisma, dened, 194
Charismatic exorcists, 8283
Charismatic leaders, social change, 192,
19495
Chastenet, A. M. J., Marquis de
Puysegur, 93
Chat cycle, 187
Chavet caves, 46
Chekhov, Michael, 314
Chi body, visual arts, 331, 347, 348
Childhood, as transitional space, 188
Chinchem, 192
Chlysti, emergence of, 90
Christianity: and denitions of ASC, 5;
mystical dimension, 255, 260
Clark, Fraser, 212
Claros, mantic preparations, 56, 57
Clerical exorcists, 83

388

Index
Clinical psychology, and denitions of
ASC, 5, 6
Cloud of Tea (Higby), 341f
Clowde of Unknowyng, The, spiritual
exercises, 7778
Cognitive neuroscience, actors
experience, 304
Cohen, Allen, 2067
Cohen, Emma, 217
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, narcotic use,
28384, 285
Collective effervescence, 194, 195
Comford, Francis, Cambridge
anthropologist, 307
Communication: and mediumship,
98100; prelinguistic, 36263
Communitas states, Ndembu rite, 19697;
and permanence, 198
Comstock, C., 37
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(De Quincey), 283
Consciousness: brain mechanisms, 3032;
culturally variant, 182; derivation of,
355; and dreams, 243; Eastern
tradition, 140, 144; expansion of, 106;
in transit states, 301; mapping research,
12021; meditative states, 24344;
modes of, 2930; 1980s research,
12122; noh performance ideal, 312;
phenomenal/access, 319; recent
publications, 11314, 115;
reformatting terms, 128; techniques of
experience, 204; term, 2; 20th-century
research, 106; written works/literature,
27879
Consciousness at large, 103
Consciousness clubs, 212
Consortium of Collective
Consciousness, 219
Constructivism, and mystical experience,
12021, 26164
Contemporary counterculture, 1960s
legacy, 2045
Control techniques, acting, 317
Corporal mystical experience, 7677
Cortazar, Julio, 16
Cosmic consciousness, 204
Counterculture, psychedelics, 2058

Cousins, James, altered states, 291

Cousins, Wendy, 14
Crawford, H., 34
Creative Evolution (Bergson), 205
Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
(Freud), 27980
Creativity, dened, 19192
Crevel, Rene, 28990
Cronenberg, David, 15
Cross-cultural perspective, 23
Crowley, Aleister, narcotic use, 285
Culture, and ASC, 24
Cummins, Geraldine, altered states,
29192
Cyberculture, early counterculture, 208
Cyberdelic thesis, 208
Cyberia, 208
Daimonion of Socrates (Plutarch), 58, 59
Dal, Salvador, shamanic induction
techniques, 329, 334f
Dance: genetic basis, 36364; psytrance
culture, 21518; shamanism, 16667,
169
Dancing: brain activity, 364; scenes in
prehistoric art, 49; uncontrollable,
9192
DAndrea, Anthony, 213
dAquili, E., 24, 34
Davis, Erik, 220
Daydream cycle, 187
Daydreams, and dissociation, 36
De Exorcismis (1998), 85
De Mille, Richard, 286
De Morgan, Sophia, 99
De Quincey, Thomas, 283
Deafferentation, 34, 37
Deconstructivism, mystical experience,
26162
Decontextualism, mystical experience,
261; 1980s research, 121
Deep hypnotic state, 95, 96
Deep sleep, 29
Defensive function, ego, 264
Deikman, Arthur J., 256
Deir Alla, Jordan, prophecy inscription, 53
Deleuze, Joseph Philippe Francois, 94
Delphi, mantic preparations, 56

389

Index
Delusional belief, 4
Democritus, on poetic inspiration, 63
Demotic Magical Papyrus, Egypt, 66
Dere`gelment de tous les sens (Rimbaud), 14
Descartes, Rene: dream skepticism,
23031, 23334; philosophy of, 89
Description of Greece, Pausanias, 57
Desnos, Robert, 290
Dexter, George T., 9899, 100
Diabolic spirit possession, 76, 7980
Dialectics of utopia, 219
Didyma, mantic preparations, 56
Dietrich, A., 32, 33
Digital Maoism, 209
Digital utopianism, 2089
Dionysiac mysteries, 60, 6163, 62f, 63f
Direct realism, philosophy of
perception, 233
Disciplinary matrix, paradigm
elements, 25
Discrete state of consciousness, 3
Discriminative intellect, Eastern tradition,
150, 151
Discursive thinking, Eastern tradition,
150, 151
Disjunctivism, mental states, 23637
Disk series (Irwin), 348
Dissociation, 8, 34; dened, 36; and
integration, 37; make-believe, 189; and
mediumship, 101, 102; shamanism,
16465
Dissociative identity disorder, and
hypnosis, 97 n.2
Divergent concepts, social sciences, 25
Divine madness, 55
Divine spirit possession, 75, 7678
DiY consciousness, early counterculture,
203, 209, 21012
Don Juan (Byron), 257
Donne di fuori, 74
Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 205,
28586, 330
Dopamine, 31
Double consciousness, acting, 303, 320
Double personality, and hypnosis, 97 n.2
Dowden, Hester, 291
Dracula (Stoker), 288
Dream incubation, shamanism, 159

Dream skepticism, epistemological

concerns, 23033
Dreaming: 1970s research, 119; REM
sleep, 29, 30
Dreams: and consciousness, 243;
epistemological concerns, 23033;
philosophy of perception, 233;
religious life, 244; and selfconsciousness, 24143; shamanism,
17172; surrealism, 28990
Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 15
Drugs, shamanism, 16566
Drumming: altered temporality, 36667;
body synchronization, 363; ritual
trance, 35758; shamanic, 125, 166
Du Maurier, George, 288
Dualistic mystical state, 9
Durkheim, Emile: on charisma, 194; on
ritual, 196; on the sacred, 195
Earthdance, 212
Eastern civilization: ASC experience,
14044, 148; ASC practical effects,
15357; ASC states (maps), 14450;
ASCs role, 139; inner awareness
levels, 15053
Ecstasy, 5, 31; bodily movements, 356t,
357; Latin ex stasis, 77; sensory
deprivation, 356; visionary
experience, 53
Ecstatic entrancement, 211
Edelman, Nicole, 98
Edmonds, Judge John W., 9899, 100
Ego, functions of, 264
Ekstrom, Hjalmar, 265
Electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs),
211, 213, 21517
Eliade, Mircea, shamanism, 16061, 163,
33839
Elkin, A. P., 331
Ellis, Havelock, narcotic use, 285
Ellul, Jacques, 209
Ellwood, Robert S., 259
Embodied metaphors, prehistoric art, 48
Emotional brain, 175
Emotional response gating, 31
Emotions, and music, 168, 356,
36062

390

Index
Empirical research, 1980s instruments,
12223
Emptiness: Buddhist experience, 140,
142; Eastern ASC states, 14445
Encounter, The (Varo), 335
Enlightenment, 9
Enlivenment, Eastern tradition, 154
Entheogen drugs, 24
Entheogenic Reformation, 207, 214
Enthousiasmos, Greek divine
possession, 56
Enthusiasm, spirit possession, 53
Entrainment, dened, 358
Epic of Gilgamesh, 279
Epistemology, ASC issues, 230
Epoques des sommeils, 290
Ergotropic arousal, 120
Ernst, Max, surrealist painter, 335
Ersatz-death, Ancient Greek mystery
rites, 60
Esalen Institute, 204 n.1
Esdaile, James, 97
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Locke), 245
Executive possession, 217
Exemplars, paradigm elements, 25
Exertion, shamanism, 171
Exogenous neurotransmitters,
shamanism, 16566
Exorcism, 8284
Exorcism, animal magnetism, 91
Experimental metaphysics, and
mediumship, 98
Extrovertive mystical experience (EME),
146 n.4
Eyn Sof (without end), 258
Ezekiels visions, 5455
Fachner, Jorg, 15
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,
The (Poe), 288
Farthing, G. William, consciousness,
113
Fasting, shamanism, 170
Father Hell, 91
Faulkner, William, 287
Feedback loops, cortico-striato-thalamocortical, 32

Felt presence (FP), religious belief,

24647
Fern Cat, The (Varo), 336
Fersen, Alexander, actor training, 314,
31617
Fischer, Roland, arousal studies, 3, 120
Flaherty, Alice: on Lewis Carroll, 281; on
writing, 281
Flournoy, Theodore, 104, 105
Folded Under a Stone Sleeping (Higby), 342
Ford, Gordon Onlow, 330
Forgetting model, mysticism, 263
Forman, Robert K. C.: mystical
experience, 26163, 271, 272; mystical
studies, 9, 121
Fo-yen Ching-yuan, 149
Frankenstein (Shelley), 284
Franklin, Benjamin, magnetism, 91
Freak, counterculture, 204, 213
Frecska, E., 37
Free Spirits Antinomists, 78
French Encyclopedists, philosophy of, 89
Freud, Sigmund: ASC themes, 105; on
literary sources, 278; on mysticism,
255; on writing, 27980
Frontal limbic interaction, in hypnosis, 35
Frontal lobe synchronization, 6, 23, 30
Frontal-subcortical circuits, 32
Gamma high-frequency brain waves, 30;
in meditation, 33
Gao trance, 212, 213, 216
Gardzienice Theater Association
techniques, 318
Garrett, Eileen, altered states, 291
Gassner, Johann Joseph, 90, 91
Gathering of the Tribes for Human Be-in,
2067
Gauthier, Francois, 218
Gautier, Theophile, narcotic use, 28485
Geels, Antoon, 14
Gender, cultural beliefs, 185
Generalized altruism, 182
Geometric motifs, Tuleilat Ghassul,
48, 50f
Gerard, Morgan, 218
Gertrud the Great of Helfta, 26870
Ghost Dance cults, social change, 19394

391

Index
Ghost Shirts, 194
Gibson, William, 208
Gift (le don), Afro-Caribbean religions, 90
Gift exchange, clan-based society, 18384
Gil, DJ Goa, 213
Ginsberg, Allen, LSD, 206
Global Dance Party for Peace, 212
God-mysticism, 256
Goldman, Albert, 342
Gore, Georgina, on raves, 217
Great Awakening, religious movement, 90
Green, John, 316
Gregory, William, 95, 9697
Grey, Alexander, shamanic induction
techniques, 329, 333f, 333
Grof, Stanlislav, unconscious, 120
Grotowski, Jerzy, actor training, 314,
31516, 318
Guardia, Helena, 15
Gurdjieff, George, I., 330; The Work,
107
Gurney, Edmund, 102; hypnosis, 9596
Hallucination: dened, 124; hypnagogic
state, 247; 1980s research, 12324;
phenomenology of, 102; philosophy of
perception, 23338; selfhood, 240, 241
Hallucinogen Rating Scale (HRS),
research, 12526, 127
Hallucinogenic drugs, new millennium
research, 12627
Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, The
(Holden et al.), 119
Handsome Lake, Iroquois revival, 194
Hard/complete constructivism, 121
Hardy, Alister, REs studies, 18990
Harrison, Jane Ellen, 307
Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic
Susceptibility, 363
Hashish Club, members of, 28485
Hataphatic experience, religious
visions, 258
Hatha yoga, 3089
Heidegger, Martin, 279, 331
Hemingway, Ernest, 287
Hemp seeds: Neolithic sites, 50; Scythian
funeral rites, 51
Henosis, unit, 67

Herbert, R., 33
Hermann, Max, theater as event, 3034
Herodotus, Scythian funeral rite, 51
Higby, Sha Sha, shamanic techniques,
329, 34142
Highly hypnotizable people, 8, 9,
14, 34, 35
Hippies, counterculture, 204
Hippocampus, 31
Histoire Critique du Magnetisme Animal
(Deleuze), 94
Hobbes, Thomas, on dream
skepticism, 231
Hobson, J. A., 7
Hodgson, Richard, 1001
Hoffman, D. D., 11
Hofmann, Albert, 205
Homer, 282
Hood, Ralph W., REEM, 256
Horace, 295
Houston, Jean, ASCID, 119
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
(Beuys), 337f, 339
Hughes, Ted, 14
Hui Neng, 344
Hull, Clark L., 106
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily
Death (Myers), 102
Human Personality, Myerss articles, 103
Human potential movement, 204 n.1
Humans, bodily alterations, 18586
Hunter-gatherer societies,
shamanism, 162
Huxley, Aldous: on knowledge, 244;
on psychedelics, 2056, 25657,
28586; on van Gogh
painting, 330
Hyperfrontal states, sensory
processing, 369
Hypergraphia, 281, 282
Hypnos, god of sleep, 93
Hypnosis, 4, 6, 7, 8; dened, 127; as
dissociation, 3435; literary trope,
28788; and mediumship, 9798; and
music, 360, 363; propensity, 10; and
psi phenomena, 94; and psychiatric
diagnosis, 97 n.2; shamanism, 164;
social contagion, 186; standardized

392

Index
instruments, 127; 20th-century
research, 106
Hypnotic sleep, 28990
Hypnotic somnambulism, 9397
Hypnotic state of consciousness, 7;
investigation of, 95
Hypnotic susceptibility, 35
Hysteria, and hypnosis, 97 n.2
I Like America and America Likes Me
(Beuys), 340f
Ibn al-Arabi, 25859
Ideological revolutions, 27
Illusions: philosophy of perception, 233;
selfhood, 24041
Imbas forosnai, 292
Incarnate knowledge, Socrates on, 64
Incomplete constructivism, 121
Incorporation phase, rituals, 187
Incubus experience, hypnagogic state, 247
India, performance tradition, 310
Induction procedures, and ASC, 6, 78
Inge, W. R., mysticism, 26061
Initiation rites, Greek mystery cults,
5961
Innate Capacity, The (Forman), 262
Inner self helper, 37
Inspiration, romantic poets, 32728
Integral Institute, 204 n.1
Integral Transformative Practice, 204 n.1
Integrative mode of consciousness, 13, 23,
28, 29; biological bases, 3032;
characteristics, 38
Intellectual mystical experience, 76
Intentionalism, mental states,
23435, 237
Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila), 260
International Study on Altered States of
Consciousness (Dittrich), 123
Interpretation, individual differences, 10
Introvertive mystical experience
(IME), 146 n.4
Intruder experience, hypnagogic
state, 247
Intrusion and intervention, diabolic
possession, 78
Ion (Plato), 279
Iribas, Ana Eva, 328

Irish Witch Doctors (Yeats), 292

Irwin, Robert, meditative induction, 329,
34849
Isabella, hypnotic state, 96
Ishtar cult, prophecy, 53
Isis mysteries, Greco-Roman, 65
Islam, mystical dimension, 255,
25859, 260
Island (Huxley), 205
James, Henry, fragmented identities,
293294
James, William, 6, 11, 13; consciousness,
1034, 205; mystical experience,
24445, 256; narcotic use, 285;
noetic states, 189; perennialism, 261;
on religious belief, 246; stream of
consciousness, 278
Janet, Pierre, Mme. B., 94; ASC works,
104; inuence of, 288;
on mediumship, 101
Jansenist convulsionaries,
emergence of, 90
Japan, performance art, 31012
Jesus, visionary encounters, 26668
Joyce, James, 281, 291, 293 n.6; stream of
consciousness, 104
Judaism, mystical dimension,
255, 258, 260
Jung, Carl G.: on literature, 278; on
mediumship, 99; on mysticism, 255
Kabbala, Jewish mystical tradition, 255,
260, 263
Kairological time, 369
Kallio, S., 3, 4
Kant, Immanuel, philosophy of, 89
Karma yoga, 308
Kashmir Shaivism, mystical
dimension, 255
Katha Upanisad, yoga, 309
Katz, Steven T.: constructivist approach,
261, 272; mystical experience,
12021, 257
Keats, John, narcotic use, 283
Kerauhan, possession trance, 364
Kesey, Ken, 206
Kinship systems, cultural impact, 18285

393

Index
Kirmayer, L., 36
Kluge, Carl Alexander Ferdinand,
magnetic somnambulism, 94
Koestler, Arthur, 287
Kolanad, Gitanjali, 310
Kramer, Hilton, 348
Krippner, Stanley, 14; ASC denition, 116
Kubla Khan (Coleridge), 284
Kuhn, Thomas, 25, 26, 27; ASC
paradigms, 113
Kundalini, 9
LAnnee dernie`re a` Marienbad (lm), 15
LAutomatisme Psychologique (Janet), 101
La Prosa del Observatoria (Cortazar), 16
Landau, James, 211
Lanier, Jaren, 209
Las Ruinas Circulares (Borges), 14
Lascaux caves, 46
Lattices (Brunson), 351
Laughlin, C., 24
Laureys, Steven, 7
Lawrence, D. H., 19798
Lay individuals, exorcism, 82
Leary, Timothy, LSD, 206, 207, 208
Leboulanger, Leonie, 94
Lee, Martin, 205
Leibniz, Baruch: perennialism, 244;
philosophy of, 89
Leonard, George Burr, 204 n.1
Leonard, Gladys Osborne, medium,
100, 101
Les Champs magnetiques (Breton/Soupault),
289
Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal
Magnetism (Gregory), 95
Leuner, Hans-Carl, 265
Levy, Mark, 14
Lewis, Sinclair, 287
Lewis-Davis, D. 46, 47
Life After Life (Moody), 118
Life crisis rites, rituals, 187
Life-force, 2045
Lilly, John C., 118
Liminal phase, rituals, 18788
Liminal Village, Boom Festival, 21920
Lineage clans, kinship systems, 18283
Literacy, invention of, 277

Literature: fractured identities, 29394;

mesmeric revelations, 28793;
narcotics/alcohol inuence, 28287;
religious writing, 28082
Locke, John, knowledge, 245
Louis XVI, King of France, and Mesmer,
9293
Loyzehnski, M. V., 342
LSD, discovery of, 205
Lucid dreaming, 16; 1980s research, 123
Lucid dreams: shamanism, 17172; SMT,
242, 243
Ludwig, Arnold M., 23, 6; ASC term,
11415
Luna, E., 37
Lynch, David, 15
MacLean, P., 38
Magical ight, 74
Magico-religious practitioners, 1990s
research, 126
Magnetic Lady to her Patient,
A (Shelly), 287
Magritte, Rene, surrealist painter, 335
Mahayana Buddhism: emptiness, 348;
no-self-doctrine, 148 n.5
Make-believe, dissociation, 189
Making of a Counter Culture,
The (Roszak), 209
Malevich, Kasmir, meditative induction,
329, 34245, 343f
Malevolence-benevolence spectrum, spirit
possession, 76
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 338
Mandell, A., 31
Mania, Greek madness, frenzy, 56, 61
Manias, Platos types, 5
Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton), 29091
Marijuana, 1970s research, 118
Markoff, John, 2089
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake),
285 n.3
Martial arts, yoga training, 30910
Martin, Agnes, meditative induction, 329,
342, 34548
Mass psychogenic illness, Mesmer, 9192
Masters, Robert, ASCID, 119
Maternal bond, music, 168

394

Index
Maya yoga, 308
McKenna, Dennis, 2078
McKenna, Terence, 2078
McManus, J., 24
Mead, Europe, 5152
Mediating function, ego, 264
Mediation: brain dynamics, 3334; and
procedures, 8
Medically unexplained epidemic illness,
Mesmer, 9192
Meditation: art induction, 329; Eastern
practices, 15657; Eastern tradition,
140, 14142; ego-psychological model,
27071; new millennium research,
128; 1990s research, 12425;
psychology of religion, 256; states
classication, 5
Meditations (Descartes), 230, 231
Meditative states, consciousness, 24344
Medium, performance, 305
Mediums, 100, 104, 105; new millennium
research, 12728
Mediumship: dened, 98; early study of,
97103, 104, 105; and spiritualism,
9899; 20th-century research, 106
Meister Eckhart: God-mysticism, 256;
mystical dimensions, 260
Memory, literacy skills, 277
Menghi, Girolamo, exorcist, 83
Mental Health Research Institute Unusual
Perceptions Schedule (MUPS), 124
Mental vortex, 57 n.10, 65
Merkabah literature, Sholem, 55 n.8
Merrill, James, 293
Mescaline, literary bohemia, 28586
Mesmer, Franz Anton; animal magnetism,
9093, 92f; literary inuence,
28788
Mesmerism, 9093, 92f, 97 n.2; literary
trope, 28793
Mesmerism (Browning), 288
Mesmerism in India (Esdaile), 97
Messiaen, Olivier, 15
Metamorphoses (Apuleius), 65, 66
Metaverse, 209
Methodists, emergence of, 90
Metzner, Ralph, 206
Mimetic controller, 196

Mind: OBE protoconcept, 248;

philosophy of, 23840
Minimalism, visual arts, 342, 345
Mitchell, Weir, narcotic use, 285
Mnemodrama, actor training, 316
Modalities of experiencing, 2
Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Jung), 278
Modern primitives, 203
Modern spiritualism, 98
Monophasic cultures, waking
consciousness, 24
Monophasic, 181, 190
Monroe, Robert, OBE research, 116
Moody, Raymond (NDE), 1970s research,
11819
Mors mystica, 263
Morselli, Enrico, 105
Muller, Catherine Elise, 104
Multiple personality: and hypnosis, 97
n.2; literary trope, 29394
Murphy, Michael, 204 n.1
Murray, Gilbert, Cambridge
anthropologist, 307
Musgrove, Frank, 219
Music: altered consciousness, 355, 356t,
35657, 366; altered temporality, 366
69; brain activity, 36061; and
hypnosis, 360; information transfer,
362; prelinguistic communication,
36263; shamanism, 16769; trance
mechanics, 35758
Music and Trance. A Theory of the Relations
between Music and Possession (Rouget),
356, 360
Music therapy, 35860
Musical tradition, Upper Paleolithic,
4849
My Life in Art (Stanislavsky), 313
Myers, Frederic W. H., 6, 10; on
mediumship, 1012; works of, 1023
Mystai, Greek rite participants, 59, 60
Mystic initiation, Ancient Greece, 60
Mystical death: dened, 271; forgetting
model, 263; Gertrud of Helfta, 269
Mystical experience: classical studies, 257;
consequential dimension, 258, 25960;
dened, 259; ideological dimension,
258, 260; intellectual dimension, 258,

395

Index
260; and knowledge, 24448;
personality model, 264; religious
dimension, 25859; ritual dimension,
258, 260; scientic studies, 26164
Mysticism: dened, 255, 257; 1980s
research, 121; psychology of religion,
25556; religious case studies, 26672;
types of experience, 25657. See also
Religious mysticism
Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis
(Katz), 12021
Nave realism, philosophy of
perception, 233
Nangyar, Usha, 310
Narcotics, in literary sources,
28287
Nature mysticism, 25656
Near-death experiences (NDE), 1970s
research, 11819
Neotrance, 215
Neurobiology, metric timekeeping, 366
Neurognostic process, 196
Neuromancer (Gibson), 208
Neurophenomenological approach, 7, 29,
38; shamanism, 17677
Neuroscience: and ACS research, 106;
new millennium research, 128
Neurotransmitters: shamanism, 16566;
time perception, 368
Newberg, A., 34
Nibbana (extinction), 263
Nirvana yoga, 308
Noetic states, 189
Noh theater, performance art, 31112,
337; Sha Sha Higby, 34142
Noirhomme, Quentin, 7
Noland, Christopher, 16
Nonbeing, Buddhist tradition, 140
Numinous character, awe/wonder, 189
Nunez, Nicolas, 15; actor training, 314,
31718
ONeill, Eugene, 287
OReilly, Kaite, performance score, 320
Odyssey (Homer), 60, 282283
Old Testament prophets, shamanistic
type, 5354

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Kesey),

206
Opium: Mediterranean protohistoric
cultures, 52; poppy domestication, 50
Origin of the Work of Art, The (Heidegger),
331
Ornstein, R., 11
Ott, Jonathon, 207
Otto, Rudolf: mystical types, 256;
numinous character, 189
Out-of-body experience (OBEs), 33;
biological basis, 17375; ecstasy, 53;
new millennium research, 128; 1960s
research, 11516; Old Testament, 54,
55; as protoconcept, 248; Timarchus,
58; selfhood, 240; shamanism, 159,
17273
Ownership, SMT, 240, 241
Ozturk, E., 36
Paradigm shifts, 26
Paradigms, features of, 25
Parapsychology, J. B. Rhine, 106
Parasympathetic dominance, shamanism,
16970
Pascal, Blaise, on imaginary life, 280
Patara, mantic preparations, 56
Peak Experiences Scale (PES), 123
Pekala, Ronald, 122
Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Yeats), 292
Perception: See Sensory perception
Perennial Philosophy (Huxley), 244
Perennialism: mystical experience, 261,
262; philosophy of, 261, 244
Performance: dened, 302; Eastern
models, 31012; phenomenal/access
consciousness, 319; western/
nonwestern practices, 303
Performance art: dened, 336; genres,
33637
Performance event, theater, 3034
Performance score, 302;
phenomenological account, 32021
Permanent changes, in consciousness, 9
Persistence of Memory (Dali), 334f, 33435
Personal signicance, and ASC, 29, 30
Personality, ego-psychological model, 265
Perspectivism, animism, 184

396

Index
Phaedrus (Plato), 55, 59, 61, 63, 64, 245,
327
Phantasms of the Living (Gurney, Myers, &
Podmore), 102
Phantom limbs, 239
Phenomenal consciousness, performance,
319
Phenomenology of Consciousness
Inventory (PCI), 122
Philosophia perennis, 204
Philosophy: consciousness/self, 23844;
epistemological concerns, 23033;
mysticism/knowledge, 24448; sensory
perception, 23338
Philosophy of Composition, The (Poe), 279
Physical stress, shamanism, 171
Piper, Leonora, medium, 1001, 105
Pituitary cyclase-activating polypeptide
precursor (PACAP), 165
Placebo effect, shamanism, 164
Plath, Sylvia, 14
Plato, 2, 5, 11, 55; deep knowledge, 245;
expansion of consciousness, 106; on
initiatory madness, 59; on poetic
inspiration, 63; on poetry, 279, 327
Plotinus, on out-of-body experience,
6667
Plutarch, mystery rites, 58, 59, 6061
Poe, Edgar Allan, 279; multiple identities,
293; psychic displacement, 288
Poets Immortal Fame, The (Horace), 295
Poetic inspiration, divine madness, 63
Poetry, Language and Thought (Heidegger),
279
Polanski, Roman, 15
Polyphasic void cultures, ASC, 24
Polyphasic, 181
Popper, Karl, 27
Possession: animal magnetism, 91; and
dissociation, 37
Possession trance: movement, 35757,
364; 1970s research, 119; REs, 19091
Postconstructivism, mystical
experience, 261
Posttraumatic stress disorder, 7
Potlatch system, gift exchange, 183
Pre-Christian European shamanism,
7476

Prefrontal cortex (PFC), dysregulation,

3233
Prehistoric art and practices, 4651, 47f,
49f, 50f
Preparadigmatic period, science/ideology
change, 28
Principles of Psychology (James),
1034, 278
Private Life, The (James), 293
Problem of Pure Consciousness, The
(Forman), 26162
Propensity, to ASC, 10
Prophecy: Afro-Caribbean religions, 90;
ancient Greece, 56; ancient Israel, 53
Prosopopesis, dened, 105
Protohistoric practices, 5152
Pseudo-Dionysian transcendence, 77
Psi phenomenon, 20th-century research,
106
Psychedelic Experience (Leary et al.), 206
Psychedelic festivals, value of, 21619
Psychedelic-induced experiences,
shamanism, 16566
Psychedelic trance, contemporary
counterculture, 203
Psychedelics: early counterculture, 2058;
mechanisms, 32; 1960s legacy, 2056;
1970s research, 118; psytrance,
21415; veritable pharmacopeia, 211
Psychiatric diagnosis, and
hypnosis, 97 n.2
Psychic displacements, Romantic era, 288
Psychoactive substances: expansion of
consciousness, 106; prehistoric period,
4951
Psychoanalysis, 6
Psychogenic amnesia, 97 n.2
Psychoid experiences, 1970s research,
120
Psychological self, and sociological self,
3637
Psychological signs, demonic
possession, 80, 85
Psychology of Consciousness, The (Farthing),
113
Psychology of religion, approaches of,
25556
Psychophysical training, acting, 313

397

Index
Psytrance, early counterculture, 21215,
21819
Pure bliss, Eastern tradition, 150, 15253
Pure consciousness: Eastern ASC states,
14445; Eastern experience, 140, 142;
Eastern tradition, 150, 152
Pure consciousness event (PCE), 121;
dened, 262; personality model, 264,
271, 272
Pure individuality (ego), Eastern tradition,
150, 15152
Putnam, F. W., 12
Quran, revelation of, 28081
Race, Victor, 93
Radical behaviorism, 6
Rainbow Serpent Festival (Australia), 219
Raja yoga, 342
Ramon y Cajal, Santiago, ACS research,
106
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep:
daydreaming, 187; 1970s research,
11920; self-consciousness, 24243;
and shamanism, 17172
Rapture, affective transcendence, 77
Rationality, philosophical exploration, 89
RAVE Act (2003), 212
Rave culture, techno-music, 358
Raves, critiques, 21718
Ravindra, Ravi, 198
Reality, and consciousness, 11
Realms of the Human Unconscious
(Grof), 120
Reason, in dreams, 232
Reciprocal altruism, 182
Religion: ve dimensions, 25761;
mystical dimension, 255; and
mysticism, 255; and origin of writing,
280; psychology of, 25556; and
shamanist practices, 16162;
stoned-ape theory, 207
Religious context, prehistoric psychoactive
substance use, 51
Religious Experience Episodes Measure
(REEM), 256
Religious experiences (REs), biological
basis, 196; and social structure, 18991

Religious movements, Age of

Enlightenment, 8990
Religious mysticism: case studies, 26672;
experiential dimension, 25859;
psychology of religion, 25557
Representational system: egopsychological model, 26566;
meditation case study, 27071;
visions case studies, 26670
Representationalism, mental states,
23435
Republic, The (Plato), 11
Resnais, Alain, 15
Respiratory activity, Eastern ASC
experience, 141
Revelation, Lockes view of, 245
Revenants, possessing souls, 78
Revitalization movements, dened, 194
Revonsuo, A., 3, 4
Reward Dependence Factor, 364
Rhine, Joseph Banks, 106
Rhythmic movements; synchronizing role,
363; trance, 356, 36566
Rhythms of Peace festival (Morocco), 218
Ribot, Theodule Armand, 313
Richards, Thomas, actor training, 316
Richet, Charles, ACS research, 106
Rietveld, Hillegonda, 211
Rig Veda, ascetic practices, 309
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 330
Rimbaud, Arthur, 14, 106; narcotic use,
28485
Ring, Kenneth, NDE, 119
Rites of passage, rituals, 187
Ritual induction procedures, shamanism,
16971
Ritual/shamanic performance: and
aesthetic performance, 3056, 307;
described, 302, 3056; research, 303
Rituale Romanum, demonic possession
guide, 80, 83
Rituals: antibiological features, 187;
mystical dimension, 260; and
performance, 305; phases of, 18788;
shamanism, 16061, 163, 16667;
trance behavior, 35758, 365
Roberts, Bernadette, mystical
experience, 262

398

Index
Rock, Adam, 14
Rock art, existing communities, 46
Roman Empire, 46; practices, 6567
Romantic poets: genius notion, 327;
narcotic use, 28384; psychic
displacement, 288
Roszak, Theodore, 209
Rouget, G., 53; on music, 355, 356
Rubber-hand illusion (RHI), 239
Rules, society, 182
Rushkoff, Douglas, 208
Russell, George William, 291
Russell, Ken, 6, 15
Sacred texts, revelation of, 280
Sacred, Durkheims view, 195
Saints shrines, exorcism, 83
Saldanha, Arun, 213
Samadhi meditation, hypoarousal, 120
Samadhi, SSS, 117
Saman, 305
San, southern Africa, 46
Sar, V., 36
Sardou, Victorien, 99
Satanic/demonic agent possession, 78;
physical signs, 79, 80
Satie, Erik, 365
Schieffelin, E. L., 3056
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 278
Schwartz, T., 37
Scientic revolution, paradigm shifts, 26
Scriabin, Alexander, 15
Secular sacredness, actor training,
31415
Seeress of Prevost, 94
Self: and consciousness in Western
Christian tradition, 7374; Eastern
traditions, 14748, 148 n.5; SMT
model, 23842
Self-consciousness, SMT, 24142
Self-Expansiveness Level Form
(SELF), 123
Self-identication, conceptualist distinction, 240
Self-localization, conceptualist distinction,
240
Self-model theory (SMT), subjectivity,
23842

Self-representation, ego-psychological
model, 265
Self-shamanism, 208
Self-transcendence, 10
Seligman, R., 36
Senses, Eastern tradition, 150, 151
Sensory perception: ASC threats, 233;
Descartes, 23031; intentionalism/
representationalism, 23435
Separation phase, rituals, 187
Serotonin, 31; in dancers, 364
Sexual abstinence, shamanism, 17071
Sexual modesty, cultural universal, 185
Shakers, emergence of, 90
Shakespeare, William, drug
references, 283
Shakespearian Criticism (Coleridge), 284
Shaman, term, 159, 162, 305
Shamanic states of consciousness (SSC),
physiological symptoms, 32829
Shamanic trance, REs, 190, 191
Shamanism: biological foundations, 164;
classic 15961; cross-cultural features,
16062; dened, 159; healers, 163;
music use, 355; 1980s research,
12122; 1990s research, 125; soul
journey, 33
Shamanism (Eliade), 160, 33839
Shankara: ASC state, 149; soul
mysticism, 256
Shape-shifting, perspectival worldview,
184
Shapland, Jo, performance score, 320, 322
Shear, Jonathan, 14
Shelley, Mary, narcotic use, 284
Shelley, Percy Bysshe: narcotic use, 283;
psychic displacement, 288
Sherratt, A., intoxicating beverages, 51 n.2
Shinto religion, 31011
Shlain, Bruce, 205
Shri Yantra diagram, 346, 347f, 347
Sidgwick, Eleanor, 105
Sights and Sounds (Spicer), 99
Sleep and dream research, 1
Sleep/wake cycle, 29
Slow-wave brain pattern, agents, 31
Sluhovsky, Moshe, 13
Smith, Hele`ne, medium, 104

399

Index
Social bonding, and music, 362
Social contagion, and hypnosis, 186
Social Darwinism, Cambridge
anthropologists, 307
Social drama, 191
Social play, shift in perception, 189
Society, rules, 182
Society for Psychical Research (SPR),
102, 106
Sociological self, and psychological self,
3637
Socrates, 2, 5, 55; postcarnate
knowledge, 64
Somnambulism: dened, 93;
investigations of, 9395; and modern
spiritualism, 98
Soul, folk-phenomenological concept, 248
Soul ight: shamanism, 159, 160, 17275;
visual artists, 328, 334
Soul-mysticism, 256
Speaking in tongues (glossolalia),
Afro-Caribbean religions, 90
Spectrum of consciousness, 120
Spicer, Henry, 99
Spiral motifs, Neolithic period, 48, 49f
Spirit of Shamanism (Walsh), 328
Spirit possession, 74; as dissociation, 34,
3637; diabolic, 76, 7980;
discernment, 8082; divine, 75, 7678;
exorcism, 8284; 1970s research, 119;
performance, 3056
Spirits, shamanism, 160
Spiritual experiences, and social
structure, 189
Spiritual mystical experience, 7677
Spiritual technologies, contemporary
counterculture, 203
Spiritualism (Edmonds/Dexter), 98, 99
Spiritualization, demonic possession,
80, 82
Squid and Turtle Dreaming (Burkutlatjpi),
331, 332f
St. Augustine, on union with the
divine, 76
St. John, Graham, 14
St. Vituss dances, 91
Stace, Walter T.: mystical experiences, 146
n.4, 258, 259; perennialism, 261

Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 31314

Starry Night (van Gogh), 330f, 331
States of consciousness (SoC), 2,
28, 30
State-specic sciences (SSS), 117
Stein, Gertrude, 104
Steinbeck, John, 287
Steiner, Rudolph, Anthroposophy, 107
Stephenson, Neal, 209
Steuchus, Augustinus, 244
Stevens, Jay, 206
Stevenson, Robert Louis: multiple
identities, 293; narcotic use, 287
Stoker, Bram, 288
Storming Heaven (Stevens), 206
Storytelling, human nature, 277
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The
(Stevenson), 287, 293
Strassman, Rick, HRS, 125
Stream of consciousness, inner
experience, 278; literary style, 104
Stream of though, William James, 104
Stress, shamanism, 171
Strong eye technique, 331
Stropharia cubensis (psychoactive
mushrooms), 207
Structure of Scientic Revolutions, The
(Kuhn), 25
Studies on Hysteria (Freud/Breuer), 105
Subconscious, and mediumship,
1012, 105
Subjectivity, SMT, 23839
Subliminal mind, dened, 103
Sudre, Rene, prosopopesis, 105
Susm, mystical dimension, 255,
260, 263
Sulzer, Eva, 33536
Suprematist Composition, White on White
(Malevich), 343f, 344
Surrealism: altered states, 28892; visual
artists, 33435
Sutton-Smith, Brian, 191
Suzuki, D. T., on Eastern ASC
state, 149
Suzuki technique, actor training, 318
Symphonie Fantastique, 15
Synchronous brain states, 7
Synthetic functions, ego, 264

400

Index
Takahashi, Melanie, 217
Tale of Genji, Lady Aoi, The, 311
Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales, 15, 317
Tantric meditation, 346
Taoism: Agnes Martins paintings,
34748; mystical dimension, 255;
practices, 156
Tart, Charles Theodore, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13,
28, 29; on automaticity, 107; 1960s
research, 115, 116; 1970s research,
11718
Tatsumi, Hijikata, 318
Teaching of Don Juan, The (Castaneda), 286
Technicians of Ecstasy (Levy), 329
Techniques of ecstasy, 160
Technological Society, The (Ellul), 209
Techno-rave culture, early counterculture,
203, 21012
Techno-tribes, contemporary
counterculture, 203
Telepathic communication, 20th-century
research, 106
Tellegen Absorption Scale, 364
Temporal lobe, and hypergraphia, 28182
Teresa of Avila, 8384, 260
Theater: origins of, 3078; performance
event, 3034
Theater Research Workshop
(TRW), 31718
Theatrical theories, 194
Theogony (Hesiod), 63
Theologue (Grey), 333, 333f
Theosophists, cosmic consciousness, 204
Theravada Buddhism: ASC states, 146,
148 n.5; mystical dimension, 255;
practices, 156
Theta slow-wave brain waves, 23, 30, 31;
in meditation, 33
Thomas Aquinas, divine/demonic
possession, 79
Thomas of Cantimpre, 79
Thousand and One Nights, 283
Three-variable (AIM) model (Hobson), 7
Timarchus, at Trophonius, 58
Time paradoxon, 367
Time, and music, 356, 36769
Told by the Wind, 32023, 321f
Tomczyk, Stanislawa, medium, 101

Torah, revelation of, 280

Touch Samadhi, psytrance, 219
Trance: bodily movements, 356t, 35657;
denitions, 45; early counterculture,
21215; mechanics in ritual behaviors,
357; mediumship, 98, 99101;
postures in 1990s research, 125; ravers,
218; sensory overstimulation, 356
Trance-inductive effect, 292
Transcendent experiences, 8
Transcendent states, physiological
mechanisms, 31
Transcendental Meditation (TM): ASC
experience, 141, 142, 14344; ASC
states, 14647; practices, 156
Transitional phase, rituals, 18788
Transitions, in consciousness, 9
Trauma: and ASC, 8; and dissociation, 36
Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire,
364
Trilby (Du Maurier), 288
Triune brain, 38
Trophonius, oracular center at Lebadeia,
57, 58, 59
Trophotropic arousal, 120
Troubridge, Una, 101
Trul khor (magic circle), 309
Tuleilat Ghassul, geometric motifs,
48, 50f
Turner, Edith, 286
Turner, Fred, 2089
Turner, Victor: antistructure,188, 191;
social drama, 191; subjunctive
mood, 216; on monastic institutions,
198; Ndembu rite, 19697
Un Chien Andalou, 334
Unio mystica, union with divine, 77
Universal consciousness, 2045
Untitled (Irwin), 348, 349f
Ustinova, Yulia, 13
Vailala Madness, cargo cult, 193
Vaishnavism, mystical dimension, 255
Vaitl, D., 7, 9
Vampyr, 15
van Gennep, Arnold, Indian rituals,
18788

401

Index
van Gogh, Vincent, shamanic induction
techniques, 32931, 330f
Van Ruusbroec, Jan, 260
Varieties of Anomalous Experience (Cardena
et al.), 114
Varieties of Religious Experience (James),
104, 205, 256
Varo, Remedios, 15; shamanic induction
techniques, 329, 330, 33536, 336f
Vasopressin receptors, in dancers, 364
Vedanta tradition, ASC experience, 139,
140, 141
Vedic literature, and language, 278
Veils (Brunson), 351
Velmans, M., 4
Vexations (Satie), 365
Via negative, union with divine, 77
Virtual reality, early counterculture, 203,
2089
Visions: ego-psychological model,
26670; mystical experience, 258
Visual artists: cultivation of ASC, 328;
meditative states, 328; shamanistic
consciousness, 328
Visual hallucinations, 1970s research, 117
Visuospatial rst-person perspective
(1PP), selfhood, 240, 241, 242
Void/in Art (Levy), 329
Vollenweider, Franz, 32
Voltaire, philosophy of, 89
Waking consciousness, 1, 11, 29
Wallace, Anthony, revitalization
movements, 194
Walsh, Roger, 126, 328
Warnings (lavertissement), Afro-Caribbean
religions, 90
Wasson, Robert Gordon, 207
Wayang Kulit, performance art, 337
Weapon of the weak, 191
Wearable environment, 342
Weber, Max, charisma, 194
Weschler, Lawrence, 348
Western Christian tradition: demonic
possession, 7980; divine possession,
7678; exorcism, 8284; self and
consciousness, 7374
Western pre-Christian shamanism, 7476

Western tradition, performance,

3034, 306
Whisper of inspiration (le soufe),
Afro-Caribbean religions, 90
Whitehead, Charles, 14, 24
Whitley, D. S., 48
Wiene, Robert, 15
Wilber, Ken, 204 n.1; spectrum of
consciousness, 120
Wilson (Wavoka), Jack, 193, 194
Windt, Jennifer, 14
Wine, Europe, 52
Winkelman, Michael, 7, 13, 14
Women: demonic possession, 80;
discernment of possession, 8182;
medieval mystics, 78; religious
visions, 258
Wordsworth, William, narcotic use, 283
Work, The (Gurdjieff), 107
Wounded Knee (1890), 194
Writers block, hypnosis, 288
Writing: origins, 280; value of,
278, 27980
Yantras, 346
Yasuo, Yuasa, personal cultivation, 308
Yeats, W. B., altered states, 291, 29293;
narcotic use, 285
Yoga Sutras, ASC experience, 141
Yoga: actors performance, 310; ASC
experience, 139, 14041; ASC states,
146; martial arts, 30910; practices,
156; term, 308; transactional process,
3089; Western actor training,
31314
Yugen, noh theater, 312
Zaehner, Ronald C., mysticism types,
25657
Zarrilli, Phillip B., 15; acting techniques,
318; performance score, 320
Zazen, hypoarousal, 120
Zeami Motokiyo, 31112
Zen Buddhism: ASC experience, 14041,
14243, 144; ASC states, 14647;
mystical dimension, 255, 260;
practices, 156
Zinberg, N. E., 11

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Altering Consciousness

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Altering Consciousness
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Volume 2: Biological and Psychological Perspectives

Etzel Cardena and Michael Winkelman, Editors

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

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Altering consciousness : multidisciplinary perspectives / Etzel Cardena and Michael
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p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780313383083 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN 9780313383090 (ebook)
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Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
Kenneth S. Pope
Introduction
Etzel Cardena

vii
ix
xiii

Part I: Biological Perspectives

Chapter 1

Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered

States of Consciousness
Andrzej Kokoszka and Benjamin Wallace

Chapter 2

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

David E. Presti

Chapter 3

Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant

Space with Special Reference to Shamanic Ecstasy
Fred Previc

3
21

43

Chapter 4

Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms

Mario Beauregard

63

Chapter 5

DMT and Human Consciousness

Zevic Mishor, Dennis J. McKenna, and J. C. Callaway

85

Chapter 6

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human

Consciousness
David E. Nichols and Benjamin R. Chemel

Chapter 7

Peyote and Meaning

Stacy B. Schaefer

121
147

vi

Contents

Chapter 8

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of

Consciousness
167
Andrea E. Blatter, Jorg C. Fachner, and Michael Winkelman

Chapter 9

189
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity
Michael Maliszewski, Barbara Vaughan, Stanley Krippner,
Gregory Holler, and Cheryl Fracasso

Chapter 10 Altered Consciousness and Human Development

Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman, and Etzel Cardena

211

Part II: Psychological Perspectives

Chapter 11 Altered States of Bodily Consciousness
Sebastian Dieguez and Olaf Blanke

237

Chapter 12 Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology

Quentin Noirhomme and Steven Laureys

263

Chapter 13 Altered Consciousness in Emotion and

Psychopathology
Etzel Cardena

279

Chapter 14 Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

David Lukoff

301

Chapter 15 Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing:

327
An Embodied Social Neuroscience Perspective
Aaron L. Mishara and Michael A. Schwartz
Chapter 16 Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered
Consciousness
David Luke
About the Editors
Advisory Board
About the Contributors
Index

355

375
377
379
385

Acknowledgments

We want to acknowledge rst 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 rst-rate intellects who laid the groundwork for integrating the insights
of alterations of consciousness into our views of reality. Among the founders of modern psychology and anthropology there were notables such as
William James and Andrew Lang who articulated and incorporated alterations of consciousness into their theories of human mind and behavior.
Even during the decades-long exile of consciousness by behaviorism,
some brave souls dared to engage in research on altered states, among
them Stanley Krippner, Arnold Ludwig, Robert Ornstein, and Jerome
Singer in psychology, E. E. Evans-Wentz, Erika Bourguignon, Michael
Harner, Joseph Long, and Charles Laughlin in anthropology, and Albert
Hofmann in pharmacology. Among those who helped to point out the
importance of studying alterations of consciousness as a basic element of
human experience, the leading gure in establishing them as a legitimate
area of scientic inquiry was Charles T. Tart, an erstwhile engineering
student turned psychologist.
Our two volumes are dedicated to these and the many other pioneers
of inquiry into consciousness who provided the foundations for the perspectives developed here. We thank Debbie Carvalko, the senior acquisitions editor who made Altering Consciousness possible, and our many
contributors, without whom these volumes would not have seen the light
of day. We especially would like to thank Julie Beischel, Cheryl Fracasso,

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 extraordinary images of Remedios Varo in our covers, and of Judith Go mez del
Campo, who made it happen.

Dedications
Michael dedicates these volumes to the next generation of investigators
who will take the foundations of a multidisciplinary science of altered consciousness described here and produce a more comprehensive
paradigm for understanding these inherent aspects and potentials
of human nature.
Etzel dedicates Altering Consciousness to:
My dear departed, Ma (May Buelna de Cardena), Blueberry, and Ninnifer, whose living presence will accompany me to my dying breath.
And to my beloved princesa holandesa Sophie:
. . . somos mas 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 eld that has been fragmented, marked by tful 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 difcult
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. Scientic journals
pour forth numbers representing behaviors, doses, distances, durations,
weights, speeds, and other measurables. But consciousness challenges us
to dene it in any precise, useful, noncircular way. The stream of consciousness as it occurs in real life and is actually experienced has been
elusive for novelists as well as scientists. Virginia Woolf (2005) wrote that
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end (p. 899).
As if this were not hazy enough to evoke pity and fearnot to say a
prompt rejection from many editors of scientic journalsWilliam 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 lmiest 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, denite
types of mentality which probably somewhere have their eld of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be nal
which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How

Preface

to regard them is the questionfor they are so discontinuous with ordinary

consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. (James,
2008, p. 283)

This lack of formulas and maps has often served as a Do Not Enter sign for
conventional scientic investigation. During one period, human consciousness itself seemed to almost cease to exist as a research topic for
U.S. psychologists. As Roger Brown (1958) wrote: In 1913 John Watson
mercifully closed the bloodshot inner eye of American psychology. With
great relief the profession trained its exteroceptors on the laboratory
animal (p. 93).
Yet another problem in understanding altered states of consciousness
has been the struggle to answer the question: Altered from what? What
is normal waking consciousness? What may be normal for some may
be altered (from normal) for others. What has appeared in the popular
arts and other media as exotic altered states of consciousness may represent normative traits or enduring states for many.
The search for an objective, neutral denition and description of an
inherently subjective phenomenon is made even more daunting because
each attempt represents a specic point of view. In Through the Looking
Glass: No Wonderland Yet! (The Reciprocal Relationship Between Methodology and Models of Reality), Rhoda Unger (1983) wrote, Description
is always from someones point of view and hence is always evaluative.
A third source of complexity and misunderstandings can be found in an
altered state of Ungers statement quoted above: Description is always from
a cultural context and hence is always evaluative, drawing on that cultures
evaluative assumptions and approaches. We tend to be aware of cultural contexts, inuences, 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 inuence 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 inuences of culture and context on everyone involved. The book describes the efforts of
a California hospital staff and a Laotian refugee family to help a Hmong
child whose American doctors had diagnosed her with epilepsy. Everyone
involved had the best of intentions and worked hard to help the girl, but a

Preface

lack of awareness of cultural differences had tragic effects. The book

quotes medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman:
As powerful an inuence as the culture of the Hmong patient and her family is on this case, the culture of biomedicine is equally powerful. If you
cant see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions,
and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone elses
culture? (p. 261)

A fourth factor that may have led some to turn away from this area is anxiety or fear evoked by the stereotype of perceived danger linked to various
methods of altering consciousness. Some of the substancessuch as 3,4Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (also known as MDMA or ecstasy)
used to alter consciousness can have signicantly negative consequences
under some conditions and have been criminalized in some jurisdictions.
It is worth noting, however, that a randomized, controlled pilot study,
reported during the writing of this preface, demonstrates that MDMAassisted psychotherapy with close follow-up monitoring and support can
be used with acceptable and short-lived side effects in a carefully screened
group of subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD (Mithoefer,
Wagner, Mithoefer, Ilsa, & Doblin, 2010).
The area may also frighten some as dangerous to a scientic or academic career. For them, the career trajectory of Harvard psychologists
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert is not a fascinating journey of exploration and discovery but a cautionary tale. Academic pioneers in exploring
various hallucinogens rst 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 red 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 novels presentation of a consciousness-altering substance as dangerous gains force in light of Huxleys own courageous exploration of consciousness-altering substances to open the doors of
perception (see, e.g., Huxley, 2009).

xi

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 barriers to understanding is immediately doused by my belief that no one
ever bought a book to read the preface.

References
Brown, R. (1958). Words and things. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Fadiman, A. (1997). The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American
doctors, and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Huxley, A. (2006a). Brave new world. New York: Harper Perennial Modern
Classics. (Originally published 1932).
Huxley, A. (2006b). Brave new world revisited. New York: Harper Perennial
Modern Classics. (Originally published 1958).
Huxley, A. (2009). Doors of perception. Heaven and hell. New York: Harper Perennial
Modern Classics. (Originally published 1954).
James, W. (2008). Varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Rockville,
MD: ARC Manor. (Originally published 1902).
Mithoefer, M. C., Wagner, M. T., Mithoefer, A. T., Ilsa, J., & Doblin, R. (2010). The
safety and efcacy of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress
disorder: The rst randomized controlled pilot study. Journal of Psychopharmacology. Retrieved August 15, 2010, from http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/
2010/07/14/0269881110378371.full.pdf+html.
Ram Dass: Fierce grace. (2003). DVD directed by Mickey Lemle; produced by
Bobby Squires, Buddy Squires, Mickey Lemle, Jessica Brackman, & Linda K.
Moroney. New York: Zeitgeist Films.
Unger, R. K. (1983). Through the looking glass: No wonderland yet! (The reciprocal relationship between methodology and models of reality). Psychology of
Women Quarterly, 8(1), 932.
Woolf, V. (2005). Modern ction. In L. Rainy (Ed.), Modernism: An anthology
(pp. 897901). Carleton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing. (Originally
published 1919).

Introduction

Etzel Cardena
In the preface to this volume, Ken Pope, not only a foremost ethicist in
psychology but also a pioneer in the study of consciousness (e.g., Pope
& Singer, 1978) and a very compassionate person, offers his perspective
on various reasons why the study of such a central phenomenon as altered
states of consciousness (ASC) has been almost completely ignored by psychology and related disciplines.
Setting some of the foundations for the biological processes underlying
ASC, Andrzej Kokoszka and Benjamin Wallace discuss the various biological rhythms that may affect consciousness, including a possible continuation of the sleep and dream cycle throughout the day. Also
foundational is David Prestis chapter on neurochemistry and altered consciousness in which, after giving their proper due to neurochemical
impulses, he calls for an expansion of what he calls the standard model
(following the terminology in physics) to understand the relationship
between consciousness and biological processes.
After these general introductions, Fred Previc focuses on the dopaminergic network of the nervous system and how it gives rise to experiences
of distant space and time that may underlie shamanic and other alterations
of consciousness characterized by a sense of being in a different plane of
reality. Mario Beauregard concentrates on transcendent experiences and
proposes a sophisticated model of their connection to brain sites and functions. Calling for a neurophenomenological approach to the study of ASC
(see also Cardena, 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 specic areas (e.g.,
the temporal lobe) or mechanisms (e.g., hypofrontality).
The next four chapters deal with powerful psychoactive drugs in some
way or other. Erudite and comprehensive overviews of biopharmacological and psychological aspects of the ubiquitous psychedelic agent DMT
and of the culture-transforming substance LSD are authored by Zevic
1

The standard abbreviation in this volume for altered states of consciousness both in
singular and plural is ASC. Also note that to help cross-reference relevant chapters in the
two-volume set there are editorial square brackets [ ] throughout the volume.

xiv

Introduction

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

Benjamin Chemel, respectively. In her chapter, Stacy B. Schaefer underlines the cultural and psychological aftereffects of the ingestion of peyote
among the Huicholes, a group she has studied for decades and that I was
fortunate to come across (particularly a most special shaman) while I still
lived in Mexico. Finally, the interdisciplinary team of Andrea Blatter, Jorg
Fachner, and Michael Winkelman tackles the biological, psychological,
and sociocultural aspects of addiction, especially as it relates to alterations
of consciousness. Various of the afore-mentioned authors also discuss
how the usual account that posits that brain mechanisms cause psychological processes belies a far more complicated picture.
Michael Maliszewski, Barbara Vaughan, Stanley Krippner, Gregory
Holler, and Cheryl Fracasso discuss East and West approaches to sexuality
and ASC, besides presenting the results of a study on the phenomenology
of sexual experience in a Western sample. Their chapter is a good transition to the following section of this volume, which focuses on psychological and neurological aspects of ASC.
Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman, and I describe how the various developmental stages across the lifespan are associated with typical and different
forms of ordinary consciousness and the propensity to experience ASC.
An incredible array of altered states of bodily consciousness, both spontaneous and induced by experimental or pathological processes, is the topic
covered by Sebastian Dieguez and Olaf Blanke. In the following chapter,
Quentin Noirhomme and Steven Laureys review the literature on neurological conditions that can affect basic levels of wakefulness and arousal, including sleep, comatose states, epilepsy, and locked-in syndrome, brought to
public awareness by the excellent French lm, based on a rst-person
account, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Buttery).
Moving from mostly neurological to mostly psychological processes, in
my chapter on ASC in emotion and psychopathology, I review how alterations in consciousness can affect emotions and vice versa and then discuss the plethora of alterations of consciousness found in
psychopathology. In their chapter on healing, Aaron Mishara and Michael
Schwartz provide an overview of the research on ASC associated with different types of healing and propose a model for how the self mediates this
connection. David Lukoff describes the area of what has been called spiritual emergencies, the juncture of psychopathological phenomena that may
be part of a spiritual process, and reviews the literature showing that by
and large, unusual (anomalous) experiences, including potentially psi or
parapsychological phenomena, are not necessarily associated with

Introduction

psychopathology. A potential explanation for this is controlled research

that provides evidence that psi phenomena may in some cases be accurate
perceptions of events, and that they are often experienced during ASC, as
David Luke discusses in the nal 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 nd 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 ll that lacuna. Vaitl et al. (2005) show that relaxation, which is a common but not necessary component of most meditation
and hypnotic practices, is predominantly associated with reductions in
cortical activity (particularly beta brain waves) in the prefrontal region,
enhanced left cingulated activity, and decreased sympatho-adrenergic
tone. On the other extreme is vigorous physical activity, related to spirit
possession, various rituals, and performance, and which may differ in
subtle or not-so-subtle ways from ASC induced by quiescence (see
Cardena, 2005, Zarrilli, Volume 1). In fact, my rst taste of an intense waking ASC occurred in the midst of very conscious and demanding physical
activity in experimental theatre groups [see Zarrilli, Volume 1], experiences that at that point my psychological studies failed almost completely to
illuminate. Also, besides the runners high, some marathon runners mention out-of-body and other dissociative experiences (Morgan, 1993), and
those who run even longer (sometimes much longer) distances than a marathon, the ultrarunners, have reported alterations of a sense of time,
boundless energy, unitive experiences, and related phenomena (Jones,
2004). Although endorphins have been postulated as correlates of these
physical activity-related changes, endocannabinoids (internally produced
compounds chemically similar to cannabis) may have a stronger link (Dietrich & McDaniel, 2004).
At the end of this comprehensive tour on the domain of ASC, it should
be evident that we cannot understand the transcendent joys or the terrifying nightmares of the human experience without taking stock of the varieties of human consciousness. With that wave to William Jamess always
inspiring phrase, I give the last word to the eminent American poet Theodore Roethke (1961), who experienced ASC related to both his encounters
with psychological disintegration and his sense of unity with the world. In
his poem A Dark Time, he talks of madness as nobility of the soul/At odds
with circumstance and of a nal insight in which The mind enters itself
. . . And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

xv

xvi

Introduction

References
Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous
retroactive inuences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 100, 407425.
Cardena, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physically active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 3759.
Cardena, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of consciousness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Dietrich, A., & McDaniel, W. (2004). Endocannabinoids and exercise. British
Journal of Sports Medicine, 38, 536541.
Jones, P. (2004). Ultrarunners and chance encounters with absolute unitary
being. Anthropology of Consciousness, 15, 3950.
Morgan, W. P. (1993). Hypnosis and sport psychology. In J. W. Rhue, S. J. Lynn, &
I. Kirsch (Eds.), Handbook of clinical hypnosis (pp. 649670). 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, 19922008: Assessing the noise reduction model in parapsychology.
Psychological Bulletin, 136, 471485.
Vaitl, D., Birbaumer, N., Gruzelier, J., Jamieson, G., Kotchoubey, B., Kubler,
A., Lehmann, D., Miltner, W. H. R., Ott, U., Putz, P., Sammer, G., Strauch,
I., Strehl, U., Wackermann, J., & Weiss, T. (2005). Psychobiology of altered
states of consciousness. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 98127.

PART I

Biological Perspectives

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CHAPTER 1

Sleep, Dreams, and Other

Biological Cycles as
Altered States of
Consciousness
Andrzej Kokoszka and
Benjamin Wallace
Introduction: Commonly Observed Cyclical Changes in Consciousness
A state of consciousness depends both on its content and on its form. It is a
way of experiencing. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) are ones in which
the content, form, or quality of experience is signicantly different from
ordinary states of consciousness and that do not contain symptoms of any
mental disorders (Kokoszka, 2000) [but see Cardena, 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 ones own identity. Eventually, uctuations 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

Altering Consciousness

appear to result from uctuations 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, specically the
zona incerta (Jones, 2008). This is a horizontally elongated region of gray
matter cells. However, other brain structures are also involved in these processes. Chronobiology divides biological rhythms into three types: infradian
(with periods longer than 28 hours), circadian (with periods between
20 and 28 hours), and ultradian (with periods from a few milliseconds to
20 hours).
Biological rhythms are synchronized by cyclical environmental changes
including day/night changes, seasonal changes, times when one arises from
sleep, times when one consumes meals, and times when one engages in
social activities (Wallace, 1993; Wallace & Fisher, 2000). The most powerful
synchronizer is the presence of light in the environment.
We begin with a review of literature related to the inuence of biological
rhythms on states and ASC, and then discuss these rhythms in terms of
existing theories of such states.

Biological Rhythms That Can Inuence States and Altered States of Consciousness
Infradian Rhythms
Infradian rhythms include many slow rhythms with periods of approximately 1 month (e.g., menstrual cycles) or longer (e.g., seasonal depression or seasonal affective disorderSAD). The impact of seasons of the
year on some peoples state of mind is obvious. For example, the beginning
of winter is associated with a diminished mood for engaging in activity and
a general decrease in energy. Spring is associated with increased energy
and an improved mood for engaging in all types of activities. In addition,
spring appears to be associated with increased sexual desire that affects
the reproductive cycle of many animals, synchronized by changes in the
amount of daylight (Prendergast, 2005).
Unfortunately, this issue has received little attention with respect to
impact of increased daylight on sexual activity and birth rate in humans.
However, it has been reported that the highest sperm count among men
is found in the spring, and the lowest is found in the summer (Gyllenborg
et al., 1999). Also, seasonal differences in the frequency of suicide attempts
have been found among men. Spring and summer were found to be the
times of highest frequency for those between the ages of 15 to 34, and for
those over 65. And Valtonen, Suominen, and coworkers (2006) reported

Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness

that suicide attempts for those suffering from mood disorders peaked
during autumn and were lowest during the winter. However, it is worth
mentioning that these studies were conducted in Finland, where the day/
night cycles differ from other parts of the world. It would be interesting
to see if these results could be replicated in other countries.

Circadian Rhythms
The sleep/wake cycle falls into this category. The result of this extensively researched cycle indicates that it is approximately 24 hours in length
and it is inuenced by two separate processes. The rst is an endogenous,
biological clock that drives this cycle. The second is sleep propensity as
determined by ones history of sleep and wakefulness periods and the
duration of previous sleep episodes. These two interactive processes
determine sleep at night and wakefulness during daytime hours (PandiPeruamal et al., 2009).
Changes in the secretion of some hormones (e.g., cortisol as secreted
by the adrenal gland and related to reactions to stress, shift work, and long
journeys that disturb rhythms responsible for adaptation to the environment and normal functioning such as jet lag; see Rosmond, Dallman, &
Bjorntorp, 1998) are also inuenced by circadian rhythms. Similarly,
some neurotransmitters are inuenced by circadian rhythms (e.g., melatonin as secreted by the pineal gland; Benlouci et al., 2005, considered the
zeitgeber for regulating time of different functions including sleep and
wakefulness).

Ultradian Rhythms
The REM (rapid eye movements)/NREM (non-REM) cycle is the most
documented ultradian rhythm, lasting approximately 90 minutes (Hobson,
2001). Sleep usually ensues with a loss of awareness of the environment.
However, an individual may preserve reective consciousness and experience visual imagery, described as the rst 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
difcult 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 difcult to awaken

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 rst 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 sleepers thought processes may seem logical, but only
in a dream situation, without insight as to his or her true state of mind or
consciousness.
More recently, the sleep/wake cycles and REM/NREM cycles have been
explained in terms of the AIM model of consciousness (Hobson, 2007).

Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness

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

sleeping, and abnormal states as a continuous succession of points. Wakefulness, NREM sleep, and REM sleep occupy specic regions of a state
space. In this environment, wakefulness and REM are clearly differentiated.
AIM is an acronym for activation, information (input) source, and modulation. Activation refers to a rate of information processing. In essence, the
cortex is activated if brain wave activity is low voltage and high frequency.
Activation is measured as the power of the high-frequency component.
It can also be measured by imaging brain regions (via blood ow) or by
reaction times.
Information (input) source varies from external to internal as a function
of inputoutput information ow 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 inuences arising
from adrenergic (e.g., serotonin) and cholinergic (e.g., acetylcholine)
brainstem neurons. Modulation determines how information is processed.
Hobson also refers to the modulation component as memory. Thus, the
strength of modulation determines whether the brain records conscious
experiences (as would be the case while one is awake) or fails to record
experiences (as occurs when one is dreaming).
In addition to the 90-minute ultradian cycle that appears when examining REM/NREM activity, Kokoszka (2007) reports evidence for similar
cycles in wakefulness. As examples, Kripke and Sonnenschein (1978)
showed the existence of an ultradian cycle for the production of imagery
(both in and outside the laboratory). Lavie, Levy, and Collidge (1975)
reported nding 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).

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 vividness were similar to diurnal variations in hypnotic susceptibility (Wallace,
1993). For example, for those classied as day persons (those most alert
or active during daylight hours), hypnotizability (as measured by the
Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility: Form A; Shor & Orne,
1962) was greatest between 10 AM and 2 PM. Night persons showed the
greatest susceptibility at 1 PM and between 6 PM and 9 PM. Finally, Erickson
and colleagues speculated the existence of a 90- to 120-minute ultradian
trance period during which they believed parasympathetic dominance
and relaxation were optimal for inducing hypnosis (Erickson & Rossi,
1979; Erickson, Rossi, & Rossi, 1976; Rossi, 1991). To date, however, there
has not been empirical support found for this hypothesis.

Theoretical Explanation
The previously described rhythms are naturally occurring and associated with normal psychobiological functioning. However, their impact on
states of consciousness is more complex, especially if they can cause or be
associated with ASC. The assessment of the impact of biological rhythms
on states of consciousness depends on the accepted denition of consciousness and its altered states (Wallace, Kokoszka, & Turosky, 1993). Unfortunately, there is no commonly accepted denition of consciousness. For
pragmatic reasons, we will limit our denition to deal only with biological
rhythms from a meta-theoretical point of view. In doing so, we wish to consider the following issues and questions: (a) When are rhythmic changes
experienced and/or recognized as altered states of consciousness? (b) What
is the nature of biologically produced states of consciousness versus those
induced by other means? (c) Which theoretical concepts have the strongest
support for explaining variability in states of consciousness?

Biological Rhythmic Changes and ASC

There is no research on this topic, but clinical experience suggests that
an individual can recognize typical and unusual experiences during sleep

Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness

as well as during daydream episodes. This suggests that there may be

qualitatively different experiences during sleep and wakefulness. Also, most
individuals can usually distinguish typical from unusual night dreams;
similarly, they can distinguish normal from anomalous experiences during
wakefulness (see Kokoszka, 2007).
With respect to unaltered states of consciousness, Kokoszka (1988,
2007) describes four types: (a) REM sleep, (b) NREM sleep, (c) OWSC or
an ordinary waking state of consciousness, and (d) DWSC or a differentiated waking state of consciousness. REM sleep has previously been
described; it occurs after the typical four NREM stages and is associated with
the production of dream activity. NREM sleep includes the four stages that
precede REM sleep.
OWSC is basically a state of alertness characterized by a dominance of
mental activity, especially activity from the left hemisphere of the brain.
This type of activity does not generally involve the presence or use of
imagery. There is also a dominance of stimulus reception from the external
environment and a dominance of physical or mental activity over more
internal events such as contemplation or daydreaming. Neurologically,
this activity is accompanied by a high percentage of beta EEG activity
(see Figure 1.2).
DWSC is characterized by a sense of restfulness and, as such, is
accompanied by less mental activity than OWSC. Unlike OWSC, DWSC
is accompanied by heavy reliance on imagery, associated with a passive
state of mind or the dominance of contemplation or other internal activity
over action. Some have speculated that many of the activities in DWSC
are controlled by the right hemisphere or at least that the right hemisphere
appears to show more involvement during this state of consciousness (e.g.,
Bakan, 1969). DWSC may also be accompanied by the appearance of a
slower alpha EEG wave (Springer & Deutsch, 1997).
As described at the beginning of this chapter, ASC can be dened 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 denition of ASC does not include pathology and,
therefore, may be considered idiosyncratic and similar to the concept of
anomalous experience (see Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). Eventually, the evaluation of the state of consciousness depends on the subjective
opinion of an individual or on the accepted theory of consciousness.
Descriptions of night dreams and spontaneous ASC in wakefulness imply
that in both states there are experiences that are within and beyond the
normal range for the individual.

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, contemplation, and dominance of activity from internal sources of stimulation) is
usually inhibited for cultural reasons. On the other hand, in congruence
with biophysiological and mystical approaches, and in a theoretical
manner that is similar to that proposed by Kokoszka (1988, 2007), four
fundamental conditions or modes of consciousness have been proposed

Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness

(Winkelman, 2010): (1) waking consciousness, (2) deep sleep, (3) REM
(rapid eye movement) sleep (dreaming), and (4) a spiritual, transpersonal,
or transcendental consciousness, referred to as integrative consciousness.
However, if one accepts the view that consciousness is the processing
of information at various levels of awareness (Wallace & Fisher, 2003),
then ASC are characterized by mental processes that are higher or lower
than normal. The organization of these mental processes was previously
discussed, and they have been elaborated upon by Kokoszka (2007).
They have also been mapped by Clark (1993) in a general tool to plot
mental states. However, his complex model is anchored on a number of
competing theoretical models rather than on descriptive categories.
Although one might argue that the model proposed by Kokoszka (2007)
suffers from some of the same problems, a multidimensional scaling to
classify alterations in consciousness may be fruitful (see Cardena, 2009).
And regardless of the potential weakness of the model approach, it is clear
that changes in consciousness from variations in biological rhythms are
not usually related to changes in the organization of mental processes.

Theoretical Concepts and Explanations of Various States of Consciousness

The most comprehensive model for explaining changes in states of
consciousness resulting from variations in biological rhythms was proposed by Kleitman (1963, 1982). He referred to his model as the basic
restactivity cycle (BRAC). He suggested the existence of an ultradian
rhythm that causes cyclical, approximately 90-minute, changes in imaging
activity during sleep (reected 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 rm evidence that cycles observed during wakefulness are regulated by the same
underlying neural mechanism that is responsible for REM/NREM cycles
(Lavie, 1992).
The approximate 90-minute rhythmicity reported by Kleitman (1982)
was not found in experiments with an activity-recording apparatus (Kripke,
Mullaney, Wyborney, & Messin, 1978; Okudaira, Kripke, & Webster,
1984). As a result, it has been suggested that the notion of a single, basic
oscillator particularly related to activity should be revised. Also, the 90minute cycle was not correlated with REM activity during sleep (Lavie &
Kripke, 1981). Studies showing the existence of REM in real time (Globus,
1966) were conducted only on two cases and they were not conrmed by
other studies (Dirlich, Zulley, & Schultz, 1977; Mealey & Carman, 1978).

11

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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 presenting cyclical activity of imagination (Kripke, Mullaney, & Fleck, 1985;
Kripke & Sonnenschein, 1978).
Arguments presented against BRAC are equivocal and disputable. Results
indicating an absence of the BRAC were interpreted as suggesting a modication rather than a rejection of Kleitmans concept because there are
90- to 100-minute periodicities in various other physiologic functions, even
if not in activity (Okudaira et al., 1984). In the nonreplication of the Klein
and Armitage (1979) and Kripke and Sonnenschein (1978) experiments,
there may be a strong argument against the hypothesis of a biologically determined tendency for changes in states of consciousness. However, all experiments were conducted with small sample sizes (812), a possible problem
with the failure to replicate. Also, contemporary psychology indicates that
vividness of imagery is an ability that is differentiated in the population
(Marks, 1973), and when imagery vividness is not taken into account, failures to replicate may occur (Wallace, 1990). Moreover, replication of studies
on cognitive styles by Kripke et al. (1983) differs from the original in several
aspects, including the fact of a nancial incentive for good performance.
Finally, the concept of a protective mechanism of the BRAC may explain
where the cyclical activity of imagery utilization may be hidden.

Protective Mechanisms of the BRAC and Metabolism of Information

It seems obvious that in Western culture, natural rhythmicity, if it
exists, is suppressed during wakefulness and that spontaneous states of
vivid imagery are regarded as unusual and abnormal. This gives rise to fear
and hesitancy that interrupts those states. If we accept the hypothesis that
ultradian rhythmicity of imagery is a biological reality, human culture
should accommodate it in some way. Natural, everyday observations show
the occurrence of situations in which people experience states of consciousness with spontaneous, vivid imagery and a passive state of mind,
not only without fear of anxiety, but with a feeling of rest. Irrational ASC
cause fear, whereas rationally explained states may be experienced with
pleasure and restfulness.
According to the metabolism of information model (Kokoszka, 2007),
the inow of information is as necessary to life and proper functioning of
the organism as is the inow of energy. The amount of information must
be maintained within certain limits. An insufciency of information causes

Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness

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

making the inow of energy (nourishment) impossible. An excess of information leads to overload, fatigue, and disturbances in information
metabolism that may have consequences similar to those brought about
by the insufciency of information.
The sleepwaking rhythm may be connected with proportional changes
between the sensitivity threshold for interoceptive and exteroceptive
stimuli. The BRAC stems from changes in activity of the cerebral hemispheres and from the cyclic dominance of either for the reception of information coming from external (environment and body) or internal sources
of stimulation. In case of any disruption in the optimal range of inow of
information, we theorize the existence of two main protective mechanisms:
natural proactive mechanisms and culturally protective mechanisms.

Natural Protective Mechanisms of Metabolism of Information

These mechanisms are characterized, according to the model, by a
reduction of goal-oriented activity of imagery production. This results in
a paucity of any activity of imagination or in the reorganization of cognitive processes into a culturally acceptable form. In case of a shortage of
physical input for information processing, imagery production increases.
The most spectacular supporting data come from experiments involving
sensory deprivation (see Suedfeld, 1980; Zubek, 1969).
Another natural protective mechanism includes the thoughtless
phenomenon. This is a specic kind of staring, characterized by cognitive
absence, that according to Kokoszka (2007) may be considered as an intermediate state between an OWSC and a DWSC. This intermediate state may
be considered a daily analog of REM sleep that lasts for a relatively short
period of time. For cultural reasons, it is stopped when spontaneous
imaging activity increases. We can speculate that the rest phase of BRAC
reveals itself during this phenomenon and that it promotes some degree of rest.
Physiological manifestations may also be considered a natural protective mechanism. Rossi (1986) postulates that the rest phase of BRAC has
its own manifestation in different physiological reaction-like changes of
respiratory shift such as yawning, hiccups, heartburn, or sounds from
the gastrointestinal tract. Other physiological manifestations may include
crossing ones arms or legs, leaning the head or body to one side, wiggling
the neck, the legs, or other body parts, and eye blinking.
In case of excess perceived stimulation, the control center becomes disorganized and perception is nally disturbed. This leads to a phenomenon

13

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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 versus external sources and the occurrence of psychophysiological phenomena combined with the rest phase of the BRAC.
The use and abuse of exogenous agents like alcohol and other
consciousness-altering drugs lead to disorganization of information
metabolism and goal-oriented activities (Grilly, 2005). This results in a
limitation of the inow of stimulation from external sources. Nicotine
and caffeine, on the other hand, facilitate the occurrence of the thoughtlessness phenomenon, or passive, vivid states of imagination.
Other culturally protective mechanisms include relaxation practices
like meditation and autogenic training (Dillbeck & Orme-Johnson,
1987). They may be considered means of intentionally limiting information inow. Also, the application of endogenous agents by means of physical fatigue can lead to disorganization of information metabolism. The
feeling of fatigue might explain nonlogical experiences.
All of the aforementioned situations have some attributes in common.
They all involve sensations with spontaneous use of vivid imagery much
like Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyis (1992) activities that pattern
consciousness, what they called ow. In addition, these situations are
accompanied by a relatively passive, nonlinear attitude of mind and an
inner consent toward irrationality. The intensity and degree of extraordinariness of experiences in these situations are commonly recognized and
culturally accepted. All of them are experienced as a form of rest (Dillbeck
& Orme-Johnson, 1987). The passive state of mind seems to be an essential psychological factor of the rest phase in the BRAC. The protective
mechanisms lead to the DWSC. However, we can speculate that the
observed data represent a much more complicated psychophysiological
phenomenon that may mask obvious parameters of DWSC.

Support for Protective Mechanisms of the BRAC and Information Metabolism

It should be mentioned that the concept of protective mechanisms of
the BRAC and information metabolism is compatible with the concepts
of the ultradian healing response and the ultradian stress syndrome (Rossi,

Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness

1991). Moreover, it explains cases when the ultradian healing response

does not occur regularly in a 90-minute rhythm and is not accompanied
by the ultradian stress syndrome. This syndrome could be considered
the result of extreme and prolonged deprivation of the rest phase of the
BRAC (i.e., absence of effective protective mechanisms).
Support for the concept of protective mechanisms (see Kokoszka,
1990, 1993a, 1993b) also comes from Duchniewska and Kokoszka
(2003). Participants in this study reported that throughout the day there
was an increase in the spontaneous use of imagery. Examples were: (a) a
situation in which one was staring at something while not doing anything
in particular, (b) travelling by different means of transportation (by bus,
tram, subway, or car), (c) using the toilet, (d) taking a short rest after physical
exertion, (e) relaxing in the bathtub or in the shower, (f) lying in bed
just before sleep, (g) sunbathing, (h) being at the beautician or hairdresser,
(i) standing in a long queue in a shop, and (j) waiting for somebody or something (for a bus, an important phone call, or a green light).
Additional endeavors that led to the use of protective mechanisms
included attending a meeting in the workplace, participating in a long conversation, participating in school activities, reading a book, a newspaper, or
a long letter, watching television, being present at an exhibition in a
museum, listening to the radio, and looking at pictures in a magazine. Other
situations included taking a long walk, dancing at a party, riding a bicycle,
playing basketball, engaging in sexual activity, eating a meal, taking a short
nap, consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, and utilizing classical relaxation techniques.
There were also considerable differences in phenomenology between
the experiences considered by participants as the most and the least
detached from their interest environment. Whereas only the experience of
having no thoughts appeared more often in the state of the least detached,
many other experiences were often reported during detachment.
These results indicate that states considered as mechanisms of information metabolism were reported by all participants with a mean frequency close to that predicted by the BRAC (approximately 10 cycles
within a presumed period of 15 to 17 hours of wakefulness in a day). Most
often these mechanisms were classied 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.,

15

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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 difculty in staying awake
in the evening and staying asleep in the morning; and the non24-hour
sleepwake syndrome, which causes sleep to occur later and later each
day, resulting in a continuously moving peak alertness time.

Conclusions
Variations in states and altered states of consciousness resulting from
biological rhythms are well documented, and such variations are considered
to be normal. We discussed a number of different types of rhythms including those labeled infradian, ultradian, and circadian. Their role in behavior
and behavioral disorders requires considerably more investigation.
Research on them in wakefulness is difcult, but it is incumbent on science
to study their complexity and the produced interactions that occur between
internal rhythms, external environmental cues, personality characteristics,
and general life events. By continuing to study biological rhythms, science
may eventually be able to answer many questions about various sleep disorders, mood disorders, and states and altered states of consciousness.

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Wallace, B. (1990). Imagery vividness, hypnotic susceptibility, and the perception of fragmented stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58,
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CHAPTER 2

Neurochemistry and Altered

Consciousness
David E. Presti
Consciousness, Chemistry, and the Mind-Body Problem
Consciousness is a word that some say can have many meanings, and scientists, philosophers, and others can and do spend countless hours debating
its denition. 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 dene consciousness as the capacity to be awareaware of mental processes such as
perceptual experiences (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, temperature, pain), mental images, thoughts, emotions, and ones sense of self.
It is awareness of what it is like to be a particular person, or animal, or
organism, or (whos to say at this point) thing (Nagel, 1974). Discussions
of consciousness generally focus on human consciousness, since this is
the only consciousness we actually know, from our own internal, personal
experience and from communicating through language with other humans
about their experiences. One sometimes speaks of ordinary consciousness as the awareness that accompanies ordinary waking life, as if there
is anything merely ordinary about such an awesome phenomenon. Be that
as it may, we can perhaps nd it convenient to distinguish between various
states of consciousness: an ordinary waking consciousness and various
states of altered or nonordinarythough still wakingconsciousness,
such as states associated with lack of sleep or the presence of certain intoxicants, or states such as those facilitated by immersion in music, ecstatic
dance, hypnotic induction, and the like. There are states associated with
yogic practicesfor example, the awakening of kundaliniand there are
a variety of meditative states, from light relaxation to vividly luminous

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Altering Consciousness

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

Alvarado, Fachner, Shear, & Zarrilli, Volume 1]. There are states of
consciousness that characterize dream sleep and also other stages of nondreaming deep sleep (Wangyal, 1998). And there can be consciousness
associated with certain experiences that sometimes occur under conditions
of cardiac arrest or other circumstances of nearness to death (Greyson,
2000).
A vast amount of empirical data, accumulated especially over the last
2 centuries, suggests that our mental processes (we will call the collection
of mental phenomena our mind) and our awareness of such phenomena
(our consciousness) are intimately related to the material substance of our
body and in particular of our brain. That there is a profound and intimate
relationship between mind and body is unquestioned. Just how this relationship is manifestedhow it is that the physical processes of the matter
and energetics of the brain and body are related to the subjective experiences of the mindis a deep mystery. This so-called mindbody problem is
in many ways as deeply mysterious now as it was centuries ago when Rene
Descartes (15961650) struggled with it. Some say it is the greatest mystery
in all of contemporary science.
The great experimental psychologist and philosopher William James
(18421910) wrote in his classic 1890 text The Principles of Psychology that
If the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although
every other organ in the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on
the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the rst effect; whilst a very few ounces of alcohol or
grains of opium or hasheesh, or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide
gas, are sure to have the second. (1890, p. 4)

James thus appreciated that chemical substances can have powerful effects
on the body and on the mind (such substances are called drugs). For
example, in his discussion of time perception in The Principles of Psychology, James speaks to the remarkable effects of Cannabis:
In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in the apparent
time-perspective. We utter a sentence, and ere the end is reached the beginning seems already to date from indenitely long ago. We enter a short
street, and it is as if we should never get to the end of it. (James, 1890,
pp. 639640)

Even to this day, these effects have not been sufciently studied to glean
what insights into the nature of our perception of time might be provided.

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

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 (17331804), its psychoactive properties were extensively studied by another pioneer chemist, Humphry Davy
(17781829), who in 1800 published an impressive book that represents
the rst careful investigation of a specic identied 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 (18321919), 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 (17701831). In a paper
submitted to the journal Mind, James concluded that he found Hegels
philosophical stance difcult 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
Hegels ideas. So moved was he by these new insights that he composed
an addendum to his paper and sent it to Mind, where it was published in
conjunction with the initially written article. In this addendum he wrote
that:
The keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an
intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth
beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical
relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its
normal consciousness offers no parallel. . . . (James, 1882, p. 206)

Twenty years later, when James delivered the Gifford Lectures in Natural
Philosophy and Religion at the University of Edinburgh, the insights gained
from his experiences with nitrous oxide remained of great import. His comments on this remain one of the most eloquent passages ever written about
altered consciousness:
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression
of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking
consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of
consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the lmiest 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, denite
types of mentality which probably somewhere have their application and
adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be nal which

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Altering Consciousness

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

them is the question,for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish
formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they
forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. (James, 1902,
lectures 1617, 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
mindbody 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 brainmind connection.

Molecular Neurochemistry and the Structure of the Synapse

Drugs that impact consciousness are called psychoactive drugs. Such
drugs include the widely ingested substances caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine; other plant-based intoxicants such as cannabinoids, opioids, and
cocaine; synthetic pharmaceuticals such as amphetamine, benzodiazepines, and barbiturates; psychedelics such as lysergic acid diethylamide
(LSD), mescaline, and psilocybin; and psychiatric medications such as
antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other mood stabilzers [see various
chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume].
In the century since William James lived and spoke and wrote, a vast
amount of detailed information has accumulated as to precisely how various drugs interact with physical processes in the nervous system. These
interactions provide powerful probes into the chemical functioning of
the brain and the connections between brain chemistry and mental processes, and thus may help to illuminate the mindbody problem and the
nature of consciousness. The effects of psychoactive drugs on the brain
are generally described in terms of the chemical interactions between the
drugs and the various molecular components of nerve cells, with the primary sites of interaction being at chemical synapses, a particular kind of
connection between cells.
The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe.
(Cetaceandolphin and whalebrains may be equally complex.) Its complexity is manifest in the large number of component cells, currently

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

estimated to be in the neighborhood of one trillion (1012). These trillion

cells consist of approximately 100 billion (1011) nerves cells or neurons of
various types, and 5 to 10 times that number of glia cells of various types.
Signals are passed between cells at connections called synapses, which are
of either an electrical or a chemical nature. Electrical synapses consist of
so-called gap junctions between cells, channel proteins allowing the
passage of electrically charged ions directly from one cell to another, thereby
permitting certain kinds of signal information to rapidly propagate between
cells. Chemical synapses are narrow gaps between cells at which neurotransmitter molecules carry signal information from one cell to another. There are
hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections within the human brain.
Each and every chemical synapse is a signaling structure regulated by a
variety of complex processes. Briey, 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 ow of Na+ (sodium) ions into the cell followed by the ow
of K+ (potassium) ions out of the cell, propagates along the length of an axon
to the axon termini. There, voltage-gated Ca++ (calcium) channels are triggered to open, Ca++ ions ow into the axon, and a cascade of processes
occurs, resulting in the movement of neurotransmitter storage vesicles to
the cell membrane. The vesicles fuse with the cell membrane and release
their contents of neurotransmitter molecules (thousands of molecules per
vesicle) into the synaptic cleft, the narrow gap (circa 25 nanometers)
between one neuron and the next. Neurotransmitter molecules rapidly diffuse throughout the synaptic cleft and interact with various proteins
embedded in the membranes of the axon terminal and nearby neurons
and glia. Some such proteins are neurotransmitter receptors where the binding of neurotransmitter molecules shifts the shape of the protein and produces a specic 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 ow 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

25

Figure 2.1 Chemical synapse in action. A nerve impulse propagates along the
axon via the opening and closing of voltage-gated sodium and potassium ionchannel proteins. When the impulse reaches the axon terminal, storage vesicles
containing neurotransmitter molecules are induced to fuse with the boundary
membrane of the axon and release neurotransmitter molecules into the synaptic
cleft. Neurotransmitters rapidly diffuse throughout the cleft and interact with
receptor proteins on the postsynaptic neuron, the presynaptic axon terminal, or
other nearby neurons or glial cells (not shown). Reuptake transporters rapidly
remove neurotransmitter molecules from the cleft. These transporter proteins
are located on the presynaptic axon terminal and may also be located on the postsynaptic dendrite and on nearby glial cells. In many situations, and in particular
for the neurotransmitter glutamic acid, local reuptake rapidly and efciently
removes neurotransmitter from the synaptic cleft. In some situations, in particular for some of the monoamine neurotransmitters, reuptake may not take place
in the local region of the synaptic cleft, allowing the released neurotransmitter
to diffuse away and have effects distributed over a larger region of the brain (socalled volume conduction).

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

Figure 2.2 G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) transduction pathway. When a

neurotransmitter molecule binds to a GPCR, the resulting shift in shape of the
receptor protein facilitates the binding of an intracellular G-protein to the GPCR.
The G-protein then becomes activated, exchanges a bound GDP for a GTP, and
splits into two components. These component proteins may then interact with
various cellular effector enzymes and alter the activity of the latter. Shown here
is the activation of the enzyme adenylate cyclase, with the result that many molecules of cyclic-AMP will be generated. cAMP molecules can then diffuse throughout the cell and activate specic protein kinases, enzymes that catalyze the
attachment of phosphate groups to other substrate proteins. Among such substrates may be ion-channel proteins: Phosphorylation alters the opening and closing properties of the channels and thus effects changes in the voltage across the
cell membrane, thereby impacting the excitability of the cell. Among the other
substrates of kinases are transcription factors, proteins that enter the cell nucleus,
bind to the DNA, and regulate the transcription of genes.

component proteins. These component proteins then move within the cell
and interact with other specic effector proteins, altering the activity of
proteins with which they interact. Several detailed scenarios have been
described for GPCRs, including the ability of specic activated Gproteins to do one of the following things: interact with adenylate cyclase
enzyme and stimulate or inhibit the synthesis of intracellular cAMP (cyclic

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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 function to phosphorylate (attach a phosphate group to) specic substrates
within the cell. Thus, cAMP may activate protein kinase enzymes that go
on to regulate several cellular processes, most notably: ion-channel opening and closing and thus membrane voltage and the excitability of the cell,
the activation and inactivation of various enzymes involved in cell metabolism, and the turning on and off of genes via transcription-factor proteins.
These genes include those coding for reuptake transporters, receptors, Gproteins, and other proteins involved in signaling at synapses, and for
nerve-growth factors regulating neurogenesis and the growth of dendrites
and axons. Thus, the effects of GPCRs may be varied and amplied. 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 specic reuptake transporter proteins that move neurotransmitters from the synaptic cleft back
into the interior of the axon terminal. In some cases, enzymes are present
that rapidly inactivate neurotransmitters by catalyzing a specic chemical
alteration.
At many synapses, one postsynaptic action of certain neurotransmitters
is to trigger the synthesis of particular molecules that diffuse back across
the synaptic cleft and have effects at the presynaptic axon terminal, either
by binding to receptors or interacting in other ways with cellular chemistry. These retrograde signals are intimately involved in the regulation of
signal activity at synapses via feedback effects that can alter the strength
of the synapse (Regehr, Carey, & Best, 2009).
Chemical synapses thus have a stunning capacity to nely 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 ne structure and activity of the brain, ever more
sophisticated regulatory strategies will be elucidated. Ionotropic receptors
mediate relatively rapid signals that have immediate excitatory and inhibitory effects on neurons via changes in membrane voltage. GPCRs can also

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

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

opening and closing of ion channels, both postsynaptically and presynaptically. The properties of the G-protein coupling and intracellular transduction also permit these effects to be amplied beyond what could be
achieved with ionotropic receptors. GPCR receptors can also have longterm effects on synaptic activity via effects on gene transcription. For
example, the synthesis of various growth-factor proteins can be modulated, with impact on neurogenesis, dendrite growth and branching, the
formation of dendritic spines, and the growth and branching of axons.
Thus, new synapses can be formed, and existing synapses can become
more elaborate and strong, or become weaker and even deconstruct.
Expression of metabolic enzymes can have an impact on the quantity of
neurotransmitter synthesized and loaded into storage vesicles, as well as
how rapidly the neurotransmitter is degraded. Regulation of the expression of neurotransmitter receptors, uptake transporters, and the components of the various steps involved in intracellular G-protein coupling
pathways allows for nuanced tuning of the strengths of synapses.
These processes of changing the patterns and strengths of synapses in
the brain are collectively referred to as neuroplasticity. Such processes are
intimately involved in learning and memory formation, to the extent that
memory is hypothesized to reside in the activity of networks of neuronal
connectivity. Activation of particular brain circuits will likely always have
an impact on modulating their longer-term strength, often via the effects
of ubiquitous GPCRs.
The most abundant neurotransmitter in the human brain is glutamic
acid (or glutamate), a molecule that has excitatory signaling effects when
acting at ionotropic glutamate receptors. The second most abundant
neurotransmitter in the human brain is gamma-amino butyric acid
(GABA), a molecule that has inhibitory effects when acting at ionotropic
GABAA receptors. Each of these neurotransmitters is released by billions
of neurons and has effects at trillions of synapses.
Other well-known neurotransmitters in the human brain are the monoamines, so-called because their molecular structures contain a single amine
(-NH2) group: serotonin (5HT or 5-hydroxytryptamine), norepinephrine,
dopamine, and histamine. Each of these neurotransmitters is produced by
specic clusters of cells in the brainstem: serotonin in the raphe nuclei, norepinephrine in the locus coeruleus, dopamine in the substantia nigra and
ventral tegmentum, and histamine in the tuberomammillary nucleus of the
hypothalamus. In each case, the number of cells producing and releasing
these monoamines as neurotransmitters is relatively small, on the order of
a hundred thousand or so (Iverson, Iverson, Bloom, & Roth, 2009). These

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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, glycine, adenosine, adenosine triphosphate, nitric oxide, endocannabinoids
such as anandamide and 2-arachidonylglycerol (2AG), more than a dozen
different opioid peptides or endorphins, substance P, oxytocin, vasopressin,
and other neuropeptides. Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), tryptamine, octopamine and other so-called trace amines may also function as neurotransmitters in the human brain (Jacob & Presti, 2005; Premont, Gainetdinov,
& Caron, 2001).
The dominant receptors for glutamate and GABA are of the ionotropic
type, allowing glutamate and GABA to have rapid excitatory and inhibitory
effects on neuronal activity. Acetylcholine (acting at the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor), serotonin (acting at the 5HT3 receptor), ATP acting at purine
2X receptors, and glycine are the other neurotransmitters presently known
to have ionotropic receptors. In addition to their ionotropic effects, glutamate, GABA, and ATP also act at GPCRs. Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors
and all the serotonin receptors other than 5HT3 are GPCRs. All other known
neurotransmitter receptorsdopamine, norepinephrine, histamine, adenosine, opioid, cannabinoid, and so forthare GPCRs. Thus, the effects of
many neurotransmitters, as well as drugs that act via these neurotransmitter
receptors, can have rapid effects on neuronal excitability, as well as longerterm modulatory effects on excitability, metabolism, gene transcription,
and synaptic connectivity.

Pharmacology and Altered Consciousness

Pharmacology is the study of how drugs interact with the body. The
etymology of this word captures the complex nature of drugs, as the Greek
word pharmakon means both medicine and poison at the same time.
The most widely used psychoactive drug in the world is caffeine, usually ingested by way of the following plants: tea (Camellia sinensis), coffee
(Coffea arabica), and cacao (Theobroma cacao, source of chocolate). Other
caffeine-containing plants include kola, yerba mate, and guarana. These

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

days, a great deal of caffeine consumption also occurs by way of a variety of

caffeinated soft drinks and energy-drink products. Caffeine acts as an
antagonist at receptors for adenosine, a neurotransmitter that has an
inhibitory function in the brain. Adenosine appears to be generated
throughout the brain via the enzymatic conversion of the ubiquitous
energy-carrying molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP). When adenosine
acts at adenosine receptors, it has an inhibitory effect on neuronal signaling, an effect that is likely to take place primarily at glutamatergic synapses.
It has been hypothesized that adenosine neuronal signaling may play an
important role in the cycle of sleep and wakefulness (Jones, 2009). By
antagonizing adenosine receptors and thus blocking adenosines normal
inhibitory effects, caffeine produces excitatory effects in the nervous system. The increased excitation in the brain is correlated with the experiential effects of caffeine: increased wakefulness and alertness. Related
molecules such as theophylline, found in tea, and theobromine, found in
cacao, act in a similar fashion.
Other drugs that act as nervous-system stimulants include cocaine from
the coca plant (Erythroxylum coca), ephedrine from the Ephedra plant, and
the synthetic pharmaceutical amphetamine, a chemical cousin of ephedrine. Other pharmaceutical chemical relatives of amphetamine include
methamphetamine and methylphenidate. These various drugs act primarily
at the uptake transporters for the monoamine neurotransmitters dopamine
and norepinephrine, blocking reuptake of released neurotransmitter (in
the case of cocaine) and causing leakage of neurotransmitter out of the axon
terminal via the reuptake transporter (in the case of amphetamine and
related chemicals). In all cases, there is enhanced activity at synapses using
dopamine and norepinephrine and a resulting arousal of cortical activity.
Alcohol is an example of a drug that has an opposite effect on consciousness to that of the stimulants described above. Decreased arousal and
increased relaxation are the hallmarks of low doses of alcohol and other
sedative-hypnotic drugs, a category that also includes barbiturates (such as
the pharmaceuticals phenobarbital, secobarbital, thiopental, and others),
benzodiazepines (diazepam, lorazepam, alprazolam, and many others),
and general anesthetics (diethyl ether, halothane, sevourane, propofol,
and others). All these sedative-hypnotics produce, in a dose-dependent
manner, further decreased arousal, amnestic effects (blacking out), sleep
or other loss of waking consciousness, and death from shut-down of parts
of the brain controlling vital functions of the body. Sedative-hypnotic drugs
all appear to have as a primary mechanism of action binding to one of several locations on ionotropic GABAA receptors and enhancing the ux of
Cl- ions through the channel that results from the binding of GABA to the

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Altering Consciousness

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

increased, and this is correlated behaviorally with decreased arousal, sedation, and loss of waking consciousness (Franks, 2008).
Opioids are molecules that act on the body like opium from the opium
poppy, Papaver somniferum. Morphine and codeine are the primary
psychoactive constituents of opium. Effects of opioids include profound
analgesia (reduced perception of pain), cough suppression, sedation, and
hallucinatory dreaminess. Slowing of respiration can result in death if
the dose is sufciently large. Opioid receptors are GPCRs that have been
classied into several subtypes (mu, delta, kappa) based on their pharmacology, protein structure, and distribution in the brain.
Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), with its primary psychoactive constituent, nicotine, is one of the most widely used psychoactive substances in
the world. From a shamanic perspective, tobacco is considered among
the most powerful of plants, and from a pharmacological perspective, nicotine is among the most poisonous of chemicals to which humans are routinely exposed. The effects of tobacco on consciousness are subtle and
profound: mentally stimulating and focusing, anxiolytic (reducing anxiety), and grounding. Nicotine acts as an agonist at nicotinic acetylcholine
receptors found throughout the brain. These are ionotropic positive-ion
channels that have excitatory effects on neurons.
The seed from the Southeast Asian palm tree Areca catechu also ranks
among the most widely used psychoactive substances in the world. The areca
nut is frequently referred to as betel nut, deriving from the fact that it is often
chewed together with leaves from Piper betel, a plant of the same genus as
black pepper. Not widely known in Europe and the Americas, the areca
nut is used by millions of people daily in India, Taiwan, Thailand, and other
parts of Southeast Asia. Like all plant substances, it contains numerous
molecular constituents, a number of which are likely to have physiological
activity. The alkaloid arecoline is thought to be the primary psychoactive
substance in the areca nut, and its major identied 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 identied 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

located on presynaptic axon terminals. Endogenous neurotransmitter

ligands, the endocannabinoids, are thought to be produced in postsynaptic
axon terminals and carry signals from the postsynaptic cell to the presynaptic cell, a form of signaling termed retrograde. Retrograde signaling by endocannabinoids is believed to play an important role in adjusting the strengths
of synapses throughout the brain (Chevaleyre, Takahashi, & Castillo,
2006).
Thus, a large variety of plants and chemicals have long been appreciated
and used by humans for altering consciousness. In many instances, these
alterations of consciousness have anxiety-reducing effects, at least over the
short term. This can contribute to a desire to repeat the experience, and with
repetition, the neural circuitry associated with the behaviors related to
intoxication is strengthened, making the behaviors more robust and reinforced. If the drive toward intoxication develops into a compulsive behavior
having adverse effects on ones 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 Blatter, 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 substancespsychedelic (mind revealing), hallucinogen
(generating hallucinations), psychotomimetic (mimicking psychosis), entheogen (generating god within)speak to the complexity of their effects, perhaps most succinctly described as a generalized amplication of mental
experience. Feelings, thoughts, and perceptions become intensied and
available to conscious awareness in ways not ordinarily experienced. These
ASC may also be characterized by a diminution of Freudian psychological
defenses, allowing material not ordinarily available to conscious awareness
to become more accessible. It is this property that contributes to the psychotherapeutic utility of the psychedelics (Grof, 2008). Many psychedelic
plants and fungi have long histories of therapeutic use by indigenous
cultures. In such cultures, the medicine people, healers, or shamans may
employ psychedelic plants or fungi to catalyze therapeutic processes [see
Winkelman, Volume 1]. Among such agents are Psilocybe mushrooms, containing psilocybin and psilocin; Virola (Epena) and Anadenanthera (Yopo)
snuffs from the Amazon, containing DMT; Psychotria and other DMTcontaining plants from the Amazon, mixed together with the Banisteriopsis
caapi ayahuasca vine to make ayahuasca brew or yage; Tabernanthe iboga

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Altering Consciousness

from west-central Africa, containing ibogaine; and peyote, San Pedro, and
other cacti from the Americas, containing mescaline (Schultes, Hofmann,
& Ratsch, 2001)
One of the most famous psychedelic chemicals is LSD, lysergic acid
diethylamide, rst made by Albert Hofmann (19062008) in 1938 as
one of a series of chemical derivatives of ergotamine isolated from ergot
fungus. He remade it again in 1943 and at that time discovered its potent
psychoactive effects. Hofmann quickly appreciated that he had discovered
something very profound (Hofmann, 2005). In the 1940s people were not
thinking of the brain as a neurochemical system. That a tiny amount of
chemical could have such a stunning impact on consciousness was a pivotal event in the early development of biological psychiatry and of molecular neuroscience. The effects of LSD on consciousness, the identication of
signaling actions of serotonin, and the similarity of molecular structure
between serotonin and a portion of the LSD molecule led to the rst speculations on relating brain chemistry and mental illness (Nichols & Nichols,
2008; Woolley & Shaw, 1954).
The primary neurochemical action of LSD and other classical psychedelics like psilocin, DMT, and mescaline is believed to be as an agonist
at 5HT2A receptors (Nichols, 2004; Vollenweider et al., 1998). These
GPCR serotonin receptors are widely distributed throughout the brain
and large numbers are found on the dendrites of cortical pyramidal cells.
Many appear to be located extrasynaptically, consistent with the idea that
some of the effects of serotonin on cortical activity are mediated by volume
conduction (Nichols & Nichols, 2008). Other serotonin receptor subtypes, especially 5HT2C and 5HT1A, may also play signicant roles in the
actions of psychedelics. Dopamine receptors and trace amine receptors,
as well as other neurotransmitter receptors, are also likely to be involved
in the effects of psychedelic substances on the brain.
Although the consciousness-altering effects of various classical psychedelics (LSD, psilocin, DMT, mescaline, etc.) have a great deal in common,
there are also many subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle differences. Eventually it may be possible to connect the subjective signatures of different
psychedelic drugs to their differing neurochemical effects in the brain.
For example, serotonin and other agonists at the 5HT2A receptor activate
two different intracellular signaling pathways: phospholipase C (producing IP3 and DAG as intracellular messengers) and phospholipase A2 (producing AA as an intracellular messenger). The relative activation of these
two pathways varies widely among different agonists at the 5HT2A receptor (for example: serotonin, LSD, psilocin, 5-methoxy-DMT, etc.; Nichols,
2004). The implications of this are presently unknown, and it may well be

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

that such differences are relevant to understanding the different subjective

signatures of the various classical psychedelics. As more is learned about
the molecular actions of these substances, it may be increasingly possible
to formulate hypotheses as to how neurochemical differences are related
to mental-state effects.
To round out the present discussion of pharmacology and alterations
of mental experience, there are several more examples of substances that
have profound effects on consciousness. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), popularly known by the street name ecstasy, has
mind-revealing qualities reminiscent of psychedelics, that is, intensication of thoughts and feelings. However, its overall consciousness-altering
characteristics are distinct enough to warrant a separate category, often
including enhanced feelings of connection with others, reduced anxiety,
and enhanced ability to verbalize feelings. Chemically related to methamphetamine, MDMA also produces central nervous system stimulation,
euphoria, and sympathetic nervous system stimulation. Although MDMA
has been found to interact with a variety of neurochemical systems, its primary effect appears to be facilitating the release of serotonin (as well as
dopamine and norepinephrine) from axon terminals via leakage through
reuptake transporters.
Salvia divinorum, a plant from the mint family having a history of shamanic use in southern Mexico, produces profound alterations of consciousness when ingested. Although hallucinogenic in nature, the character of the
ASC is very different from that produced by the classical psychedelics. The
primary psychoactive chemical component was identied in the early
1980s as salvinorin A, a nonalkaloid molecule more recently identied to
be a highly selective agonist at the kappa-opioid receptor (Roth et al.,
2002; Valdes, 1994). Not much is yet known about the functions of the
kappa-opioid receptor in the brain. Among its endogenous ligands are the
dynorphin peptides, from the opioid peptide (endorphin) family. How activation of kappa-opioid GPCRs is related to such profound alterations of
consciousness is, at this time, completely obscure.
A variety of solanaceous plants, including Atropa belladonna (deadly
nightshade), Hyoscyamus niger (henbane), Mandragora ofcinarum (mandrake), Datura (devils weed), and Brugmansia (angels trumpet), produce
powerful alterations of consciousness characterized by intense hallucinatory activity. The major psychoactive chemicals in these plants are thought
to be atropine and scopolamine, compounds that have potent antagonist
actions at muscarinic acetylcholine receptors.
Ketamine is a drug used in human and veterinary surgical procedures. It
is called a dissociative anesthetic and is said to remove body awareness from

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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 primary neurochemical effect that has been identied for ketamine is noncompetitive antagonist action at ionotropic NMDA-type glutamate receptors,
found throughout the brain.
And what about nitrous oxide (N2O), the intoxicant that so impressed
William James many years ago? It is widely used in medicine and dentistry
for its analgesic and anesthetic properties. Its dominant neurochemical
effects in the brain are antagonist actions at NMDA-glutamate receptors
(similar to ketamine) and increasing the release of endogenous opioid
peptides (Emmanouil & Quock, 2007; Jevtovic-Todorovic et al., 1998).
How such molecular actions are connected with the ability of N2O to
facilitate the induction of profound alterations of consciousness is as much
a mystery now as it was in 1882 when William James experienced his
gas-induced insights.
I have discussed how various molecules having hallucinogenic or psychedelic effects interact with receptors of various types5HT2A and other
receptors for serotonin and receptors for trace amines, acetylcholine,
opioid peptides, and glutamateand facilitate the onset of powerful
altered states of consciousness. How is this possible? What is going on?
This remains a complex and poorly understood arena, but there is reason
to believe that interesting and fruitful ideas will develop as more details
of the neural circuitry are elucidated. One particularly profound effect of
the classical psychedelics is their ability to produce very powerful memories of circumstances experienced during periods of intoxication. Experiences of insight and transcendence may have lifelong positive benets
(Grifths et al., 2008), and experiences of anxiety or panic may have
long-term negative impact. This suggests that the classical psychedelics
have a particularly powerful impact on neuroplasticity. Perhaps this phenomenon might eventually be understood in terms of agonist actions
at 5HT2A receptors and subsequent impact on cortical excitability (Beque
et al., 2007) as well as local synaptic plasticity.
Much of what is known about the specic relationships between brain
chemistry and behavior comes from the study of psychopharmacology,
and this is likely to remain one of the most valuableindeed, perhaps the
most valuableprobes of physical aspects of the mindbrain connection.
There is reason to believe that it will be possible to paint ever- moredetailed scenarios connecting brain chemistry and circuitry with aspects of

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

our actions, emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. Yet the ultimate link connecting mental experience with physical properties of the brain remains a
deep mystery, in many ways as much so now as centuries ago.

The Mind-Body Problem and Future Directions in the Neuroscience of Mind

A vast quantity of information about the molecular and cellular structure and function of the human brain has accumulated. This corpus of
knowledge ts beautifully into a descriptive scenario that has developed
in the physical sciences over the last several centuries. From Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein to Darwin, DNA, and contemporary molecular biology and neuroscience, the explanatory framework of biophysical science provides a stunningly powerful description
of nature, from the distant expanses of intergalactic space to the molecular
and cellular structure and function of living organisms in general and the
human brain in particular. It is thus compelling and reasonable to continue pushing the limits of investigating and describing the interactions
of psychoactive drugs with the molecular and cellular components of the
nervous system and attempting to connect these molecular and cellular
effects with mental experience and behavior. This will undoubtedly shed
light on the still mysterious question of how physical processes in the
brain are related to mental experiences.
The conventional stance in contemporary neuroscience is that somehow physical processes in the brain (and body) will provide a sufcient
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
mindthat a more complete understanding of physical processes in the
brain and body will be sufcient to determine a solution to the mindbody
problem. Standard Model arguments include (but are not limited to) stances such as: Mental experiences are somehow identical to neurobiological
processes, and mental experiences somehow emerge from underlying
neurobiological processes (Sperry, 1980), and mental experiences are
higher-order interpretations of neurobiological processes (Searle, 2000).
The key property of consciousness that serves to distinguish it from all
other kinds of phenomena is its subjectivity, the fact that it is an irreducibly
rst-person phenomenon (Nagel, 1974). How can physical processes
involving the stuff of matter and energy produce a subjective experience?

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Altering Consciousness

(Here physical means describable in terms of mathematical properties

ascribed to coordinates in space and time: matter, energy, trajectories,
forces, eld strengths, and so forth.) Some argue that it may never be possible to account for rst-person, subjective phenomena in terms of thirdperson, objective, physically describable properties and that an expanded
explanatory framework will be required (Chalmers, 1996; Rosenberg,
2004) [see Beauregard, this volume].
It ought not be surprising that the quest to understand our own capacity for awareness is a daunting task. If we are able to say anything coherent
about the scientic understanding of consciousness, it ought to be that our
current analysis of it is likely to be at a very primitive place. Certainly consciousness is somehow related to the brain. However, despite all the
detailed information we have about the structure and function of the
brain, there are no compelling reasons to believe we are anywhere close
to appreciating just how consciousness is actually related to the brain.
The effects of various drugs both on the brain (in the domain of chemical
and cellular processes in the nervous system) and on mentality (in the
domain of subjective experience) are likely to continue to be among the
best probes available in the investigation of this mindbrain connection.
And although many pieces of information t together quite elegantly
such as the structure and dynamic functioning of neuron synapses and
intercellular signaling and how drug effects at synapses and on brain circuits correlate with effects of drugs on mental experienceit could well
be that a better next step toward understanding consciousness will involve
a radical revisioning of the connection between mind and brain, something rather different from the Standard Model.
There is ample precedent for this in the history of science. Newtonian
physical principles provide an excellent (and often perfectly adequate)
description of many phenomena, from the falling of apples to the behavior
of ocean tides to the movements of the moon and planets. However, following the development of special and general relativity by Albert Einstein, it is now appreciated that relativistic physics provides a revisioned
and more powerful descriptive framework for these phenomena and
much more. Indeed, contemporary physics already contains the foundation for such an expansion. Quantum mechanics, the universally accepted
physical description of matter and energy, was developed during the
1920s and constituted a radical revisioning of our conception of physical
reality. The most widely accepted interpretations of quantum mechanics,
put forth by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, John von Neumann, and
others posit an irreducible role for measurement or interaction in dening
the properties of a system. It can be compellingly argued that this provides

Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness

a place to begin to address consciousness and mentality from an expanded

perspective (Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2006; Stapp, 2007, 2009). (This is a
complex and controversial subject, requiring another long conversation.)
Within the domain of the contemporary empirical science of mind are
numerous anomalous phenomena that strongly suggest an expanded
framework will be required in order to take the next big steps in addressing the mindbody problem (Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Kelly
et al., 2007). (Another contentious subject deserving of a long conversation.) Everything the Standard Model provides on the neurochemistry of
consciousness and on altered consciousness will still apply and will contribute to characterizing how the substrate of the brain contributes to the
subjective experiences of mentality. And more will be possible. Even in
this anticipated future expanded framework, insights and information
are likely to be gained by continued exploration of the effects of drugs
on the brain and the mind.

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CHAPTER 3

Dopamine, Altered Consciousness,

and Distant Space with Special
Reference to Shamanic Ecstasy
Fred Previc
Introduction
An altered state of consciousness (ASC) generally refers to any condition that
differs from the normal waking state. Deviations can range from the mild
(e.g., after ingestion of a stimulant or depressant or analgesic) to the extreme
(as in coma). Altered states can be induced either during the normal sleep
wake cycle, by accident or trauma (as in hypoxia and fever), in psychotic
states associated with disorders such as temporal-lobe epilepsy and schizophrenia, and by a large variety of drugs (Previc, 2006) [see also chapters
by Cardena, Kokoszka & Wallace, Presti, and Noirhomme & Laureys, this
volume]. The most intriguing and arguably widely studied ASC are those
that involve distortions of reality, hereafter referred to as altered states of
consciousness with distorted reality (ASCDRs). These include a wide range
of states involving different experiences and means of induction, from
sensory hallucinations and dreamlike experiences to meditative and mystical states and even dissociative states in which out-of-body sensations and
spirit possessions may occur. Even within each of these categories, there is
considerable variability; for example, mystical experiences may range from
heightened awareness and a mild noetic feeling to a profound loss of ones
sense of time and personal space (see Wulff, 2000).
All mammals presumably experience some form of altered consciousness, based on a slowing of the EEG from the typical waking beta state,
and many are presumed to experience ASCDRs after ingesting hallucinogenic drugs, as judged by grasping attempts at nonexistent objects in space.
However, humans alone intentionally enter ASCDRs, whether by physical
and behavioral activities (e.g., meditation, exhaustive dancing, sensory

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Altering Consciousness

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

contexts), whereas hallucinogenic drugs are rarely self-administered by primates and may even be mildly aversive (Fantegrossi, Woods, & Winger,
2004; but see Samorini, 2002). Why humans are especially prone to seek
ASCDRs may best be explained by the high dopamine content of the human
brain, which orients us to extrapersonal space and, as will be discussed
later, may be the common denominator of all ASCDRs.

The Dopaminergic Mind and the Origin of Human Consciousness

Most theories concerning when and how human intelligence and consciousness rst 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 (inuences 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 signicant
because dopamine, the most widely studied neurotransmitter in the brain,
has been implicated in a number of processes that are fundamental to
modern human behavior. These include motivation, goal directedness,
exploratory behavior, reward prediction, stimulus associations, and at least
six cognitive abilities crucial to human intelligence: motor programming,
working memory, cognitive shifting, abstract representation, temporal
processing speed, and generativity/creativity (Previc, 1999, 2009). Working
memory is considered to be the most fundamental cognitive ability and the
single best predictor of the general intellectual factor g (Kyllonen & Christal,
1990). Together with cognitive shifting and other strategic abilities, working memory underlies what has been termed executive intelligence
(Previc, 1999). Such strategic ability is associated with yet another dopaminergic traitinternal 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 dopamines primarily parasympathetic action on the body in lowering blood
pressure, reducing temperature, increasing peripheral vasodilation, and
reducing oxygen consumption (Previc, 2009). The parasympathetic action
of dopamine is a major clue in accounting for the parasympathetic dominance found in the majority, if not all, ASCDRs.
According to Previc (2009), all of these critical cognitive skills are
related to operations carried out in extrapersonal space. For example, motor
programming, motivation, goal directedness, stimulus associations, and

Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space

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 conrmed by the contraction of
nearby space as well as an exaggerated emphasis on the upper visual eld
(where distant space is mostly found) in the hyperdopaminergic disorder
of schizophrenia, whereas reduced dopamine (as in Parkinsons disease)
results in upper visual-eld decits (Previc, 1998). Evidence from rodents
points to a whole constellation of similar upper-eld behaviors (e.g., dorsiexion, climbing, rearing) caused by dopaminergic drugs (Previc, 1998).
As will be discussed later, dopamines role in extrapersonal space (and distant time) is a major reason for its role in mediating the out-of-body themes
occurring during many ASCDRs [see also Dieguez & Blanke, this volume].
Dopamine is a catecholamine that, like the similarly structured transmitter noradrenaline, is considered a stimulant in the central nervous
system. Dopamine is found primarily in two major systems emanating
from the brainstem: (1) the nigrostriatal, coursing from the substantia
nigra to the corpus striatum (containing the caudate nucleus and putamen, the most densely innervated dopaminergic structures in the brain);
and (2) the mesolimbic, emanating more ventrally and medially from the
ventral tegmental area and projecting to the nucleus accumbens or ventral
striatum (Previc, 2009). These systems, also known as the dorsolateral and
ventromedial ones, respectively, have in turn their own set of extensive
and reciprocal cortical connections (Previc, 2009). Although both systems
are oriented toward extrapersonal space, the nigrostriatal one is more
involved in focused, cognitive processes, while the somewhat more chaotic mesolimbic system tends to be more involved in motivation and goal
directedness and, when disinhibited, is the more likely site of dopaminemediated ASCDRs.

Dopamine and Other Transmitters Mediating Altered States of Consciousness

One element common to all ASCDRs is that they involve a disinhibition of dopaminergic extrapersonal brain systems located in the ventral
cortex (Previc, 2009), particularly a limbic circuit coursing from
the medial temporal lobe to the ventral striatum (Mandell, 1980; Vollenweider & Geyer, 2001). The extrapersonal predominance is reected in

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Altering Consciousness

the dearth of tactile and proprioceptive (bodily) sensations, a bias toward

the upper visual eld, and an emphasis on extrapersonal themes (e.g.,
out-of-of-body experiences) in ASCDRs. For example, dreams often
involve oating sensations, as do hallucinations occurring just prior to
and following sleep (Girard, Martius, & Cheyne, 2007), and deep hypnosis is associated with a loss of body sensations (Cardena, 2005). As examples of the upper-eld 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 eld (Girard et al., 2007), and religious
visions and positive symbolism tend to be upwardly biased (Previc,
2006). The out-of-body or ecstatic sensationderived from the Greek
word ekstasis, to stand outside oneselftends to be the most perceptually distant of the hallucinations (Girard et al., 2007). The extrapersonal
effect of the consciousness-altering drugs is further evidenced by their tendency to distort space perceptions by de-emphasizing near space (Fischer,
Hill, Thatcher, & Scheib, 1970) and by activating upper-eld systems
associated with distant space through raising apparent eye level (Krus,
Resnick, & Raskin, 1966). These effects are similar to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, in which excessive dopamine leads to, among
other perceptual and thought disorders, a diminution of near space and
a perceived attening of the 3-D world (see Previc, 1998).
Although there are many differences among the ASCDRs, these differences may be more supercial than real. For example, most dreams tend
to be visual whereas schizophrenic hallucinations tend to be auditory; however, intense, narrative dreams known as apex dreams are very similar to
the schizophrenic experience (Hunt, 1982). Also, ASCDRs involving spirit
and other possessions differ from more active ASCDRs associated with
meditation and prayer, yet meditation elevates dopamine levels (Kjaer
et al., 2002) just as some possession disorders are linked to dopaminergic
psychosis and are treated by antipsychotic drugs that block dopamine (Goff
et al., 1991). Other phenomenological evidence for a commonality of all
ACSDRs is the similarity of drug-induced states with mystical and psychotic
states. For example, Grifths et al. (2006) replicated earlier results of
Pahnke (1969) in showing that the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin closely
replicates the features of the mystical state and produces similarly longlasting mental and spiritual changes in individuals. Furthermore, endogenous and hallucinogen-induced psychoses are highly similar in the reality
distortions experienced (Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 1998).
There is also neuroanatomical evidence for a commonality of all
ASCDRs. Dreams, most hallucinations, and mystical experiences all

Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space

involve a greater activation of the ventral brain pathways housed in the

medial temporal and medial and lateral prefrontal areas (Previc, 2006).
Posterior sensory and body-centered brain regions, especially in the
parietal lobe, are generally quieted in dreams and mystical states, while
damage to the parieto-temporal region (particularly on the right side) can
create out-of-body sensations (Blanke & Arzy, 2005). The posterior cortical silencing may explain why sensory isolation is capable of inducing
hallucinations and even out-of-body illusions (Previc, 2006; Zuckerman,
1969), especially in the context of serotonergic, noradrenergic, and cholinergic deactivation in primary and secondary sensory areas (see below).
Finally, dreams, mystical, and other altered states may all involve varying
preponderances of activity in the left hemisphere (Previc, 2006).
At rst glance, the neurochemistry of dreams, hallucinations, and other
altered states contradicts the notion that there is a common neural substrate
for all ASCDRs. Indeed, altered levels of dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT), glutamate, gamma aminobutyric
acid (GABA), and the opioids and cannabinoids have all been shown to produce altered states of consciousness. Yet the plethora of neurochemical
involvements obscures the common neurochemical proles 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 Parkinsons patients to
treat their motor dysfunction. Serotonergic neuronal activity in the raphe
nucleus is also decreased by psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD),
mescaline, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and many other hallucinogens
(Previc, 2006), whereas elevated 5-HT levels are protective against hallucinations (Previc, 2006). Cholinergic antagonists such as scopolamine and
atropine can also produce dreamlike visions and hallucinations (Perry &
Perry, 1995). Glutamate antagonism by such drugs as ketamine, phencyclidine, and ibogaine creates dissociative (out-of-body) and other types of
hallucinations (Corlett et al., 2009, Previc, 2006). GABA is also involved
in hallucinations but in a more complex way: GABA agonists can prevent
hallucinations in alcohol-induced delirium tremens and in the Charles
Bonnet syndrome, in which visual loss creates a condition akin to sensory
isolation (Paulig & Mentrap, 2001), but GABA agonists such as Zolpidem
can also foster a dreamlike hypnotic state (Markowitz, Rames, Reeves, &
Thomas, 1997). Finally, the natural opiates have an even more complex
involvement in ASCDRs: Although some kappa agonists like salvinorin A
are hallucinogenic, possibly because of dopamine coactivation, both opiate

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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 ultimately lead to elevated levels of dopamine in the brain. Serotonergic systems
interact with dopaminergic ones in many parts of the brain in a mostly
inhibitory manner (see Kapur & Remington, 1996; Mandell, 1980; Previc,
2006), with reduced serotonin levels leading to elevated dopamine levels,
thereby explaining why drugs such as LSD can model dopaminergically
mediated psychosis. GABA-agonistic drugs such as Zolpidem increase dopamine levels in the brainstem (Heikkinen, Moykkynen, & Korpi, 2009) while
anticholinergic drugs such as atropine elevate dopamine levels in the basal
ganglia and septo-hippocampal area (see Mandell, 1980; Perry & Perry,
1995; Previc, 2006). Various antiglutamate drugs also are known to elevate
brain dopamine levels in the basal ganglia and to mimic schizophrenic
psychosis (Corlett, Frith, & Fletcher, 2009; Vollenweider et al., 2000),
although the ketamine-enhanced release of dopamine in the striatum has
not always been found, perhaps because the dosages were too low (Rabiner,
2007). Opioid interactions with dopamine are even more profound, as
natural opiates such as the enkephalins are most densely located in the
striatum (Schmauss & Emrich, 1985) and are co-located with dopamine
terminals and physiologically show strong reactions with dopamine.
Finally, cannabinoids are known to cross-sensitize dopaminergic neurons
to other dopaminergic drugs, which may help explain their exacerbation
of psychosis (Luzi et al., 2008).
Recent evidence suggests that most if not all hallucinogenic drugs,
including the opiate antagonist salvinorin A, stimulate dopamine D2 receptors in vitro in a manner consistent with their hallucinogenic potential
(Seeman, Guan, & Hirbec, 2009). However, there is only mixed evidence
that blocking dopaminergic transmission reduces the effects of hallucinogens
(Carlson & Wagner, 2005; Keith, Mansbach, & Geyer, 1991), so it cannot be
rmly concluded that ecstatic effects can only be produced by dopaminergic
activation. Nor should it be concluded that all drug-induced altered states
and effects on the central nervous system are identical. A drug with antiserotonergic effects may stimulate dopamine, but the high density of serotonergic
neurons in the temporal lobe visual areas will ensure that more visual hallucinations will occur with antiserotonergic drugs than with other hallucinogens.

Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space

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

degrees, emotional or motivational side effects. For example, any hallucinogen that stimulates opioid receptors will produce a feeling of euphoria and
reduced sensitivity to pain, while combined dopaminergic and noradrenergic
action creates more of a stimulant action and less of a hallucinogenic one than
does dopaminergic activation alone. The stimulant amphetamine, for example, has less of a hallucinogenic potential than the dopaminergic precursor
L-dopa, although the former can lead to mystical experiences and delusions
and hallucinations with chronic use that can both resemble and worsen the
psychosis of schizophrenia. Another drug, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, excites both dopamine and serotonin as well as noradrenaline and oxytocin in stimulating both extrapersonal and peripersonal systems.
Although MDMA ironically goes by the street name of ecstasy, its experience
is different from that of the classic hallucinogens in that it enhances tactile and
emotional sensations (dependent on peripersonal and sympathetic systems),
which runs counter to the original denition of ecstasy as an out-of-body
experience.
Even if many transmitters may be involved in ASCDRs, dopamine is the
only transmitter unequivocally elevated during such states. The dopaminergic
basis of the ASCDRs is further strengthened by a parasympathetic predominance in sleep (Harris, 2005) and in many (but not all) drug-induced hallucinogenic states, because dopamine has a primarily parasympathetic
inuence in bodily functions and inhibits sympathetic emotional arousal systems in the amygdala and posterior cortex (Mandell, 1980; Previc, 2009).
Parasympathetic dominance is present in virtually all out-of-body and other
ASCDRs, whether elicited actively by meditation, drugs, sweating, prolonged
dancing (which exhausts the sympathetic resources), hypoxia, or even
trauma (see reviews by Mandell, 1980; Sierra & Berrios, 1998; Winkelman,
2010). Parasympathetic dominance has also been shown in acute hyperdopaminergic clinical states (Henry et al., 2010), whereas antidopaminergic
drugs (neuroleptics) used to treat psychosis cause sympathetic effects such
as hypertension and hyperthermia (Previc, 1999). The parasympathetic
dominance is consistent with the greater consciousness-altering role of the
more extrapersonally oriented and dopaminergically dominant left hemisphere, which exerts a predominant parasympathetic action and is less
involved than the sympathetically dominant right hemisphere in emotional
regulation (Previc, 2009).
In summary, there is considerable evidence that dopaminergic activation
occurs in all hallucinogenic states and is the primary neurochemical correlate of these states.

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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 experiencealso
referred to as the shamanic state of consciousness (Krippner, 2002)
which is manifested in such experiences as soul ight 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 reected in prehistoric rock art
(Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988). The ecstatic experience can be limited
to one or a few individuals or extend to the entire group, depending on
the society and ritual involved. Although drugs are not the only means of
producing ASCDRs during shamanic rituals, they are or have been widely
used in hunter-gatherer cultures, with the notable exception of some (such
as the Inuits) who have limited access to plants. Shamanism has been
described as the original neurotheology (Winkelman, 2004), and the
involvement of dopamine in shamanic ecstasy (see below) parallels the
more general involvement of dopamine in religious experience and practice
(Previc, 2006).
The shamanistic practices used to create the ecstatic state by means other
than drugs include sweating, exhaustive dancing, rhythmic chanting
and drumming, sleep deprivation, emotional stress, and sensory isolation
(Winkelman, 2010), consistent with the link between dopamine and parasympathetic activity. Dopamine stimulates peripheral vasodilation in order
to lower our temperature (Previc, 1999), so it would be elevated in such
venues as sweat lodges, used by the Navajos to create ecstatic experiences.
Rhythmic drumming in the 3 to 6 Hz range purportedly excites hippocampal
theta waves, which occur during REM sleep, meditation, and in orienting to
distant stimuli (see Previc, 1998) and are accompanied by increased dopamine in the medial septal area (see Mandell, 1980). Prolonged dancing can
lead to sympathetic exhaustion and elevate dopamine and endorphin levels
in the brain (Winkelman, 2010). Aboriginals in Australia and the modern
San peoples of Africa do not rely on hallucinogens during religious rituals
(Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988) but on hyperventilation, sleep deprivation, fasting, and dreams to attain otherworldly experiences. Hyperventilation reduces blood ow 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

hallucinations and even psychosis (Corlett et al., 2009), and it has been
speculated that prolonged periods of time spent in darkened caves may have
helped inspire some shamanic prehistoric rock art (Lewis-Williams &
Dowson, 1988; Whitley, 2008).
Another widely used route to the shamanic ecstatic experience is the use
of hallucinogens. Over one hundred such drugs are known to be used by
shamans, typically from plant or fungus extracts. Because of their use in religious rituals, these have been variously termed food of the gods, plants of
the gods, or entheogens (see Perry, 2002, for a review). The hallucinogens
used by shamans across the world affect a large number of neurotransmitter
systems, principally cholinergic and serotonergic ones. Psilocybin, obtained
from mushrooms and currently used in North American and some Oceanic
shamanic rituals, is known to mimic the action of LSD on serotonin receptors, as does mescaline from the peyote cactus (also used by Mexican and
North American shamans; see Perry, 2002). Extracts from sacred vine species used by North and South American natives such as Virola, Turbina,
and the soul vine Banisteriopsis, the source of the powerful hallucinogen
ayahuasca, are also believed to have mostly serotonergic effects (Perry,
2002; Previc, 2006) [see also Mishor, McKenna, & Callaway, this volume].
Anticholinergic drugs used in rituals mostly act at the muscarinic cholinergic synapse, although some also act on nicotinic receptors. Scopolamine
(from the Datura plants used by Navajo shamans in the southwestern
United States) and atropine (widely used around the world both in
hunter-gatherer cultures as well as in ancient and even medieval civilizations) are two of the most powerful muscarinic drugs with hallucinogenic
properties. Ibogaine, an antiglutamatergic and partial opiate agonist derived
from the root bark of the Iboga plant, is used by West African shamans in
initiation and other religious rituals. Salvinorin A, derived from the sage
plant Saliva divinorum and used by shamans in Mexico, is a kappa-opioid
agonist that has a high afnity for the dopamine D2 receptor (Seeman
et al., 2009). The Amaritia muscaria mushroom, found in the shade of birch
and other trees in northern arboreal forests and used by Siberian shamans,
has as its main psychoactive ingredient muscimol, which acts like other
benzodiazepines at GABA receptor sites (Perry, 2002) and is one of the
various drugs hypothesized to be the soma of the ancient Vedic texts.
Marijuana, derived from the cannabis sativa plant, was believed to have been
used extensively by shamans in China and central Asia (Perry, 2002). Interestingly, no plant species that mainly and directly stimulates dopamine is
known to be used by modern shamans for its hallucinogenic properties,
although ancient Egyptian and Mayan priests are believed to have made use
of the water lily (nymphaea; Emboden, 1989), which contains apomorphine.

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Altering Consciousness

Although some hallucinogens used by shamans activate systems that are

involved in mood, sometimes creating pleasant effects, they can also produce negative psychological effects, including anxiety, depression, and even
psychosis in some cases (Whitley, 2008), consistent with their dopaminergic actions and the dopamine excess in psychosis. Many of these drugs lead
to hallucinogenic experiences at doses approaching toxic levels and they,
like other toxic drugs, lead frequently to nausea and vomiting.
Undoubtedly, part of the shamanic role would be to help regulate and monitor the ingestion of these potentially dangerous drugs. Along with their hallucinogenic effects, grimacing and reduced social grooming and other
indicants of social isolation are produced by apomorphine and psilocybin
in primates (Schlemmer, Narasimhachari, & Davis, 1980; Siegel, 1974),
even though in humans they may be consumed in group settings during
shamanic rituals and stimulate group cohesion in their aftermath. Not surprisingly, the hallucinogens do not approach the stimulants, opiates, and
other mood-altering drugs in terms of their addictive potential (Fantegrossi
et al., 2004). Chimpanzees and gorillas have been known to consume hallucinogenic plants among the more than100 plants in their diet, but they do
so sparingly and for primarily medicinal purposes (Cousins & Huffman,
2002), just as other nonhuman primates do not self-administer LSD and
other hallucinogens in laboratory settings (Fantegrossi et al., 2004). Even
many hunter-gatherers (e.g., the Kung San!) who once may have ingested
plant extracts to induce altered states now rely on behavioral means of doing
so (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988).
Hence, despite some psychological healing and social bonding owing
from the ecstatic experience, as well as possibly a greater perceived control
over animal spiritsanalogous to the dopaminergic internal locus of
controlthe risks and efforts associated with hallucinogen ingestion
and other shamanic practices require that a larger purpose underlie their
use in shamanismnamely, to achieve the ecstatic state. As a Mexican shaman
described her psilocybin state:
This is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible.
And this is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and saints, a
world where everything has happened and everything is known. The world
talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything
is known. (Mara Sabina, in Perry, 2002)

The shamanic experience is consistent with studies of psilocybin in the

United States (Grifths et al., 2006; Pahnke, 1969), which have produced

Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space

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 (Grifths et al., 2006). However, even in the controlled and supportive environment of the latter study, 31% of participants experienced negative side effects such as fear and anxiety after ingesting the hallucinogen
(Grifths et al., 2006). That individuals would engage in prolonged activities or in many cases suffer psychological and physical stress or danger to
achieve the ecstatic experience and the supernatural knowledge supposedly gained is consistent with the capability of other dopaminergic extrapersonal endeavors (e.g., ghting in the name of abstract concepts, working
for years in solitude to achieve scientic breakthroughs, etc.) to override
peripersonal and bodily needs (Previc, 2009).

Origins of the Shamanic Consciousness and Modern Mind

It is unlikely that ecstatic experiences induced by the hallucinogens
could be nearly as profound without the pre-existing expansion of our
consciousness of extrapersonal space provided by the dopaminergic mind.
The origin of shamanism most likely parallels the origin of dopaminergically mediated human consciousness, not only because of a need for an
expanded extrapersonal orientation but also because of the symbolic
capacity required to interpret shamanic rituals (Winkelman, 2010).
Dopaminergic systems have undergone a dramatic reorganization and
expansion in primates relative to other mammals such as rodents (Berger,
Gaspar, & Verney, 1991). Whereas dopamine predominates in relatively
few regions of the rodent brain, such as the anterior ones involved in
motor control, it is much more widely distributed in primates. Even in primates, however, dopamine more densely innervates frontal and prefrontal
areas involved in motor control and is sparsely represented in the sensory
areas of the brain, which explains why diminished nondopaminergic sensory processing during isolation can disinhibit dopaminergic activity and
produce ASCDRs (Previc, 2006; Zuckerman, 1969). Dopaminergic transmission also appears to be predominant in the left hemisphere, which in
most humans houses our advanced intellectual abilities and also may be
the major locus of most altered-reality states (Previc, 2009).
Neuroanatomical evidence suggests that dopaminergic systems are
more salient in human brains than in those of monkeys and even apes.
For one, the cerebral cortex and the striatumboth extremely rich in
dopamineshow the highest brain progression indices in humans relative
to chimpanzees (Rapoport, 1990). Also, the dopaminergic-rich anterior

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Altering Consciousness

cingulate gyrus, a structure activated in numerous studies during meditation (see Previc, 2006), has in humans markedly increased in size and
number of large dopaminergic spindle neurons relative to apes (Allman
et al., 2001). Although a recent study showed there is no fundamental
increase in dopamine neuronal density in human prefrontal cortex relative
to that of the chimpanzee, some subtle axonal changes were noted
(Raghanti et al., 2008a). However, there is even less evidence for evolutionary expansions/changes from chimpanzee to humans in glutamatergic,
cholinergic, and serotonergic systems (Perry & Perry, 1995; Raghanti
et al., 2008b, c; Rapoport, 1990). Although changes in gene sequencing of
dopaminergic as well as serotonergic, opioid, and other receptors has been
documented in humans as compared to apes, Preuss (2006) points out that
such sequencing differences are difcult to correlate with any specic
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 rst
hominid species to engage in extensive stone tool making and to be specialized for endurance activities such as running, as evidenced by changes in
the skeletal anatomy and foot (Bramble & Lieberman, 2004). The enhanced
endurance capabilities and tools would have allowed Homo habilis to travel
large distances to scavenge or engage in other activities to procure meat,
which is believed on the basis of dentation and archaeological evidence to
have been part of its diet (Previc, 1999). Meat would have provided Homo
habilis with a rich source of tyrosine, the precursor to dopamine, and dopamine would correspondingly have improved thermal tolerance and endurance capability (Gilbert, 1995; Previc, 1999). The second major increase
in dopamine leading to modern human behavior occurred more than
100,000 years after the establishment of the modern human anatomy and
gene pool and therefore may be ascribed to epigenetic factors. The most
likely of these factors was an improved diet (including marine fauna rich
in essential amino acids and iodine that boost dopamine transmission)
and a rise in human longevity and population (Previc, 2009). The rst
unambiguous evidence of modern human intelligence circa 80 kya is manifested in manufacturing artifacts (e.g., carved bone tools, pyrolithic blades),
elaborate lithic geometric designs, and decorative beads and ochre-colored
ornaments found at Blombos Cave, Klasies River, and other sites along the
coast of South Africa (Brown et al., 2009; Henshilwood et al., 2001; Jacobs
& Roberts, 2009).

Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space

Despite their hierarchical social structures and limited use of ritual

dancing, there is no evidence that chimpanzees display anything comparable to shamanism. Beginning with Homo neanderthalis, some evidence
exists for ritualistic burials (Winkelman & Baker, 2008), but it is limited
and certainly a far cry from the conceptual sophistication required of the
shamanic consciousness. By contrast, there is clear evidence in rock art
and cave paintings of shamanic themes (e.g., animalhuman therianopes)
in various parts of the world by 35 kya, including Fumane Cave in Italy
(Broglio et al., 2009) and Chauvet Cave in France (Valladas et al.,
2001). These dispersed artistic renderings suggest that the shamanic
tradition must have been well established before the end of the Middle
Paleolithic, but how far it extends back in time is a matter of speculation.
The modern human anatomy and gene pool were established at least
around 200 kya, but there exists only sparse and disputable evidence of
behavioral modernity for the next hundred thousand or more years
(Jacobs & Roberts, 2009; Mellars, 2006; Previc, 2009). The absence of
evidence could be explained by many extraneous factors, including
rock-art physical decay, but there is also evidence of absence in that, even
as recently as 90 kya genetically modern humans created few advanced
artifacts in the Levant region of the Middle East, from which they eventually disappeared (Mellars, 2006). It is believed that the gene pool
common to almost all non-Africans (as well as most Africans) possibly
originated from a mixture of South African and East African populations
and is believed to have entered Southwest Asia around 65 kya (Behar
et al., 2008). It seems likely that the South African clade (group of biological species sharing a common ancestor) that merged with the East African
populations before leaving Africa migrated from South Africa after the
rst extensive artifacts indisputably ascribable to modern humans were
deposited less than 80 kya at Blombos Cave and other sites along the
South African coast (see Jacobs & Roberts, 2009; Previc, 2009). There is
no evidence for shamanism at this time, but in Rhino Cave, located in
the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, tenuous evidence for spirit worship exists
in the form of a giant python-shaped rock.1
Although there is uncertainty as to when the shamanic consciousness
emerged, its demise can be traced to the rise of agriculture approximately
10 kya in the Middle East, which led to a further extension of
1

The python is marked by a large number of intentionally made cuts; evidence of burned
spears, dated to 77 kya years ago, is located in a pit below (http://news.nationalgeographic
.com/news/2006/12/061222-python-ritual.html). Sheila Coulson, one of the archaeologists
excavating Rhino Cave, even speculates that nearby rooms once may have been occupied by
shamans, but this is unsupported by any physical evidence.

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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 stratied societies
in which priests and priestesses controlled spiritual access for large populations. Although some shamanic hallucinogens and practices (e.g., chanting) continued to be used by the ancient civilizations, even these would
eventually become prohibited, thereby further diminishing the role of shamans in spiritual activities.

Conclusion
Most or all altered states of reality involve a triumph of extrapersonal
over peripersonal activity and are accompanied by elevated dopamine in
the ventral corticiolimbic regions of the brain, especially in the left hemisphere. The ecstatic experience, created either by behavioral practices or
hallucinogenic drugs and manifested in soul ights, out-of-body journeys,
and other phenomena, is a cardinal feature of shamanism. Shamanistic
practices and drugs designed to invoke the ecstatic experience increase
dopaminergic and parasympathetic activity and would be largely lacking
in purpose without an expanded appreciation and consciousness of distant space and time provided by dopaminergic systems in the brain.
Hence, the evolution of the dopaminergic mind, providing the capability
of abstract, symbolic, and distant concepts and believed to have reached
its modern status no more than 80 kya, appears to have been the major
impetus for the rise of shamanic consciousness.

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CHAPTER 4

Transcendent Experiences
and Brain Mechanisms
Mario Beauregard
Introduction
The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in understanding the
brain mechanisms mediating transcendent experiences (TEs). These experiences extend or lie beyond the limits of ordinary experience. Mystical experiences represent one particularly interesting type of TEs. Characterized by
altered or expanded consciousness, mystical experiences relate to a fundamental dimension of human existence and are frequently reported across
all cultures and religious/spiritual traditions (Hardy, 1975; Hay, 1990).
For James (1902), the main characteristics of a mystical experience are: (1)
ineffability: the quality of eluding any adequate account in words; (2) noetic
quality: it is experienced as a state of deep knowledge or insight unknown to
the discursive intellect; (3) transiency: this experience cannot be sustained
for long; (4) passivity: the feeling that, after the experience sets in, one is
no longer in control and is perhaps even in the grasp of a superior power
or presence. According to Stace (1960), mystical experiences involve the
apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or
a One into which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate. Stace distinguishes between extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences: In
extrovertive experience, nature, art, music, or mundane objects facilitate
mystical consciousness and are transgured by awareness of the One; in
introvertive experience, the One is found at the bottom of the human self.
Stace further proposes that the main aspects of mystical experiences are:
(1) the disappearance of all the mental objects of ordinary consciousness
and the emergence of a unitary or pure consciousness; (2) a sense of objectivity or reality; (3) feelings of peace, bliss, and joy; (4) the feeling of having

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encountered the sacred or the divine (sometimes identied as God); and

(5) a transcendence of space and time.
TEs can be triggered by the ingestion of mind-altering drugs and natural substances, shamanic practices, meditation, hypnosis (Cardena, 2005),
and near-death experiences (NDEs; Levin & Steele, 2005). They can also
result from regular religious/spiritual practice. Additionally, these experiences can occur without any apparent reason (Levin & Steele, 2005).
TEs often lead to profound transformative changes in attitudes and behavior, that is, changes in ones 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 ndings 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 mindbrain 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 (18721873) rst
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 rst 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

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 Gods presence, the
sense of being connected to the innite (Alajouanine, 1963), hallucinations of Gods voice (Hansen & Brodtkorb, 2003), visual hallucination of
a religious gure (Karagulla & Robertson, 1955), or repetition of a religious phrase (Ozkara et al., 2004). It has been suggested that some of
the greatest religious gures in history (e.g., Saint Paul, Muhammad, Joan
of Arc, Joseph Smith) probably suffered form TLE (Saver & Rabin, 1997).
Naito and Matsui (1988) described an elderly woman whose seizures
were characterized by joyful visions of God. Interictal electroencephalography (EEG) revealed spike discharges in the left anterior and middle temporal areas during sleep. Morgan (1990) reported the case of a patient
whose seizures were associated with feelings of ineffable contentment
and fulllment, visualizing a bright light recognized as the source of
knowledge, and sometimes visualizing a bearded young man resembling
Jesus Christ. A computed axial tomography (CAT) scan displayed a right
anterior temporal astrocytoma. Following anterior temporal lobectomy,
the ecstatic seizures vanished. Along the same lines, Picard and Craig
(2009) described the case of a 64-year-old right-handed woman who has
had epileptic seizures with an ecstatic aura. During her ecstatic epileptic
seizures, she reported experiencing immense joy above physical sensations as well as unimaginable harmony with life, the world and the All.
Cerebral MRI showed a meningioma in the left temporal pole region. An
interictal EEG revealed left anterior temporofrontal epileptiform activity.
Ogata and Miyakawa (1998) examined 234 Japanese epileptic patients
for ictus-related religious experiences. Three (1.3%) patients were found
to have had such experiences. All 3 cases had TLE with postictal psychosis
and interictal experiences with hyperreligiosity. Patients who had ictusrelated or interictal religious experiences did not believe only in Buddhism
(a traditional religion in Japan) but rather in a combination of Buddhism
and Shintoism, new Christian sects, contemporary Japanese religions,
and/or other folk beliefs. Interestingly, the content of their religious experiences was related to their religious beliefs. This nding emphasizes the
importance of considering psychological factors (such as beliefs) in addition to neurobiological aspects when the relationship between epilepsy
and religion/spirituality is discussed.

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Interictal Personality Syndrome of TLE

Waxman and Geschwind (1975) suggested that hyperreligiosity is a core
feature of a distinctive interictal personality syndrome of TLE (also called
the Geschwind syndrome). A heightened state of religious conviction, an
increased sense of personal destiny, intense philosophical and cosmological
concerns, and strong moral beliefs usually characterize interictal religiosity.
The putative temporal-lobe personality type is also characterized by hypermoralism, deepened affects, humorlessness, aggressive irritability, and
hypergraphia.
Support for this hypothetical syndrome was provided by Bear and Fedio
(1977), who found that religiosity trait scores were signicantly higher in
TLE patients than in healthy control participants. In keeping with this,
Roberts and Guberman (1989) found that 60 percent of 57 consecutive
patients with epilepsy had excessive interests in religion. Subsequent studies using religion questionnaires, however, failed to nd any differences
about interictal religiosity between patients with TLE versus idiopathic
generalized epilepsy or between patients with epilepsy and normal control
participants (Tucker, Novelly, & Walker, 1987; Willmore, Heilman,
Fennell, & Pinnas, 1980). It has been proposed that differences in religiosity
measures and in control group selection account for some of the discrepancy
among studies (Saver & Rabin, 1997).
Interestingly, Wuerfel and collaborators (2004) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate mesial temporal structures in
33 patients with refractory partial epilepsy, comparing 22 patients without
and 11 patients with hyperreligiosity. High ratings on the religiosity scale
were correlated with a signicantly smaller hippocampus in the right
hemisphere. The hippocampal atrophy may reect the duration and
severity of hyperreligiosity. This does not necessarily mean that the right
hippocampus is the critical cerebral structure for religious experience
(Devinsky & Lai, 2008).

The Limbic-marker Hypothesis

Saver and Rabin (1997) have theorized that temporolimbic discharges
underlie each of the core features of TEs (e.g., the noetic and the ineffable;
the sense of having touched the ultimate ground of reality; the sense of
incommunicability of the experience; the experience of unity, timelessness, and spacelessness; and feelings of positive affect, peace, and joy).
The limbic system integrates external stimuli with internal drives and is
part of a distributed neural circuit that marks the valence (positive or

Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms

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) harmoniousindicative of a connection or unity
between disparate elements, and (4) ecstaticprofoundly joyous.
According to the limbic-marker hypothesis, the perceptual and cognitive contents of a TE are comparable to those of ordinary experience,
except that they are tagged by the limbic system as of deep importance,
as united into a whole, and/or as joyous. Therefore, descriptions of the
contents of the TE resemble descriptions of the contents of ordinary experience, and the feelings associated with them cannot be captured fully in
words. As in the case of strong emotions, these limbic markers can be
named but cannot be communicated in their full visceral intensity, resulting in a report of ineffability.
The temporal lobe and the limbic system may not be the only cerebral
structures involved in TEs. About this question, Devinsky and Lai (2008)
hypothesized that alterations in frontal functions in the right hemisphere
may contribute to increased religious interests and beliefs as a personality
trait. This hypothesis is based on the nding that dramatic changes in self,
dened as a change in political, social, or religious views, can be seen in
patients with a dysfunction affecting selectively the right frontal lobe
(Miller et al., 2001).

Stimulation of the Temporal Lobe

Persinger (1983) speculated that TEs are evoked by transient, electrical
microseizures within deep structures of the temporal lobe, and that it is
possible to experimentally induce TEs by stimulating the temporal lobe
with weak electromagnetic currents. Persinger and Healey (2002) tested
this hypothesis by exposing 48 university students to weak (100 nanoTesla to 1 microTesla) complex, pulsed electromagnetic elds. These elds
were applied in one of three ways: over the right temporoparietal region,
over the left temporoparietal region, or equally across the temporoparietal
regions of both hemispheres of the brain (one treatment per group). Fields
were applied for 20 minutes while participants were wearing opaque goggles in a very quiet room. A fourth group was exposed to a sham eld
conditionthat is, participants were not exposed to an electromagnetic
eld, although all participants were told that they might be. Beforehand,
the Hypnosis Induction Prole (HIP; Spiegel, Aronson, Fleiss, & Haber,
1976) was administered to participants (psychology students), to test for
suggestibility.

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Two-thirds of the participants reported a sensed presence under the inuence of the electromagnetic elds, but 33 percent of the control (shameld) group reported a sensed presence too. In other words, Persinger and
Healey (2002) found that twice as many participants reported a sensed presence under the inuence of the electromagnetic eld as those who reported
one without an electromagnetic eld. About half of these participants stated
that they felt someone else in the chamber. Another approximate half of the
group described a sentient being who moved when they tried to focus attention upon the presence. About one-third of participants attributed the presence to a deceased member of the family or to some cultural equivalent of a
spirit guide. In the study, those who had received stimulation over the
right hemisphere or both hemispheres reported more unusual phenomena
than those who had received stimulation over the left hemisphere. Persinger
and Healey (2002) concluded that the experience of a sensed presence can
be manipulated by experiment, and that such an experience may be the
source for phenomena attributed to visitations by spiritual entities.
A research team at Uppsala University in Sweden, headed by Granqvist
(Granqvist et al., 2005), mirrored Persingers experiment by testing 89
undergraduate students, some of whom were exposed to the electromagnetic elds and some of whom were not. Using Persingers equipment,
the Swedish researchers could not reproduce his key results. They attributed their ndings to the fact that they ensured that neither the participants nor the experimenters interacting with them had any idea who was
being exposed to the electromagnetic elds.
Granqvist and colleagues made sure that their experiment was double
masked by using two experimenters for each trial. The rst experimenter,
who was not told about the purpose of the study, interacted with the participants. The second experimenter switched electromagnetic elds off or
on without advising either the rst experimenter or the participant. So if
the volunteer had not already been told that a TE was likely at Granqvists
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-eld (control) condition. Rather, volunteers were told
only that the study investigated the inuence of weak electromagnetic
elds 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

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

lifestyle orientation.
No evidence was found for a sensed presence effect of weak electromagnetic elds. The characteristic that signicantly predicted the outcomes was personality. Of the three participants who reported strong
spiritual experiences, two were members of the control group. Of the 22
who reported subtle experiences, 11 were members of the control
group. Those participants who were rated as highly suggestible on the
basis of a questionnaire lled out after they completed the study reported
paranormal experiences whether the electromagnetic eld was on or off
while they were wearing the stimulation helmet. Granqvist and colleagues
also noted that they found it difcult to evaluate the reliability of Persingers ndings because no information on experimental randomization or
masking was provided, which left his results open to the possibility that
psychological suggestion was the best explanation.
Taken together, the clinical studies of epileptic patients suggest that
the temporal lobe and the limbic system are involved in the experiential
aspect of TEs. However, the relationship between these brain regions
and TEs is still poorly understood because (1) most people who have these
experiences are not epileptics, and (2) very few epileptics report TEs
during seizures. In addition, the experimental induction of such experiences by stimulating the temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic currents
does not appear easily achievable when psychological suggestibility is controlled using a randomized, double-masked, placebo approach.

Brain Imaging Studies of Transcendent Experiences

The rst 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-identied religious participants who attributed their religious experience to biblical Psalm 23. These participants, who were members of a Free Evangelical Fundamentalist Community in Germany, all
reported having had a conversion experience (related to the rst 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 (rst verse of biblical Psalm 23),
happy (a well-known German childrens nursery rhyme), and neutral
(instructions on using a phone card from the Dusseldorf telephone book).

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Participants were scanned with positron emission tomography (PET)

during various conditions: reading silently or reciting biblical Psalm 23;
reading silently or reciting the childrens nursery rhyme; reading silently
the set of instructions; and while lying quietly. The PET images revealed
a signicant 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 ow (rCBF) changes.
According to Azari and colleagues (2001), these results strongly support the view that religious experience is a cognitive attributional phenomenon, mediated by a pre-established neural circuit, involving
dorsolateral prefrontal, dorsomedial frontal, and medial parietal cortex.
Religious attributions are based on religious schemata that consist in
organized knowledge about religion and religious issues and include reinforced structures for inferring religiously related causality of experienced
events (Spilka & McIntosh, 1995). Azari and coworkers (2001) proposed
that the dorsolateral prefrontal and medial parietal cortices were probably
involved in the participants own religious schemata, whereas the dorsomedial frontal cortex was implicated in the felt immediacy of religious
experience.
Newberg, Pourdehnad, Alavi, and dAquili (2003) used single-photonemission computed tomography (SPECT) to scan three Franciscan nuns
while they performed a centering prayer to open themselves to the presence of God. This prayer involved the internal repetition of a particular
phrase. Compared to baseline, the prayer condition scan showed
increased rCBF in the prefrontal cortex, inferior parietal lobes, and inferior
frontal lobes. There was a strong inverse correlation between the rCBF
changes in the prefrontal cortex and in the ipsilateral superior parietal
lobule. Newberg et al. (2003) hypothesized that increased frontal rCBF
reected focused concentration, whereas changed rCBF in the superior
parietal lobule was related to an altered sense of space experienced by
the nuns during prayer. In this pilot study, there was no attempt to analyze and quantify in a rigorous and systematic manner the nuns subjective
experiences during their centering prayer. In other words, Newberg and
colleagues could not determine whether focusing attention on a phrase
from a prayer over a period of time really led the nuns to feel the presence
of God.
With respect to the involvement of the parietal cortex in spirituality,
Urgesi, Aglioti, Skrap, and Fabbro (2010) reported that selective damage

Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms

to left and right inferior posterior parietal regionsassociated with the

surgical removal of brain gliomas (i.e., cancer types affecting the cerebral
tissue)induced in several patients a specic increase of selftranscendence (as measured with the Temperament and Character Inventory; Cloninger, Przybeck, Svrakic, & Wetzel, 1994). This nding indicates that changes of neural activity in posterior parietal areas may
produce fast modulations of a stable personality trait related to transcendental self-referential awareness.
Newberg, Wintering, Morgan, and Waldman (2006) also utilized
SPECT to investigate changes in cerebral activity during glossolalia
(speaking in tongues). This unusual mental state is associated with specic religious traditions. Glossolalia is one of the gifts of the Spirit
according to Saint Paul and, hence, some fundamentalist religious traditions see it as a sign of being visited by the Spirit. This belief is based on
the Pentecost experience in which, according to the Acts of the Apostles,
the Apostles spoke in the tongues of all those present and made themselves understood to everybody, whereby later on just babbling something
became synonymous with glossolalia. In this state, the individual seems to
be speaking in an incomprehensible language over which he or she claims
to have no voluntary control. Yet the individual perceives glossolalia to
have great personal and religious meaning. In their study, Newberg and
colleagues examined ve practitioners (women) of glossolalia. Participants
described themselves as Christians in a Charismatic or Pentecostal tradition who had practiced glossolalia for more than 5 years. Structured clinical interviews excluded current psychiatric conditions. Glossolalia was
compared to a religious singing state since the latter is similar except that
it involves actual language (English). Earphones were used to play music
to sing and to perform glossolalia (the same music was used for both
conditions). Several signicant rCBF differences were noted between the
glossolalia and singing state. During glossolalia (compared to the religious
singing state), signicant decreases were found in the prefrontal cortices,
left caudate, and left temporal pole. Decreased activity in the prefrontal
lobe is consistent with the participants description of a lack of volitional
control over the performance of glossolalia. Newberg et al. (2006)
proposed that the decrease in the left caudate may relate to the altered
emotional activity during glossolalia.
Recently, we sought to identify the neural correlates of a mystical experience (as understood in the Christian sense) in a group of contemplative
nuns using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Beauregard &
Paquette, 2006). Fifteen Carmelite nuns took part in the study. Blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal changes were measured during a

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mystical condition, a control condition, and a baseline condition. In the

mystical condition, participants were asked to remember and relive the
most intense mystical experience ever felt in their lives as a member of
the Carmelite Order. This strategy was adopted given that the nuns told
us before the onset of the study that God cant 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 afliated with the Carmelite Order. The week preceding the
experiment, participants were requested to practice these two tasks. The
baseline condition was a normal restful state. Immediately at the end of
the scan, the intensity of the subjective experience during the control
and mystical conditions was measured using numerical rating scales ranging from 0 (no experience of union) to 5 (most intense experience of
union ever felt). Self-report data referred solely to the experiences lived
during these two conditions, not to the original experiences recalled to
self-induce the control and mystical states. The phenomenology of the
mystical experience during the mystical condition was assessed with the
Mysticism Scale (Hood, 1975).
As regards the phenomenology of the subjective experience during the
mystical condition, several participants mentioned that, during the mystical condition, they felt the presence of God, His unconditional and innite
love, as well as plenitude and peace. All participants reported that, from a
rst-person perspective, the experiences lived during the mystical condition were different than those used to self-induce a mystical state. The
nuns also reported the presence of visual and motor imagery during both
the mystical and control conditions. Additionally, the participants experienced a feeling of unconditional love during the control condition. The
mystical versus baseline contrast produced signicant loci of BOLD activation in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex,
right inferior parietal lobule, and superior parietal lobule, right caudate,
left medial prefrontal cortex, left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, left
inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, and left brainstem. A few
loci of activation were also seen in the extra-striate visual cortex.
Based on the studies indicating a relationship between TEs and the temporal lobe, we posited that the right middle temporal activation noted
during the mystical condition was related to the subjective impression of
contacting a spiritual reality. We also proposed that the caudate activations
reected feelings of joy and unconditional love since the caudate nucleus
has been systematically activated in previous functional brain imaging studies implicating positive emotions such as happiness (Damasio et al., 2000),

Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms

romantic love (Bartels & Zeki, 2000), and maternal love (Bartels & Zeki,
2004). Concerning the brainstem, there is some empirical support for the
view that certain brainstem nuclei map the organisms internal state during
emotion (Damasio, 1999). Given this, it is conceivable that the activation in
the left brainstem was linked to the somatovisceral changes associated with
the feelings of joy and unconditional love. As for the insula, this cerebral
structure is richly interconnected with regions involved in autonomic regulation (Cechetto, 1994). It contains a topographical representation of inputs
from visceral, olfactory, gustatory, visual, auditory, and somatosensory
areas and is thought to integrate representations of external sensory experience and internal somatic state (Augustine, 1996). The insula has been
found to be activated in several studies of emotional processing and appears
to support a representation of somatic and visceral responses accessible to
consciousness (Critchley, Wien, Rotshtein, Ohman, & Dolan, 2004; Damasio, 1999). It is plausible that the left insular activation noted in our study
was related to the representation of the somatovisceral reactions associated
with the feelings of joy and unconditional love.
In addition, we suggested that the left medial prefrontal cortical activation was linked with conscious awareness of those feelings. Indeed, the
results of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that the medial prefrontal cortex is involved in the metacognitive representation of ones
own emotional state (Lane & Nadel, 2000). This prefrontal area receives
sensory information from the body and the external environment via the
orbitofrontal cortex and is heavily interconnected with limbic structures
such as the amygdala, ventral striatum, hypothalamus, midbrain periaqueductal gray region, and brainstem nuclei (Barbas, 1993; Carmichael &
Price, 1995). In other respects, brain imaging ndings (Lane, Fink, Chau,
& Dolan, 1997; Lane, Reiman, et al., 1998) support the view that the activation of the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex reected that aspect of
emotional awareness associated with the interoceptive detection of emotional signals during the mystical condition. This cortical region projects
strongly to the visceral regulation areas in the hypothalamus and midbrain
periaqueductal gray (Ongur, Ferry, & Price, 2003). Regarding the medial
orbitofrontal cortex, there is mounting evidence that this prefrontal cortical region codes for subjective pleasantness (Kringelbach, ODoherty,
Rolls, & Andrews, 2003). The medial orbitofrontal cortex has been found
to be activated with regard to the pleasantness of the taste or smell of
stimuli (de Araujo, Rolls, Kringelbach, McGlone, & Phillips, 2003; Rolls,
Kringelbach, & de Araujo, 2003) or music (Blood & Zatorre, 2001).
It has reciprocal connections with the cingulate and insular cortices

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(Carmichael & Price, 1995; Cavada, Company, Tejedor, Cruz-Rizzolo, &

Reinoso-Suarez, 2000). The right medial orbitofrontal cortical activation
noted in the mystical condition was perhaps related to the fact that the
experiences lived during the mystical state were emotionally pleasant.
Given that the right superior parietal lobule is involved in the spatial
perception of self (Neggers, Van der Lubbe, Ramsey, & Postma, 2006), it
is conceivable that the activation of this parietal region reected a modication of the body schema associated with the impression that something greater than the participants seemed to absorb them. Moreover,
there is evidence that the left inferior parietal lobule is part of a neural
system implicated in the processing of visuospatial representation of
bodies (Felician, Ceccaldi, Didic, Thinus-Blanc, & Poncet, 2003). Therefore, the left inferior parietal lobule activation in the mystical condition
was perhaps related to an alteration of the body schema. In keeping with
this, there is some evidence indicating that the right inferior parietal
lobule is crucial in bodily consciousness and the process of self/other
distinction (Ruby & Decety, 2003). However, the inferior parietal lobule
plays an important role in motor imagery (Decety, 1996). It is thus plausible that the activations in the right and left inferior parietal lobules
were related to the motor imagery experienced during the mystical condition. Last, concerning the loci of activation found in the extra-striate
visual cortex during this condition, it has been previously shown that
this region of the brain is implicated in visual mental imagery (Ganis,
Thompson, & Kosslyn, 2004). It is likely that the BOLD activation in
visual cortical areas was related to the visual mental imagery reported
by the nuns.
We also used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure spectral
power and coherence in the Carmelite nuns during the same type of mystical state (Beauregard & Paquette, 2008). EEG activity was recorded from
19 scalp locations during a resting state, a control condition, and a mystical condition. In the mystical condition compared to control condition,
electrode sites showed greater theta power at F3, C3, P3, Fz, Cz and Pz,
and greater gamma1 power was detected at T4 and P4. Higher delta/beta
ratio, theta/alpha ratio, and theta/beta ratio were found for several electrode sites. Additionally, FP1-C3 pair of electrodes displayed greater
coherence for theta band while F4-P4, F4-T6, F8-T6, and C4-P4 pairs of
electrodes showed greater coherence for alpha band. These results indicate that mystical experiences are mediated by marked changes in EEG
power and coherence. These changes implicate several cortical areas of
the brain in both hemispheres (Beauregard & Paquette, 2008).

Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms

Transcendent Experiences and the MindBrain Problem

Physicalism is the mainstream metaphysical view of modern neuroscience with respect to the mindbody problem, the explanation of the relationship that exists between mental processes and bodily processes.
According to this view, consciousness and mental events (e.g., thoughts,
emotions, desires) can be reduced to their neural correlates, that is, the
brain electrical and chemical processes whose presence necessarily and
regularly correlates with these mental events. Physicalist philosophers
and neuroscientists believe that mental events are equivalent to brain processes. Standing against this metaphysical belief, James (1902) noted that
neural correlates of TEs do not yield a causal explanation of mental events
because they cannot explain how neural processes become mental events.
Indeed, correlation does not entail causation. And the external reality of
God or ultimate reality can neither be conrmed nor disconrmed by
neural correlates. Newberg and colleagues (Newberg, dAquili, & Rause,
2001) submitted that the most important criterion for judging what is real
is the subjective vivid sense of reality. They argued that individuals usually
refer to dreams as less real than waking (baseline) reality when they are
recalled within baseline reality. In contrast, TEs (e.g., cosmic consciousness states, religious visions, NDEs) appear more real to the experiencers
than waking (baseline) reality when they are recalled from baseline reality.
A major problem with this criterion is its subjectivity. This problem is
well illustrated by the fact that individuals suffering from psychosis are
unable to distinguish personal subjective experience from the reality of
the external world. They experience hallucinations as being very real.
From a neuroscientic 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 brillation, there is a total
lack of electrical activity on the cortex of the brain (at EEG), and brainstem activity is abolished (loss of the corneal reex, xed and dilated
pupils, and loss of the gag reex).
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 difculty moving. A CAT scan revealed that she had a giant
basilar artery aneurysm (a grossly swollen blood vessel in the brain stem).

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If it burst, it would kill her. But attempting to drain and repair it might kill
her too. Her doctor offered no chance of survival using conventional
procedures. Reynolds heard about neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler at the
Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. He was a specialist
and pioneer in a rare and dangerous technique called hypothermic cardiac
arrest, or Operation Standstill. He would take her body down to a temperature so low that she was clinically dead, but then bring her back to a normal temperature before irreversible damage set in. At a low temperature,
the swollen vessels that burst at the high temperatures needed to sustain
human life become soft. Then they can be operated upon with less risk.
Furthermore, the cooled brain can survive longer without oxygen, though
it obviously cannot function in that state. So for all practical purposes,
Reynolds would actually be clinically dead during the surgery. But if she
didnt 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 attened into
total silence (indicating no cerebral activityduring a cardiac arrest, the
brains 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 Reynoldss vital signs were
stopped, the surgeon began to cut through her skull with a surgical saw.
She reported later that at that point, she felt herself pop outside her body
and hover above the operating table. From her out-of-body position, she
could see the doctors working on her lifeless body. She described, with
considerable accuracy for a person who knew nothing of surgical practice,
the Midas Rex bone saw used to open skulls. Reynolds also heard and
reported later what was happening during the operation and what the
nurses in the operating room had said. At a certain point, she became conscious of oating 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 mindbrain 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 at EEG) during
a period of clinical death. This case also suggests that TEs can occur when

Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms

the brain is not functioning, that is, these experiences are not necessarily
delusions created by a defective brain. In other words, it would be possible for humans to experience a transcendent reality during an altered
state of consciousness in which perception, cognition, identity, and emotion function independently from the brain. This raises the possibility that
when a TE happens while the brain is fully functional, the neural correlates of this experience indicate that the brain is de facto connecting with
a transcendent level of reality. Solid scientic 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 sufcient levels so as to permit
return to normal brain functioning after the standstill operation. Yet it is
difcult to see how the brain could generate higher mental functions in
the absence of cortical and brainstem activity. Scientic 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 prismwhich is not the source of the lightchanges incoming
white light to form the colored spectrum). Following James, Henri Bergson (1914) and Aldous Huxley (1954) speculated that the brain acts as a
lter 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 signicant alteration of the electrical
and chemical activity of the brain would be necessary for the occurrence
of a TE (Beauregard & OLeary, 2007).

Conclusion and Future Directions

There is increasing consensus that cortico-cortical interactions and thalamocortical interactions play a crucial role in the integration of widely distributed neural activity across brain regions and the generation of
conscious experience (Tononi & Edelman, 1998). Regarding this issue,

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Vollenweider (1994) posited that cortico-striatal pathways exert a modulatory inuence on thalamic gating (or ltering) of sensory information from
the body and environment to the cortex (Vollenweider, 1994). According
to this stance, thalamic gating decits should result in sensory overload
with excessive processing of exteroceptive and interoceptive stimuli. Additionally, Vollenweider and Geyer (2001) hypothesized that serotonergic
psychedelics (e.g., psilocybin) produce an overloading inundation of the
cortex [see Nichols & Chemel, this volume]. This increased ow of information may cause the sensory ooding, cognitive fragmentation, and ego
dissolution noted in altered states of consciousness induced by these
drugs. The fact that serotonergic hallucinogens produce a marked activation of the prefrontal cortex (hyperfrontality) as well as other overlapping
changes in cortical, striatal, and thalamic regions (Vollenweider, Leenders,
et al., 1997) is consistent with this viewpoint. Taking a stand against this
hypothesis, Dietrich (2003) postulated that alterations of consciousness
implicate a temporary down-regulation of higher-level brain functions of
the prefrontal cortex (PFC; hypofrontality) and other cortical regions. In
line with such a view, Newberg et al. (2001) proposed that functional
deafferentation (cutting off) of input into the posterior superior parietal
lobule, a cerebral structure involved in the creation of a three-dimensional
body image in space, could produce a sense of pure space and obliteration
of the self-other distinction [see Previc, this volume].
The neuroimaging studies reviewed in this chapter provide empirical
support to both these outlooks (hyper- vs. hypoactivation of the prefrontal
cortex and other cerebral structures). Indeed, the results of these studies
indicate that altered states of consciousness and TEs can be correlated
with either activation or inhibition of various cortical and subcortical
brain regions. These results also suggest that several brain areas and networks mediate the main features of these experiences (e.g., perceptual,
cognitive, emotional, spiritual). This conclusion should not come as a surprise given that TEs are complex and multidimensional, that is, they
implicate changes in perception, self-awareness, cognition, and emotion.
It is important to note that TEs can be triggered in many different ways
and can be quite distinct from an experiential perspective (e.g., a state of
cosmic consciousness induced by LSD-25 vs. an encounter with a Being
of Light during sensory deprivation). It is highly probable that phenomenologically different TEs are mediated by distinct neuroelectrical, neurochemical, and neurometabolical substrates. In other words, many different
neurophysiological mechanisms may support TEs. Future neuroimaging
studies are awaited to conrm this view. Correlating subjective (rst-person,
phenomenological) data and objective (third-person, neurophysiological)

Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms

data represents a crucial issue in the neuroscience of transcendence

(Newberg & Lee, 2005). The use of rst-person methodswhich are disciplined practices individuals can use to increase their sensitivity to their own
mental experiences at various time-scales and produce more rened
descriptive reportsintensify self-awareness (Lutz & Thompson, 2003).
Given this, the collection of rst-person data from phenomenologically
trained individuals of different religious/spiritual traditions should be used
to interpret the neurophysiological processes pertaining to some types
of TEs.
Although the segregation principle states that some functional processes specically engage well localized and specialized brain regions, it
is now widely believed that higher mental functions emerge through integration of information ows across distributed cerebral structures
(Frackowiak et al., 2004; Varela, Lachaux, Rodriguez, & Martinerie,
2001). In this perspective, it is not only a collection of brain areas that is
hypothesized to process functional tasks, but rather large-scale networks
or sets of brain regions dynamically interacting with one another (e.g., the
temporal lobe with the prefrontal cortex). Accordingly, future neuroimaging studies of TEs and altered states of consciousness should entail the
measurement of functional connectivity within dynamic, large-scale brain
networks. Such measurement may signicantly improve our knowledge
and understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying these phenomena.

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CHAPTER 5

DMT and Human Consciousness

Zevic Mishor, Dennis J. McKenna,
and J. C. Callaway
Introduction
N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a potent psychedelic agent found in
many plants and animals and is remarkably similar in its molecular structure to the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT).
DMT has been utilized extensively in South America as a psychoactive
sacrament in the form of smoking mixtures, snuffs, pastes, clysters, and
orally active brews for at least hundreds of years and possibly longer. This
drug is a key component of an advanced indigenous technology that has
only recently been noticed by modern science. Its consumption has not
been merely a curiosity but rather a vital part of many medico-religious
practices over a long period of time and across a wide geographic range.
More recently, following scientic experimentation with the pure chemical
in the late 1950s, DMT entered the awareness of modern experimental
medicine and the popular culture.
As a tryptamine derivative, DMT is thought to derive its psychoactivity
primarily via the serotonergic neurotransmitter system. Unlike other serotonergic agents such as psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD, however, DMT
occurs widely throughout the natural world. It is found in the barks,
leaves, and owers 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 oneness with the universe are some of the common phenomenological features
associated with the DMT state. There have also been reports of contacts with
external entities during the experience facilitated by this drug, although the
ontological interpretation of such experiences is subject to speculation and
debate.

HistoryDMT 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 modication of consciousness. One
of the earliest indications for the consumption of DMT as a consciousnessmodifying drug comes from the Inca Cueva site located in northwestern
Argentina, radiocarbon dated to approximately 2080 BCE. The site contained two smoking pipes made from puma bone, together with Anadenanthera colubrina (Vell.) Brenan seed remnants, a tree known to express
relatively high quantities of both DMT and other tryptamine derivatives.
This nd was congruent with an extensive modern ethnographic record
describing the wide use of A. colubrina seeds in South America for the
preparation of psychoactive smoking mixtures and snuffs, known by names
including vilca and cebil (Aschero & Yacobaccio, 1994; Torres et al., 1991).
The next earliest site that contains evidence for the smoking of Anadenanthera seeds is a rock shelter near Inca Cueva known as Huachichocana,
radiocarbon dated to approximately 1450 BCE. This site included four
stone smoking pipes and crushed seeds (Distel & Alicia, 1980). The oldest
evidence in all of South America for the snufng of plant preparations consists of several whale-bone snuff trays and bird-bone tubes, unearthed at
Huaca Prieta on the central Peruvian coast, dated to approximately
1200 BCE (Torres, 1996).
In historic times, during his second voyage to the New World embarking in October of 1493, Christopher Columbus requested his friar, Ramon
Pane, to prepare a report on the natives of Hispaniola (today the island
comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Panes 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. Signicant events and milestones in
the human discovery and utilization of DMT and the Ayahuasca beverage
Date

Entry

ca. 20,000
15,000 BCE

Arrival of the rst humans in the Americas. This date is

highly uncertain; the chronology of human migration into
the continent has been subject to increasing controversy in
recent years.

ca. 5500 BCE

Oldest ceramics in South America found at the Taperinha

shell midden/Pedra Pintada cave complex near Monte
Alegre, Brazil.

ca. 3200 BCE

Ground peyote material found in the Shumla Caves near

the Rio Grande, Texas.

ca. 2080 BCE

Two puma-bone smoking pipes, together with Anadenanthera

colubrina seed remnants, found at Inca Cueva in northwestern
Argentina.

ca. 1450 BCE

Four stone smoking pipes and crushed Anadenanthera

seeds found at Huachichocana, a rock shelter near Inca
Cueva in Argentina.

ca. 1200 BCE

Whale-bone snuff trays and bird-bone tube unearthed at

Huaca Prieta on the central Peruvian coast, constituting the
earliest evidence for snufng in all of South America (the
active ingredients being snuffed here, however, remain
unclear).

ca. 100800 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. 5001000

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 Ramon Pane, commissioned by Christopher

Columbus, observes the natives of Hispaniola using a
psychoactive snuff prepared from Anadenanthera peregrina.

1737

Jesuit account of an intoxicating potion ingested for

divinatory and other purposes and called ayahuasca, which
deprives one of his senses and, at times, of his life

1851

English botanist Richard Spruce encounters the Ayahuasca

brew amongst the Tukano peoples of the Rio Uapes in
Brazil and proceeds to collect owering 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 rst

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, modies tryptamine and synthesizes,
amongst other compounds, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

1945

Barquinha (Little Boat in Portuguese), another Ayahuasca

syncretic sect, founded in Brazil.

1946

Goncalves de Lima publishes ndings 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 Goncalves 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 Szara self-administers probably the rst 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.

19561970

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 scientic journals.

1961

Uniao 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 nding 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 rst 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.

19701971

Controlled Substances Act passed in the United States,

followed closely by the United Nations Convention on
Psychotropic Substances. DMT is classied 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 identied in the human brain.

1980s

Brothers Terrance and Dennis McKenna, through public

talks and written publications, play an instrumental role in
raising awareness in modern Western cultures of DMT,
Ayahuasca, and other psychoactive tryptamines.

1980

The basic principle that DMT contained in Ayahuasca is

rendered orally active by inhibiting its metabolism is
(Continued)

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90

Altering Consciousness

Table 5.1 (Continued)

Date

Entry
conrmed for the rst time by Jeremy Bigwood, through
his ingesting of a capsule containing DMT mixed with the
harmala alkaloid harmaline.

1980present

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 rst new academic

research in the United States in more than two decades on
the effects of psychedelic drugs on humans. Over a period
of 5 years, he administers more than 400 doses of DMT to
60 volunteers.

1993

The Hoasca Project, measuring the physiological and

subjective psychoactive effects of Ayahuasca on 15
volunteers, conducted in Manaus, Brazil.

snuff used by the natives of the Orinoco River basin in Colombia and
Venezuela. Considering these and other pieces of evidence, it may be concluded that DMT-containing plants have been insufated by humans in
the New World for a very long time.
The earliest European references to the New World use of orally
ingested beverages that most probably contained DMT are found in the
writings of Jesuits traveling in the Amazon basin and its surrounding
regions. These Jesuit accounts are typically disparaging and even fearful;
one from 1737, for example, describes an intoxicating potion ingested
for divinatory and other purposes and called ayahuasca, which deprives
one of his senses and, at times, of his life (Rudgley, 1998, p. 26). The
term Ayahuasca refers to what is known today to be a powerful DMTcontaining beverage and also identies a key plant in this decoction,
the Malpighiaceaous woody liana Banisteriopsis caapi (Spruce ex Griseb.)
Morton (Figure 5.1).

DMT and Human Consciousness

Figure 5.1 The Malpighiaceaous woody liana Banisteriopsis caapi, an essential

ingredient of the Ayahuasca brew (PHOTO LOCATION: near Kailua-Kona,
Hawaii. CREDIT: J.C. Callaway).

Scientic Investigations
The story of the modern scientic discovery of DMT begins with various
19th-century explorers and botanists conducting eldwork 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 caapi. Spruce
proceeded to collect owering 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 rst
published phenomenological reports of the Ayahuasca experience belong
to the Ecuadorian geographer Manuel Villavicencio, who in 1858 gave an
account of visions of great cities, lofty towers, and beasts of prey that
he experienced after consuming the drink (Villavicencio, 1858).
In 1931, the Canadian chemist Richard Manske was investigating
chemicals occurring in the poisonous North American strawberry shrub.

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Altering Consciousness

He modied tryptamine in order to synthesize several derivatives as standards to analyze the phytochemistry of this shrub. One of these derivatives
was new to modern science, N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT for short.
As far as is known, DMT was synthesized, analyzed, and subsequently
placed into storage as a reference compound; nobody yet suspected its
psychedelic properties (Strassman, 2001). Arguably the rst solid clue to
the psychoactivity of DMT came in 1946, when the Brazilian chemist Goncalves de Lima (1946) published ndings 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 identied in M. hostilis, and Goncalves 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 classied
under the genus Piptadenia instead of the modern classication of Anadenanthera); like Goncalves, 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 Szara, 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 Szaras 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, Szara synthesized this chemical in his own laboratory. In April of
1956, he gave himself what was probably the rst ever intramuscular injection of the drug, self-administering 75 mg of DMT. Within several minutes
he began to experience bodily feelings and visual sensations similar to those
that others had described for LSD and mescaline [see Nichols & Chemel,
this volume]. He wrote, I got very, very excited. It was obvious this was
the secret (Szara, 1989, p. 239). This secret was the realization that orally
administered DMT (at least up to the 150 mg total dose Szara had earlier
ingested separately) had no psychoactive effects whatsoever. Instead, the
drug had to be injected to manifest its psychedelic actions (S. Szara, personal communication, February 2010).
Since that experiment, other scientists went on to study the chemical
properties, pharmacological actions, and psychedelic effects of DMT in
laboratories in many parts of the world. A literature search reveals that

DMT and Human Consciousness

between 1956 and 1970, hundreds of academic papers covering various

aspects of DMT and its analogues were published in the leading scientic
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 classied DMT as a Schedule 1
drug (the most restrictive category), with no medical use and a high potential
for abuse. An era of unrestricted scientic access to this compound was thus
effectively ended. It is currently publicly unknown whether DMT was investigated, along with many other psychedelic drugs, in secret government
research projects such as MKULTRA run by the CIA.

Endogenous DMT
Interwoven with the history of the modern discovery of DMT, and
unique to it and its analogues, is the story of its detection in the human
body. In the early 1960s, scientists demonstrated the presence of bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT in human urine. In a short communication to the
journal Nature, Franzen and Gross (1965) reported the presence of DMT
and bufotenine, amongst other tryptamines, in human urine and blood.
By 1972, the enzymes required to convert tryptamine to DMT had been
positively identied in the human brain (Saavedra & Axelrod, 1972).
These studies revealed that a powerful psychedelic, which had been used
by humans for millennia for the modication 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 inuence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a
palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that ood 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 ones own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more
wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. One has the impression
of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what
we naively call death. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as
the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since
the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to

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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 psychedelic experience include the overall atmosphere of the experience; affect
(emotions); bodily feeling; sensory perception (including auditory, tactile,
and visual modalities); ideation (philosophical thoughts or insights about
oneself and the universe); the spiritual facet (including religious and noetic
sentiments); and consciousness (relating to personal identity, the relationship between oneself and the world, and the experience of time; Shanon,
2002). The following descriptions of the possible phenomenologies of a
DMT trip and an Ayahuasca experience are based on personal encounters,
trip reports written by users, and the published academic literature,
including Shanon (2002) and Strassman (2001).

The DMT Trip

Upon injection or inhalation, a sudden rush may be experienced, a feeling that one is being propelled somewhere with a mighty force. A dance of
light plays in front of the eyes, and a mighty roar may be heard. A pressure
is felt all over the body and one is transported into a novel mental realm.
Swirling discs of pure light or incredibly intricate geometric patterns may
appear. Feelings of sheer amazement, confusion, euphoria, fear, and joy
may be felt, one after the other, or all at the same time. The perception of
time is often lost. One may believe one is about to die or is already dead.
The feeling of being surrounded by an intelligent awareness or awarenesses, as one breaks through into a different realm, can be very strong.
Often there is the experience of entities, other beings, machineselves,
gnomes, aliens, or whatever label one chooses for them. There are visions
and perceptions of incredibly beautiful objects, of machines and technologies beyond ones wildest imagination, fashioned not only of the stuff of
the physical world but also of more subtle energies, even of the matrix of
language and thoughts themselves.
There may be insights into the nature of the world or into death, experienced as a gestalt or through visions involving anonymous people, loved
ones, or archetypal beings. One may feel a mystical union with the cosmos, a sense that all is as it should be, because all is one. And throughout
the experience are the lights, the colors and the geometric shapes, the
sounds, hums, squeaks and buzzes, and the feeling of weirdness and
amazement, so great, that the danger is the possibility of death by astonishment (T. McKenna, 1990).

DMT and Human Consciousness

The Ayahuasca Experience

The brew is brown and murky, strong tasting, bitter, and sometimes
fermented. It has a heady essence reminiscent of the forest and the soil, of rotting trees and other plant matter. After perhaps half an hour, vague stirrings
and tightness in the stomach build up. Sitting in the dark, tantalizing visual
effects begin to appear, just on the edges of ones 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 ones insides, ridding the body of the brown muck which
has gone into it over a lifetime, along with whatever else the brew can pull
out. Vomiting bile is also possible. The trauma of purging is often replaced
by a feeling of well-being, of lightness and cleanliness, assisted perhaps by
the singing or drumming of the person presiding over the session.
During the Ayahuasca experience, visions most commonly appear when
the eyes are closed, brilliant, impossibly complex, multicolored designs in
three dimensions and sometimes more, forming pulsating and shifting
worlds of pure light. Beings who may interact with the psychonaut in different ways may be encountered. Primordial events may be witnessed, or
rather, may see birth and expression within oneself; the Big Bang, the
Biblical Creation of the world, or the coming apart of a soul in a twisting
array of multicolored lights. Ancient civilizations, exquisite works of art,
castles and palaces, as well as natural landscapes and animals, both mythical
and real, may form the content of ones visions. Opening the eyes generally
interrupts these visions and reafrms ones physical surroundings, although
in some cases visions may be experienced when the eyes are open. Sometimes there is a desire to communicate with other people, other times a torrent of silent bliss; often there is a feeling of pure delight, as one awaits the
next enchantment. The ideational, spiritual, and consciousness-related
experiences described for a DMT trip are common to the Ayahuasca inebriation. One may realize that there is no qualitative difference between a
thought and the physical world, that both are simply part of a continuum.
Insights about, or oneness with, the world and the cosmos are common.

The Molecular Structure of DMT and Its Widespread Occurrence in Nature

Chemical Structure
Pure N,N-dimethyltryptamine is a white crystalline solid at room temperature (Figure 5.2). As indicated by its name, its molecular structure

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Altering Consciousness

Figure 5.2
Erowid.org)

DMT crystals under magnication. (Photo by Stevek1, # 2009

consists of two methyl groups (CH3) attached to the aliphatic nitrogen (N)
of a tryptamine backbone. Tryptamine itself is built around an indole ring,
a structure consisting of a six-carbon benzene ring fused to a ve-carbon,
nitrogen-containing pyrrole ring (Table 5.2). DMT varies only slightly in
its structure from the neurotransmitter serotonin, which lacks the two
extra methyl groups and has an additional hydroxyl group at position 5
on the indole ring. DMT is also very similar in its molecular structure
to three other psychedelic tryptamines; bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT, and
psilocin (4-hydroxy-DMT). Bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT contain an additional hydroxy and methoxy group, respectively, at position 5 on the
indole ring. By contrast, psilocin, an orally active psychedelic agent produced by many species of Psilocybe, or magic mushrooms, and also in
closely related genera, contains a hydroxy group on position 4 of the
indole ring (Table 5.2).

Table 5.2 Important Psychoactive Tryptamines. Chemical structures and typical threshold dosages for DMT, bufotenine, 5-MeODMT and psilocin. These psychoactive dimethyl-tryptamines closely resemble the neurotransmitter serotonin in their molecular
structures and bind primarily to serotonergic (5-HT) receptors to exert their effects. All except psilocin occur naturally in the bodies
of mammals, including humans; psilocin (along with psilocybin, its more stable precursor) is found mainly in the fungal kingdom and
is the only dimethyl-tryptamine conclusively shown to be orally active.
Average Threshold Dosage for Visionary Effects (unless otherwise
specied, all doses are in mg and refer to the freebase compound)
Name

Chemical Structure

Oral Administration

Vaporization Insufation Intravenous

(Smoking)
(Snufng)
Injection

Serotonin
(5-hydroxytryptamine)

DMT
(N,Ndimethyltryptamine)

0.5/kg body-weight in
combination with MAOI

1020

510

0.2 salt/kg
body-weight

(Continued)

Table 5.2 (Continued)

Average Threshold Dosage for Visionary Effects (unless otherwise
specied, all doses are in mg and refer to the freebase compound)
Name

Chemical Structure

Oral Administration

Vaporization Insufation Intravenous

(Smoking)
(Snufng)
Injection

48

40

4?

5-MeO-DMT
(5-methoxy-DMT)

0.1/kg body-weight in
combination with MAOI

25

510

98

Bufotenine
(5-hydroxy-DMT)

Table 5.2 (Continued)

Average Threshold Dosage for Visionary Effects (unless otherwise
specied, all doses are in mg and refer to the freebase compound)
Name
Psilocin
(4-hydroxy-DMT)

Chemical Structure

Oral Administration
2030 of the
phosphorylated prodrug form, psilocybin

Vaporization Insufation Intravenous

(Smoking)
(Snufng)
Injection

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Occurrence in Nature
The widespread occurrence of DMT in nature, in contrast to many
other plant-based psychedelics, is remarkable. It is present on all continents except (as far as is known) Antarctica and is found in both the plant
and animal kingdoms. To date its presence has not been reported in fungi
or in prokaryotic organisms. An extensive discussion of plant families,
genera, and species that contain DMT may be found in Shulgin and Shulgin
(1997). Examples include reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea L.), the
bamboo-like giant cane (Arundo donax Georgi), numerous species of the
genus Acacia, several species of the genus Virola, Psychotria viridis Ruz &
Pavon (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 identied as endogenous neurochemicals
produced by rabbits, mice, rats, and humans. Indeed, DMT and the biochemical machinery required for its synthesis have been detected in all mammals investigated for its presence to date.
The DMT analogues bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT, and psilocin are found,
along with DMT itself, in many of the aforementioned species and are also
produced in a number of other interesting plants and animals. The magic
mushrooms found in the genus Psilocybe, for example, almost all contain
both psilocin and psilocybin (once in the body, the latter is rapidly metabolized to yield the former). Bufotenine, and in some cases 5-MeO-DMT, is
found in many species of toads (the word bufotenine itself is derived from
the genus name Bufo, or the true toads).

Pharmacology and Neurophysiology: The Interaction between DMT and Humans

Means of Administration
Exogenous DMT may be effectively administered by inhalation of
the freebase as a vapor (through sublimation or smoking), insufation
of a salt form (snufng or snorting), anal administration as a solution
or suppository, or injection of an aqueous solution. DMT may also be consumed orally, although this method of administration results in a considerably different psychoactive effect. When smoked, the vaporized compound
is quickly absorbed by the alveoli of the lungs, diffusing rapidly through the
alveolar capillaries to enter the bloodstream. From the pulmonary circulation, DMT then passes through the bloodbrain barrier into the central

DMT and Human Consciousness

Figure 5.3 Psychotria viridis leaves, a typical source of DMT for the Ayahuasca
brew. The vine growing amongst the psychotria leaves is the Banisteriopsis caapi
liana (PHOTO LOCATION: Nucleo Samauma near Sao Paulo, Brazil. CREDIT:
J.C. Callaway)

nervous system (CNS) to interact directly with serotonin receptors. This

novel receptor interaction, relative to ordinary serotonin, drives the psychedelic effects that are so well recognized for this molecule. When snuffed as
one of its many possible salts, DMT is absorbed through the nasal mucosa
and similarly reaches the CNS via local circulation. Water-soluble salts of
DMT may also be injected, either into a muscle (intramuscularly; IM), just
under the skin (subcutaneously; SC), directly into a vein (intravenously;
IV), or directly into the peritoneal cavity of rodents (intraperitoneally; IP)
[see Presti, this volume].

Oral Consumption of DMT: The Harmala Alkaloids and Monoamine Oxidase Inhibition
Orally ingested DMT presents a special case, as DMT on its own is not
orally active. This is because the drug is rapidly metabolized by the enzyme
monoamine oxidase (MAO), which breaks down endogenous monoamines
(the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline). MAO in general exists as two isozymes: MAO-A and MAO-B. It is

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MAO-A that exclusively metabolizes and thereby deactivates both serotonin

and DMT; the aliphatic nitrogen atom (the monoamine) of both serotonin
and DMT is vulnerable to oxidation by MAO-A, forming inactive, watersoluble metabolites that are eventually excreted in the urine. Interestingly,
the hydroxyl group on position 4 of psilocins indole ring has the ability to
form an intramolecular hydrogen bond with its own aliphatic amine; this
electrostatic bond protects psilocin from oxidation by MAO and thus renders it orally active.
The DMT contained in Ayahuasca is made orally active by a group of
compounds, provided by the B. caapi vine, called harmala alkaloids. These
are a specic subset of a much larger chemical family known as -carbolines, and their narrow range of bioactivity should not be confused with
the many other biochemical actions represented by this larger group.
The main harmala alkaloids in B. caapi, which are concentrated in the
woody cortex of the vine, are harmine and tetrahydroharmine. In Ayahuasca, harmine serves as a potent inhibitor of MAO (a MAOI); more
accurately, it is a specic, competitive, and reversible inhibitor of MAOA. As a competitive inhibitor, it binds to the MAO-A isozyme at the same
site as endogenous monoamine substrates, thereby blocking the metabolism of these substrates by MAO-A for several hours. Being reversible
means the enzyme is returned to its original state once harmine is eventually removed by other metabolic processes. This mechanism is quite different from that which underlies the class of antidepressants known as
suicide (irreversible) inhibitors of MAO, where the enzyme is permanently bound to the inhibitor and its effects therefore persist until the drug
is discontinued and new MAO produced.
The idea that DMT could become orally active by inhibiting its metabolism was rst suggested by ethnobotanist Bo Holmstedt in 1967. This
hypothesis was subsequently veried in 1980 by Jeremy Bigwood through
his ingesting sufcient amounts of another harmala alkaloid, harmaline,
combined with DMT in a capsule. The harmala alkaloids, because they
are compounds that raise serotonin levels, may be considered to be
psychoactive in their own right, but only through the increased activity
of serotonin. Their psychoactivity is, at best, a secondary effect and not
psychedelic. In the case of Ayahuasca, harmine is essential for allowing
the oral activity of DMT, while in conjunction with other psychedelic
tryptamines such as psilocin and psilocybin, both harmine and harmaline
can modify the resulting psychoactive effects by increasing serotonergic
activity. In this case, as with DMT, these tryptamines must compete with
increased levels of serotonin for active receptor sites in the brain.

DMT and Human Consciousness

Hypertensive Crisis
A common misconception regarding the use of harmala alkaloids is that
foods containing tyramine (such as red wine, broad beans, hard cheeses,
and other fermented products) are contraindicated, as their consumption
together with MAOIs may lead to a hypertensive crisis. An excess of tyramine in the body may indeed lead to this condition; however, tyramine is
degraded primarily by MAO-B, while the harmala alkaloids inhibit primarily the A-isoform of this enzyme (MAO-A). Following the consumption
of Ayahuasca, the peak plasma concentration of harmine in blood may typically reach 0.5 mol/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 mol/L (Samoylenko et al.,
2010); this is about 40 times greater than the typical plasma level. Therefore, there is no in vitro or other empirical evidence to support the current
cultural myth that consumption of Ayahuasca in conjunction with
tyramine-rich foods can, in and of itself, lead to a hypertensive crisis.

Dosage and Duration of Effects

For an IV injection of DMT, 0.2 mg drug/kg of bodyweight typically
marks the psychedelic threshold, while 0.4 mg/kg and above may be considered a high dose. A normal dose of smoked DMT may consist of 20 to
40 mg of the pure crystal form, while more than this is likely needed to produce a strong trip. Most studies, including those performed with cats,
monkeys, and human beings, have reported little or no physical tolerance
to DMT. This means that repeated administrations of the drug over short
periods of time do not signicantly diminish its acute psychedelic effects.
Following his original IM injection, Szara (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 rst of two or three inhalations. The total duration of effects
for both smoked and ingested DMT is usually about 30 minutes. In contrast,
following a typical Ayahuasca dose, MAO-A inhibition by harmala alkaloids
may last for 8 to 12 hours, leading to a psychedelic experience normally lasting about 4 to 5 hours. With Ayahuasca, there is also considerable attenuation of the acute effects when compared to DMT administered by other
routes, probably because of the slowness of oral absorption and also the

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increased levels of serotonin after MAOI. This serotonin must subsequently

compete with DMT for similar receptor sites in the brain.

Pharmacological Mechanisms of Action

The neurotransmitter receptors that have consistently been shown to
be associated with psychedelic activity are activated by serotonin. The
binding characteristics of typical psychedelics such as psilocin, 5-MeODMT, and LSD to what is today known as the 5-HT2A receptor subtype
were shown in a landmark study to be positively correlated with the psychoactivity of these drugs (Glennon, Titeler, & McKenney, 1984). The
high afnities 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 denition (from a pharmacological perspective) of a psychedelic drug (such as DMT, LSD, or mescaline, as opposed to other visionary psychoactives, such as tropane alkaloids)
has become associated with either full or at least partial agonist action, at low
concentrations, at the 5-HT2A receptor site. It has become increasingly clear,
however, that psychedelics interact with other serotonergic receptor subtypes,
as well as other neurotransmitter systems, such as the dopaminergic. The
action of any one specic drug, therefore, may be thought of as a chord played
upon a musical instrument; the drug activates a group of receptors and secondmessengers (notes), each of which is not usually unique to that drug but that
together produce an experience distinct to it [see Previc, this volume].
Although a controversial early study (Deliganis, Pierce, & Peroutka,
1991) reported that DMT was a 5-HT2A antagonist, further experiments
eventually conrmed its agonistic properties for this receptor site, similar
to other psychedelics (Keiser et al., 2009). DMT has also been shown to
be an agonist at 5-HT2C (Smith, Canton, Barrett, & Sanders-Bush, 1998)
and 5-HT1A (Deliganis et al., 1991) receptors. In the case of the latter,
for DMT and 5-HT1A, such an interaction in humans may possibly just
modulate or actually inhibit psychedelic activity (Strassman, 1996). Overall, such efforts basically show how little is yet known about the receptor
pharmacology of psychedelic agents.
More recently, two putative nonserotonergic mechanisms have been
proposed as having some involvement in the psychoactivity of DMT. First,
DMT has been demonstrated to be a potent agonist at one type of trace
amine (TA) receptor. TAs are a recently discovered class of G proteincoupled receptors. Jacob and Presti (2005) suggested that DMT may

DMT and Human Consciousness

interact with this receptor, especially at endogenous or low exogenous levels, to modulate emotional states. Second, researchers have more recently
proposed DMT to be the rst endogenous agonist for the sigma-1 receptor, which is also a nonserotonergic receptor that is found in various areas
of the brain (Fontanilla et al., 2009).
The majority of pharmacological studies so far on DMT have sought to
determine the mechanisms underlying its psychoactivity through its direct
actions on known neurotransmitter receptors. Some studies, however,
suggest that DMT may also act through more indirect pathways that affect
neuronal function. A few reports have suggested that DMT and/or its analogues (including bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT) act as SSRIs (Nagai, Nonaka,
& Kamimura, 2007). A recent cell-based study, however, has proposed
that DMT is not such a reuptake blocker but rather is itself transported
(in competition with serotonin) into the cell and also packaged for later
release. This mechanism has been proposed to explain how very low levels
of endogenous DMT might still activate the sigma-1 receptor, but is as yet
only speculative (Cozzi et al., 2009).
It is currently unknown specically what neurochemical interactions
are required to elicit the unique consciousness-modifying effects of DMT
or any other psychedelic, how this vivid mental content becomes conscious, or even why our species has the capacity for such an experience
in the rst place. Whatever the intricacies involved in the CNS interactions
between DMT, neurotransmitters, and their receptors, additional knowledge of these variables can only constitute the rst stages in understanding
and explaining how a molecule mediates its psychedelic actions. Further
stages involve an anatomical and systems-level explanation; exactly where
in the brain does DMT bind to these receptors, and which neural pathways and circuits does it thereby modulate? As is the case with other psychedelics, the answers to these questions are still in their formative stages.
The serotonin-rich raphe nuclei of the brainstem, the locus coeruleus of
the pons (also located within the brainstem), and the cerebral cortex have
all been implicated as sites through which serotonergic psychedelics may
mediate their effects (Aghajanian & Marek, 1999). DMT-specic 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
modies consciousness.

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Endogenous DMT: The Psychedelic Within

Biosynthesis
DMT is produced in the body via a biosynthetic pathway that originates with the essential dietary amino acid tryptophan. Tryptophan is
decarboxylated (a COOH group removed) by an enzyme called aromatic
amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) to yield tryptamine. A second enzyme,
indolethylamine N-methyltransferase (INMT), then attaches two methyl
groups, donated by a different substrate in successive rounds, to the aliphatic nitrogen, thereby producing DMT. The exact location where this
synthesis occurs, however, remains unclear. Strassman (2001) has suggested that DMT may be produced in the human pineal gland; however,
this hypothesis remains speculative.

Function
DMT may be classied as a neurotransmitter in its own right, considering that it is a normal constituent of mammalian brains and according to
criteria such as its potential synthesis by neurons, storage in vesicles and
removal by specic metabolic processes. Some of the earliest speculations
regarding the role of DMT in the human body did not concern normal,
healthy functions but rather pathology in the form of psychoses. Osmond
and Smythies (1952) proposed a transmethylation hypothesis, suggesting that endogenous schizotoxins may be responsible for the socalled positive symptoms seen in schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. At the time, psychedelics were commonly referred to as psychotomimetics or psychotogenscompounds that either mimicked or
created psychoses respectively. The subsequent discovery of DMT as an
endogenous psychedelic agent aroused strong speculation about its potential role as a schizotoxin; however, despite early reports that claimed
differences in the presence and metabolism of DMT in schizophrenics
compared to controls, further studies proved contradictory, and in some
cases the differences between patient and control groups were statistically
insignicant (Callaway, 1996).
In the healthy human, DMT may be involved in the production of the
dream visions that are experienced during rapid-eye-movement sleep
(REMS; Callaway, 1988). The periodic nature of REMS suggests that dreaming may be the result of a metabolic cycle involving serotonin, melatonin,
and other endogenous tryptophan products that include pinoline (an
endogenous SSRI and a weak MAOI) and DMT. As the eyes are closed and
the amount of light falling onto the retina is reduced, sleep-inducing

DMT and Human Consciousness

enzymatic activity is increased in the pineal and, accordingly, more melatonin produced. As the brain descends deeper into sleep, pinoline and DMT
production may also be increased. Rising levels of pinoline and DMT, in a
manner reminiscent of the mechanisms facilitated by Ayahuasca, eventually
trigger the REM phase and its associated dream visions. A negative feedback
mechanism involving pinoline, by virtue of its ability to inhibit the reuptake
of serotonin, subsequently increases synaptic serotonin levels in the brain.
This increased serotonin concentration induces the sleep cycle to move in
the opposite direction, toward a lighter sleep or to waking. This model
could be tested by monitoring the blood serum and/or cerebrospinal uid
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 CultureDMT and the Modication of Human Consciousness

Traditional Indigenous Usage
Prior to its isolation and identication with 20th-century technologies
as a pure compound, consciousness-modifying preparations that contained DMT as their active ingredient were used extensively by indigenous
peoples living in South America. Not only was DMT systematically sought
and identied in a wide variety of plants throughout the continent, but
extremely novel and effective delivery systems were developed in order
to experience its unique psychoactive effects. This is an impressive example of human innovation and it must be mentioned again that DMT is not
active orally, so a plant containing the drug could not simply be picked
and eaten to produce a psychoactive experience. Many other plants
throughout the Americas do offer such an effect, literally right off the stalk,
yet it seems clear that indigenous peoples have been very selective and
dedicated, over long periods of time and across a wide geographic range,
in their development of a technology to exploit their botanical resources
specically to obtain DMT.
The products of this technology were consumed by the smoking or
snufng of plant preparations, the administration of aqueous solutions as
enemas, the licking of pastes, the imbibing of the Ayahuasca beverage,
and the consumption of jurema. Despite drugs being used for occasional
diversion and pleasure, their utilization overall was a technology for ritualized ceremony and not merely for personal gratication [see Schaefer,
this volume]. Practitioners of Ayahuasca technology employed it for the
diagnosis and treatment of illness, warfare, hunting magic, divination,

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remote viewing, magical attack or defense, or other matters involving

spirits that are thought to reside in every part of nature (Luna, 1984).

Products Derived from Anadenanthera and Virola Species

DMT-containing snuffs, produced from the seeds of the genus
Anadenanthera, have already been mentioned in a historical context. These
snuffs include vilca and cebil, produced from the species A. colubrina, and
also cohoba and yopo, from the species A. peregrina. The second major
DMT-containing genus that has been utilized to provide active methylated
tryptamines for snufng 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 Vaupes region, the Orinoco River and Ro 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 Ro 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 Vaupes region, these snuffs were reported to have been
used by shamans only, for the diagnosis and treatment of disease, for divination and prophecy, and for other medico-religious purposes (Schultes,
Hofmann, & Ratsch, 1979).

Preparation and Administration of Snuffs

The methods used for preparing Virola snufng mixtures vary depending on the group but usually involve stripping the bark from the tree, heating the bark over a low re to force the resin to the surface, scraping the
resin into a container, and then evaporating it over a low re until the mixture is reduced to a reddish-brown syrup. The syrup is then dried, pulverized (sometimes together with the dried leaves of other plants, such as the
herb Justicia pectoralis Jacq.), and sifted to form a ne powder for snufng.
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 specic plant
species, including Theobroma cacao L. (from which chocolate is produced)

DMT and Human Consciousness

or Elizabetha princeps Schomb. ex Benth (a majestic tree from the Fabaceae

or legume family), while the latter was produced by burning seashells. Ash
and lime provide the snuff with a basic pH, which allows the active alkaloids
to be absorbed more quickly into the nasal cavity.
Snuff products are often administered by one person using a tube to
blow the powder into the nostrils of another. Plotkin (1994, p. 264)
describes a personal experience during his time with a Yanomamo tribe
in the remote northern Amazon forest:
. . . I placed the tubes bowl in my right nostril. The shaman held the other
end between his lips and blew, starting off slowly and nishing with a
mighty blast. The force of the blast threw me backward from my squatting
position. Immediately a warm sensation ooded memy nostril, my sinus,
my head, my limbs were all aame. . . . [following another administration of
the snuff moments later into the other nostril] The force seemed to propel
the drug from the shamans tube directly into my bloodstream and then
into my very soul.

Orally Active Virola Preparations

Amongst several tribes, including the Witoto and the Bora of the Amazonian
region of Colombia and Peru, Virola preparations are consumed orally in the
form of pellets. These are produced by stripping the inner layers of the tree
bark, scraping off the resinous sap and boiling it to a thick consistency,
and combining various admixtures to produce a malleable paste. The paste
is then rolled into a pellet and allowed to dry. The pellet is placed in the
mouth between the cheek and the gum to achieve buccal absorption, thereby
bypassing the liver and GI tract and avoiding MAO degradation.
This gradual progression, as revealed in the archaeological record, from
simple preparations from readily available plant materials for smoking in a
pipe to more advanced psychedelic snuffs and orally active preparations,
represents a technological evolution driven by desire, empirical observations, and systematic experimentation over thousands of years in South
America. This innovative progression in drug delivery technologies demonstrates a keen awareness of three pharmaceutical principles that are still
important in pharmacology today: that a crude plant substance can be
rened for higher potency, that adding ash or mineral lime can liberate
alkaloids for more rapid and efcient absorption, and that the human nasal
cavity can absorb much more of this material than the lungs (Torres &
Repke, 2006).

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Preparation and Origins of Ayahuasca

The term Ayahuasca derives from the Quechua language and may variously be translated to mean vine of death, vine of enlightenment, or,
more accurately, vine of the soul (Schultes & Raffauf, 1992). The brew,
which is known by dozens of names including yage and caapi, is one of
the most complex drug delivery systems known to humankind. As a product prepared by Ayahuasqueros (Ayahuasca masters) in small groups
across much of lowland South America, almost endless variations exist
for its wide range of potential constituents and methods of production.
In its most rudimentary form, Ayahuasca combines the MAOI B. caapi vine
(the single constant ingredient in all versions), with the leaves of a DMTcontaining plant (Callaway, Brito, & Neves, 2005). The most widely used
such plant is P. viridis (also known as chacruna), while D. cabrerana (chaliponga), belonging to same family as B. caapi itself, is used primarily in the
northwest Amazon.
One piece of evidence for the antiquity of Ayahuasca use is gas chromatography/mass spectrometric hair analysis from human mummies
belonging to the Tiwanaku civilization (ca. 5001000 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 conrmed more rigorously. Interestingly, the B. caapi vine is not known to
be a native plant of the region, suggesting the existence of plant trade networks for this durable product extending from as far away as the Amazon
to the Chilean coast.
Pots and ladles depicting elaborately dressed lords drinking potions
from large vessels with deer head-shaped lids have been unearthed from
the Moche civilization in northern Peru (ca. 100800 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 claried.
The preparation of Ayahuasca typically involves pounding the B. caapi
vine to separate the brous plant material and create more surface area for
better extraction of the desired alkaloids, and then boiling the resulting
macerate in water together with DMT-containing leaves and any other

DMT and Human Consciousness

desired admixture. The nal product, usually a brown liquid or dark

paste, may have numerous variations in terms of both its viscosity and
subsequent potency, depending on the method of preparation used. Additional ingredients for the production of Ayahuasca, according to the traditions of each group and very often of a particular individual, may be
drawn from a wide variety of plant families. Ingredients are also added
depending on the purpose intended for a specic brew, for example, divination versus healing. The most common plant family from which additives are taken for Ayahuasca is the Solanaceae. These plants contain
various compounds, including nicotine, scopolamine, and atropine,
which modulate adrenergic and cholinergic neurotransmission and may
modulate, sometimes substantially, the phenomenological experience of
an Ayahuasca session.
Ayahuasca is an amazing ethnopharmacological accomplishment. The
Amazonian rainforest contains an enormous number of plant species and
therefore a far greater number of potential pairings for an active brew;
accordingly, the chances of a DMT-containing plant being combined with
a MAOI, as a result of accident or trial and error, must be exceedingly
small.
In terms of its possible origins, Richard Spruce (1873) is reported to
have observed natives chewing B. caapi stems, perhaps to obtain a mild
serotonergic buzz from the harmala alkaloids contained therein, or, as is
also likely, for basic hygienic purposes. These purposes may have
included antibacterial dental care and/or intestinal worm removal by the
absorbed harmala alkaloids (Hassan, 1967). If a DMT-containing leaf
was simultaneously chewed or even consumed in a simple tea of just
leaves around the same time, a coincidental modulation of the psychoactive effects may have been noticed and the matter further investigated. In
terms of the explanations for the origins of Ayahuasca according to the traditions of the indigenous peoples themselves, the mystery of the brew usually constitutes a fundamental part of group mythology. The discovery of
this tea is frequently attributed to supernatural events involving the spirit world and is often intrinsically linked to a central creation myth for the
human species as a whole (Shanon, 2002).

Applications and Uses of Ayahuasca Technology

The use of Ayahuasca is steeped in mysteries and traditions that provide complete cosmological and practical frameworks for its practitioners.
A key principle for most practitioners is the idea that the beverage reveals a
true underlying nature of reality. In the traditional setting, the role of the

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Ayahuasca shaman is to enter the spirit realm and bring useful knowledge
back to the ordinary world, where it is subsequently applied. Knowledge
is typically expressed through song (which constitutes an integral part of
most Ayahuasca ceremonies), narrative, artistic expression with geometric
designs, fragrances, and other means.
Ayahuasca is considered by vegetalistas (those who use these plants for
such purposes) to be especially important for the diagnosis and treatment
of illness. On a physical level, the beverage typically induces strong vomiting, tremors, and occasionally diarrhea, and accordingly has been called
by the Spanish name la purga: the purge. This effect is thought to clear
the body of toxins and other undesirable substances and, far from being
considered an unfortunate side effect, is often an important part of the
healing process. The role of Ayahuasca in healing, however, is considered
to go far deeper than its purely physical actions. Use of the brew is
intrinsically linked to an indigenous worldview that considers illness to
be the result of processes occurring within an ordinarily unseen spirit
world. In this sense, illness may result from someone ring a magical dart
at the victim or through the loss of ones soul for various reasons. In such
cases, the effects of Ayahuasca reveal these underlying realities. The psychedelic state induced by the brew supposedly allows the practitioner to
manipulate causal factors and inuence outcomes in this spirit realm,
thereby effecting change in the ordinary physical world of the patient
and/or the community (McKenna, Luna, & Towers, 1995).

Into the Modern World

A relatively recent development in South America, in what may be seen
as a transference of technology, has been the emergence of syncretic sects
around these ancient indigenous plant practices that utilize the Ayahuasca
beverage as a sacrament. This began in the early 1930s with the Santo
Daime (Saint Give unto Me in Portuguese) and continued with the Barquinha (Little Boat) in 1945 and the Uniao do Vegetal (UDV, the Union
of Vegetal, where Vegetal refers to Ayahuasca) in 1961. These sects originated in or near Acre in Amazonian Brazil, where rubber tappers encountered indigenous tribes and experimented with Ayahuasca brews. The
tappers then shared this technology with family and friends and eventually, during the 20th century, it spread at a rapid rate to major towns
and cities across and outside of the country. Many elements of indigenous
Ayahuasca ceremonies are maintained as revered rituals yet are also combined with religious practices and traditions from the Old World such as
Catholic, patriarchal elements from Christianity in the case of the Santo

DMT and Human Consciousness

Daime and a Protestant version in the UDV. Umbanda and other African
elements have been incorporated to form the Barquinha practice of this
ancient technology.
Beginning in the 1960s, DMT began to make its way into mainstream
modern awareness. Some sources initially referred to it as the businessmans trip because of its relatively short-lived and thus convenient effects
compared to other psychedelics (enabling one, in theory, to take a DMT
journey during a lunch break at work). In the 1980s, through public talks
and written publications, Terence and Dennis McKenna played an instrumental role in raising awareness of DMT, Ayahuasca, and other psychoactive tryptamines in modern Western cultures.
Both in the past and today, although not as popular as LSD or
psilocybin-containing mushrooms, nor as readily available or as convenient to use, DMT continues to constitute an important technology for the
modication of human consciousness. The most common method of
administration is by smoking the crystalline form of the drug as the freebase through an enclosed glass pipe. Recently, reports have emerged of a
smoking preparation called changa, which consists of DMT mixed together
with a MAOI-containing plant and various other herbs, and is therefore
akin to a smoked form of Ayahuasca. This contemporary observation provides further evidence that such technology continues to evolve now that
it has escaped from South America and been transmitted to other cultures [see St John, Volume 1].
The last couple of decades have witnessed an increased interest in
Ayahuasca from the modern world, particularly in its use as a tool for personal healing and insight. This interest has given rise to the phenomenon
of Ayahuasca tourism and, more generally, drug tourism, the practice
of Westerners visiting South American countries, especially Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, to participate in both urban and rural psychoactive ceremonies that are run by Mestizos (persons of mixed Amerindian and
European ancestry). The modern encounters with DMT in an urban setting, along with the use of Ayahuasca in either a traditional or syncretic
context, have also inspired distinct genres of visual art (such as the works
of Alex Grey) and music [see Levy, Volume 1].
Ayahuasca has recently been utilized in a fusion of traditional and
modern contexts to treat a number of physical, psychological, and psychosomatic illnesses. One such application has been the treatment of alcohol
and other drug addictions. The success in the use of the brew, itself shown
to be nonaddictive, in this context supports the idea that psychedelics, as
visionary tools for self-exploration and healing, are an underexplored area
for both scientists and therapists alike. One example of Ayahuasca usage

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

Treatment of Drug and Alcohol Addiction. The Center operates as a charity and was opened in 1992 near the Peruvian city of Tarapoto in the
Andean foothills. It accepts small groups of voluntary participants, typically with addictions to alcohol and/or cocaine, and in some cases to other
drugs as well. Treatment involves physical detoxication, psychological
counseling, and the use of Ayahuasca, in settings ranging from brief communal sessions to isolation in the forest. Success rates from the Takiwasi
project, as indicated by a follow-up study, have been encouraging. In its
rst 7 years, the Center facilitated 211 courses of treatment, consisting of
175 rst-time and 36 returning patients. Between 60 and 70 percent of
these patients beneted from the program, and almost a third of all
patients were furthermore determined to have had their problems apparently resolved thanks to a true structural change manifested upon several
life levels (Mabit, 2002, p. 31).

Modern Ayahuasca Analogues

An interesting modern development in Ayahuasca technology has been
the concept and application of Ayahuasca analogues, admixtures that
replace B. caapi and P. viridis with alternate sources of MAOI and DMT
respectively. The seeds of Syrian Rue (Peganum harmala L.), for example,
have been employed as a plant-derived MAOI, as have modern pharmaceutical drugs. Various Acacia species have been used as a source of
DMT. Ott (1994) lists more than 60 each of MAOI- and DMT-containing
plants, pointing out that based on these lists alone, there are several thousand possible combinations for a MAOI/DMT preparation. Because of
differences in DMT content, the presence of other methylated tryptamines
and the exact MAOIs (harmala or otherwise) used, it is likely that each
combination yields its own semi-unique psychedelic experience.

Conclusion
Jonathan Ott (1994) was one of the rst modern researchers to appreciate and emphasize the fact that DMT, obtained from a wide variety of plant
species, has been utilized by culturally diverse and apparently unconnected
groups of people, spread over a wide time span and large geographical
areas, for the modication of human consciousness. This utilization constituted a central feature of those indigenous cultures and cosmologies and
apparently dates back thousands of years. In the modern world, in the space
of a few short decades, the drug has taken its place as a powerful and

DMT and Human Consciousness

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 rst place, and
what functions does DMT serve in Homo sapiens today?
A more fundamental issue concerns the chain of causation between the
molecular actions of DMT, about which some information is known, its
effects on the brain at a systems level, about which only a little is currently
understood in the modern world, and the phenomenological experiences
it induces, where (in this leap from molecules to mind) there exists almost
only speculation. The attempt to make this leap, not only for DMT but for
other visionary psychoactives as well, raises deep and perennial questions
regarding the limitations (or perhaps the fallacy) of attempting to use the
brain as an ultimate target for explaining this phenomenological experience, which is simultaneously hypothesized to emerge from the physical
stuff of the brain itself. Of course, the very assertion that it is the brain
explaining this experience, or even that it is a brain reading these words
printed on this page, belongs, ad innitum, 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 rst place to
experience these modied states of consciousness and their associated
content. Questions regarding the ontology of the DMT experience constitute their own realm of enquiry, one intrinsically linked to matters concerning the nature of the world and reality itself. These questions are
relevant to other psychedelics, too, but are especially pertinent to DMT
because of the nature of the phenomenological experiences it induces:
the feeling of being propelled into another dimension, perceptions of
contact with other beings and their novel technologies, and, in some cases,
out-of-body experiences (OBEs), near-death experiences (NDEs), and
even alien abductions (Strassman, 2001). One approach to the question
of the ontological status of the DMT state is that the drug, through its
actions on the brain, is revealing a hidden part of the psyche; regions that
are ever-present in the mind yet not readily accessible during day-to-day
consciousness. In other words, the psychedelic agent may simply modify
the boundary between conscious and unconscious processes. How the
revealed content is then assembled into images and experiences may
depend on the individuals specic set and setting, and, more importantly,
on the Zeitgeist of his or her times. Prehistoric shamans may have

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encountered forest animals and mythical beings in their Ayahuasca

visions, yet today, following contact with European civilization, their
modern counterparts also meet aircraft, submarines, and even futuristic
spacecraft (Luna, 1986).
A different approach, in contrast, argues that DMT enables a cognizance of aspects contained in the external world. These aspects are not
readily accessible through ordinary consciousness but may be perceived
under the inuence 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 awed and will probably
never have a denitive answer. Depending on how it is handled, however, it may lead to useless word games or to valuable new insights and
realizations. As to whether DMT merely draws back the curtain on the labyrinths of our own psyche or opens a portal of some kind to another
dimension or reality, the answer may be both at the same time. Perhaps
both answers are not separate but rather each a different facet of the same
thing. Perhaps, furthermore, human beings will simply never be able to
fully understand that thing.
The modern world has inherited a precious legacy from the ethnobotanical lore of the indigenous peoples of South America, not only in terms
of the Ayahuasca brew but also, indirectly, of the DMT molecule itself.
Whether plant or molecular teacher, this drug can reveal regions not
normally experienced in day-to-day reality, help people discover a fuller
sense of awe and wonder at the world, and facilitate insights into their
own personal lives. These insights may help both the individual and societies as a whole transcend fundamental issues and challenges and ultimately help make the world a more harmonious place in which to live.
Whatever its future role, DMT has been and will continue to constitute a
prized and specialized instrument within the consciousness-modifying
toolbox of humankind.

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CHAPTER 6

LSD and the Serotonin Systems

Effects on Human
Consciousness
David E. Nichols and
Benjamin R. Chemel
Introduction
The current paradigm of neuroscience considers the entire spectrum of
human consciousness to be the result of complex events within the nervous
system. It stands to reason that if research can help us to understand the
neurochemical processes associated with memory and perception, it also
should shed light on the underlying causes and physiological nature of a
wide variety of altered states of consciousness (ASC). Of particular interest
would be understanding the nature of mystical states, one of the most profound ASC, which can be produced by hallucinogens like LSD (LSD-25:
d-lysergic acid diethylamide). As far as we know, mystical states of consciousness depend on processes of neuronal translation that are similar, if
not identical, to those responsible for converting stimuli from our everyday
environment into conscious perception [see Beauregard, this volume; Geels,
and Shear, Volume 1].

Psychedelic/Hallucinogenic Agents
Lets rst dene the materials we intend to discuss. These substances
are generally known by the catchall name hallucinogens, but they also have
been referred to as psychedelic, psychotomimetic, and more recently entheogenic, generally taken to mean mind manifesting, mimicking psychosis,
and generating the god within, respectively. We shall use these terms

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interchangeably. The denition 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 inuenced 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; intensication of mood; visual or auditory hallucinations, including vivid
eidetic imagery and synesthesia; distorted sense of time and space;
enhanced profundity and meaningfulness; and a ubiquitous sense of novelty. At low doses, effects on visual perception are often quite striking.
At higher doses (but sometimes even at low doses), perception of ordinary reality may suddenly cease, and an alternate reality or visionary
state can be perceived as completely real. Following the loss of an objective physical framework within which to compare this experience, such
visionary states seem completely real. Without external environmental
cues to serve as reference points, they are perceived as outside the framework of time and space. Often referred to as a peak experience, it is this
state, rather than simple alterations of sensory perceptions, that leads to
the experience of transcendental or mystical states. These peak experiences do not routinely occur following hallucinogen ingestion, but they are
the type of drug effect that most closely mimics spontaneous visionary
states and are of greatest relevance to our discussion here.
The late Daniel X. Freedman (1968), one of the foremost pioneers of
clinical LSD research, gained the impression from his many studies that:
one basic dimension of behavior latently operative at any level of function
and compellingly revealed in LSD states is portentousnessthe 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 Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

justify, to experience boundlessness and boundaryless events, from the

banal to the profound. (p. 331)

And later in his essay we read, The sense of truth is experienced as

compellingly vivid but not the inclination to test the truth of the senses
(p. 331). Here Freedman is saying that LSD produces profound experiences accompanied by a belief in their truth.
The idea that hallucinogens are capable of inducing religious experiences will be met with stiff resistance by certain readers. For some, the
notion of a drug-induced spiritual encounter is by denition invalid,
inauthentic, or supercial, and for them only through spontaneous rapture can one truly experience the nature of the Divine. The notable religious scholar Huston Smith (Smith, 1964, p. 524) refuted skeptics by
stating:
refusal to admit that drugs can induce experiences descriptively indistinguishable from those which are spontaneously religious is the current
counterpart of the seventeenth century theologians refusal to look
through Galileos telescope or, when they did, their persistence in dismissing what they saw as machinations of the devil. When the fact that
drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes incontrovertible, discussion will move to the more difcult question of how this new fact is to
be interpreted.

LSD was discovered in 1943, but throughout history humans have

ingested psychoactive materials, principally plants and plant extracts, to
provide altered states of consciousness (ASC). The contemporary shamanic uses of approximately 150 psychoactive plants have been veried
by eld research conducted early in the last century (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992). It seems quite probable that at the dawn of human existence, our early ancestors discovered the mind-altering potential of
certain plants during the exploration of their environment for food. The
psychological effects produced by the ingestion of these substances could
have profoundly impacted the worldview of ancient humans. Although a
matter for speculation, spiritual thought may have rst arisen as a direct
result of the prehistoric use of mind-altering plants.
Evidence for the ritualistic ingestion of hallucinogenic plants comes
from the many explorers and anthropologists who have reported the intact
use of psychoactive plants into present times. These indigenous uses seem
to be vestiges of ancient traditions that existed largely in secrecy. Practitioners often suffered centuries of religious and political repression by

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

inspired by the devil (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992). The most detailed contributions to this eld 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 worlds foremost expert
on the anthropological use of psychoactive plants in the New World.
Schultess 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 rst to isolate and identify the active components
in many of the hallucinogenic plants used by shamans. After his accidental
discovery of the potent hallucinogen LSD, Hofmann became very interested in natural products that shared the visionary potential of LSD. He
subsequently demonstrated that psilocybin and certain ergot alkaloids
similar in structure and activity to LSD were the principal active components in Teonanacatl and Ololiuqui, respectively. These were plant materials
used by South American natives to produce an ASC where they could
commune with their gods.

Scientic Study of Psychedelic Agents

The discovery of the psychoactive properties of LSD in 1943 ushered in
a new area of study of the mind, what might be called the golden age of
psychedelic research. During the 1950s and early 1960s, hallucinogens,
primarily LSD, were administered to thousands of volunteers in hundreds
of clinical research studies, notably for psychotherapy, treatment of alcoholism, and to relieve suffering in terminally ill patients (Grinspoon & Bakalar,
1979).
Although the majority of this research was technically appropriate for
the times, a subset of academic researchers abandoned accepted research
approaches, adopted nontraditional methodologies, and became outspoken advocates for their widespread use. The widespread use of hallucinogens quickly became a highly charged political issue, accompanied by
popularly held negative attitudes that were often promoted by the media.
Concern over the safety and alleged risks to society posed by hallucinogens eventually resulted in federal legislation in 1970 that outlawed the
possession of most hallucinogens. Today, most hallucinogens are classied as Schedule I Controlled Substances, which by legal denition have
a high potential for abuse, a lack of demonstrated safety, and no accepted
medical uses. Being classied as illegal drugs had profound effects on
how society, science, and medicine approached these substances.

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

Nonetheless, support for the idea that hallucinogens are capable of

producing transcendent visionary or spiritual states has been provided as
a byproduct of several academic studies. One such study treated alcoholics with large doses of LSD that produced transcendent experiences
in many subjects and apparently led to increased sobriety (Aaronson &
Osmond, 1970). It has been suggested that the more profound the psychedelic experience, the greater and more lasting the improvement (Fox,
1967). Additional and more generalized studies designed to evaluate the
range of effects produced by psychedelics (primarily LSD and mescaline)
suggest that anywhere from 24 to 95 percent of the personal accounts
included varying degrees of religious components (Batson & Ventis,
1982).
One of the well-documented examples that psychedelics provoke
mystical experiences took place in the spring of 1962. Walter Pahnke, a
Ph.D. student, conducted a groundbreaking scientic study to examine
the similarities between psychedelic and spontaneous religious experiences. In the experiment, 20 graduate students of theology, who were nave
to psychedelic drug use, volunteered to participate in a double-blind,
placebo-controlled experiment. Pahnke hypothesized that the hallucinogen psilocybin (from Teonanacatl), when administered in a religious setting
to those who were religiously inclined, could reliably induce experiences
that were indistinguishable from spontaneous mystical experiences
(Pahnke, 1963). In the basement chapel of a Boston University Church,
pills containing either an active placebo (nicotinic acid) or 30 mg of synthetic psilocybin were randomly distributed to the volunteers. As the
experiment proceeded, they listened to the Good Friday church service
that was being conducted directly above them. Following the service, the
participants were interviewed about their personal experiences, and a written account and an extensive questionnaire were provided by each of the
participants in the days following the experiment. Similar techniques were
used as a means of evaluation 6 months after the experiment.
Using common characteristics of mystical experiences derived by
reviewing either published accounts or reviews of spontaneous religious
experiences, Pahnke trained objective evaluators to discriminate written
descriptions of authentic mystical experiences (Pahnke & Richards,
1969). The personal accounts of the test and control volunteers were then
assessed. The characteristics of religious experience used in this study
were feelings of unity or ego loss, transcendence of space and time, a
deeply felt positive mood, sacredness, a noetic sense of an ultimate truth
or reality, paradoxicality, ineffability, transiency, and a persistent integration of the experience into ones life. Pahnke (1963) reported that in every

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measure, participants who received psilocybin scored signicantly higher

on the mystical scale than the control group.
An extension and conrmation of this early experiment was recently
completed by Grifths, Richards, McCann, and Jesse (2006) in 30 normal
volunteers in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. In that study, psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences in the majority of volunteers,
with personal meaning sustained out to at least a 14-month follow-up time.
Employing hallucinogens in dying patients is so far the best documented and successful modern medical application of these substances.
As a result of his extensive experience conducting LSD sessions, Stanislav
Grof proposed that a confrontation with death in a ritual context can
both eliminate the fear of death and lead to personal transformation. The
experiences of death and rebirth that can be induced by psychedelics
can sometimes lead to radical changes in the patients 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. Signicant 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 specically to how transcendent or mystical experiences might be produced from a neurochemical
perspective. We caution, however, that the ice beneath our feet is thin as
we move in that direction.
Unfortunately, most of what we know about the human pharmacology
of hallucinogens dates from 40 to 50 years ago, and almost none of that is
mechanistic. Clinical trials were rudimentary, cognitive science was nonexistent, and there were few pharmacologically specic drugs with which

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

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

rodent studies did continue, however, and certain parallels in brain function allow discussions in that context.
The problem confronted at the outset, however, is our lack of understanding of the nature of human consciousness. How can one discover
how drugs alter consciousness without understanding consciousness
itself? There is still no clear understanding of what it is and how it originates out of brain. Nevertheless, there seems to be a consensus that an
intact thalamocortical system is necessary (Izhikevich & Edelman, 2008;
Plum, 1991; Tononi, 2004). We shall use that idea as a basic foundation
for subsequent discussion.
Tononi (2004) has proposed that consciousness arises from the brains
ability to integrate information in a way that is contingent on connectivity
within functionally specialized regions of the thalamocortical system. He
argues that the quality of consciousness is determined by informational
relationships that causally link its elements and the distinct activity states
of these elements at any given moment. Massimini and coworkers (2005)
recently provided evidence in support of this hypothesis by showing that
the loss of consciousness that occurs during NREM sleep may be related
to a breakdown in cortical effective connectivity.
In parallel reasoning, Vollenweider and Geyer (2001) propose that hallucinogens disrupt information processing in cortico-striato-thalamocortical (CSTC) feedback loops, leading to an inability to screen out or
gate extraneous stimuli and to attend selectively to salient features of
the environment. Hallucinogens may disrupt thalamic gating of sensory
and cognitive information and lead to overload of cortical processing
capacity by stimulation of 5-HT2A receptors located in several components
of the CSTC, including the prefrontal cortex, striatum, nucleus accumbens, and thalamus.
Thus, even if we do not understand how a thalamocortical network
might generate consciousness, we can still discuss ways that hallucinogens
may alter processing in interacting brain structures that impinge on the
network, and from that knowledge perhaps construct a framework within
which to relate what is known about the psychopharmacological effects of
hallucinogens.
Executive decisions are made in the frontal cortex, where other important elements of personality are determined. Incoming sensory information, as well as affective tags and access to memories, converge in the
frontal cortex where the totality of incoming data is continuously integrated in some way to form what we experience as consciousness.

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One distinction between the effects of hallucinogens and other substances

that alter consciousness is that the effects of hallucinogens are typically
remembered clearly and vividly. During a psychedelic experience, consciousness and the self remain intact, memory continues to function, and one is
aware of what is happening even if it lies outside the realm of ordinary experience. Afterward, during ordinary consciousness, the experient can remember the subjective details. These characteristics apply irrespective of whether
the experience is spontaneous or induced by a psychedelic. Based on Tononis
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 ltered out of the information that is integrated into consciousness.
One can anticipate that if the incoming information for integration into
consciousness is diverted from environmental responses to interoceptive
or subjective cues, then the quality of consciousness will be altered
because the informational relationships that causally link the elements of
the thalamocortical network have changed (Tononi, 2004). That is, the
quality of consciousness will change in a way that represents a shift from
an external adaptive state to one that is internally reective. We will
remain conscious, but the quality of our consciousness will change.
If consciousness is normally focused on the everyday world, then any
direct awareness of our subjective state, in place of its object, would be experienced as anomalous. A psychedelic model consistent with this reasoning
would view ASC as the subjective reections or by-products of general mental activity, resulting when the known object of focal awareness is replaced
by features of the knowing medium (Hunt & Chefurka, 1976).
Even if we alter the informational relationships of the elements
involved in generating consciousness, what we experience may still be
perceived as completely real. It may be experienced as real by the person
and indistinguishable from consensus reality because there is no objective
relativistic framework with which to compare it. Thus, one characteristic
of a genuine mystical experience is that it must be perceived as being completely real. After an altered state experience has ended, however, if the
memory of the experience remains intact during ordinary waking consciousness, the person will be able to assess the extent to which the ASC
differed from waking consciousness.

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

We have spent some time attempting to convey the idea that it is possible for psychedelics to alter ones perception of reality, and that during
the experience we may not perceive it is anything other than completely
real. A visionary or transcendental state must be perceived as completely
real for it to be considered authentic. It is important to accept this premise
because if a transcendent or religious experience did not have the quality
of seeming completely real, it would be perceived as illusion or hallucination and would have no lasting impact.
Transcendental or visionary states have the quality of being ineffable;
there is no language that can adequately convey the richness of the experience. Similarly, psychedelics can produce a powerful and profound sense
that something ominous or momentous is about to occur or is occurring,
producing awe and amazement. These descriptors are the same as those
we might nd attached to a visionary experience and resemble Rudolph
Ottos numinous (Otto, 1958). We propose that a feeling of portentousness is a product of frontal cortical activity. It is only in humans where
reection and introspection can occur, and conscious decisions made to
carry out specic behaviors. The rationale for making complex decisions
will be based on subjective comparisons of the predicted outcomes of different choices and a ranking of the acceptability of those outcomes in the
context of ones 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
Freedmans continuum, ranging from the banal to the profound, results
from comparisons derived through cortical functions, it would seem logical that attaching to an experience a sense of portentousness (a descriptor that must lie at the extreme end of the ranking system) must derive
from processes that involve the frontal cortex.
With this brief background on how psychedelics modify perceptions
and feelings, the question begs to be asked: But how do they do that?
We shall now proceed to a discussion of how such experiences might be
produced by the interaction between psychedelic molecules and certain
brain systems.

The Neuropharmacology of Hallucinogens

Hallucinogens are classied into three structural groups: tryptamines,
phenethylamines, and ergolines. Tryptamines include psilocybin, psilocin,
and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and bear a close structural similarity
to serotonin (Figure 6.1). LSD and related tetracyclic compounds are called

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Figure 6.1 Chemical structures of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and several

psychedelics.

ergolines and can be considered to be special cases of tryptamines because

they have a tryptamine as their core framework. Mescaline, DOI, and 2-CB
are examples of phenethylamines. All three structural classes of hallucinogens seem to exert their effects on human consciousness by interacting with
similar brain targets.
DMT, psilocybin, and mescaline occur naturally in certain plants and
fungi. LSD is semi-synthetic, being produced by chemical processes from
ergot alkaloids. DOI and 2C-B are examples of totally synthetic psychedelic molecules.
The neurotransmitter system of particular importance to the present discussion involves serotonin as the chemical transmitter substance. Serotonin
(5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT) is an evolutionarily ancient neurotransmitter. In the mammalian brain, it all originates from small groups of cells in
a phylogenetically old area of the upper brainstem/midbrain known as
the raphe nuclei. These raphe cells send projections to higher brain centers,
releasing serotonin into terminal elds 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 ring rate of
raphe cells. One characteristic of these cells is that they re in a regular
rhythmic rate that is correlated with level of vigilance. During sleep their
ring rate decreases, and during REM sleep they cease ring altogether.

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

Early experiments found that LSD potently suppressed the ring of cells in
the dorsal raphe nucleus (Aghajanian, Foote, & Sheard, 1968, 1970;
Aghajanian, Haigler, & Bloom, 1972). Other tryptamine hallucinogens
also inhibit dorsal raphe cell ring (Aghajanian et al., 1970; Aghajanian &
Haigler, 1975; deMontigny & Aghajanian, 1977). Thus, Aghajanian and
Haigler (1975) hypothesized that this suppressant effect on raphe cells
might be the basis for hallucinogen action. This idea was attractive
because raphe cells send serotonergic projections throughout the forebrain and are the source of serotonin afferents in the prefrontal cortex
(Moore, Halaris, & Jones, 1978).
These ideas had relevance to an early study reported by Torda (1968).
She recorded EEGs and obtained dream records from two volunteers
during 11 consecutive nights. During control nights, participants received
10-minute intravenous saline infusions, which started 30 minutes after
the onset of their third REM episode. On alternate nights, they received
intravenous infusion of 5 mcg per minute of LSD. Volunteers were awakened during their fourth and fth REM episodes and asked to report what
was on their minds. In all cases, they reported that they were dreaming.
On control nights, the average latency to the fourth REM period and
dreaming was about 90 minutes, but with LSD infusion, the latency to this
REM episode was shortened to 10 to 19 minutes.
Problems soon developed with the raphe cell suppression hypothesis,
however, largely because phenethylamine hallucinogens such as mescaline lacked this effect (Aghajanian, Foote, & Sheard, 1970; Haigler &
Aghajanian, 1973). Furthermore, the nonhallucinogenic ergoline lisuride
also potently suppressed raphe cell ring (Rogawski & Aghajanian,
1979). This hypothesis was, therefore, not tenable. Although suppression
of raphe cell ring may not be the primary mechanism of action for hallucinogens, it is probably an important component. Raphe cells release serotonin into the cortex, and any change in ring 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 ring would lead
to increased excitability of cortical pyramidal cells.
Today there seems to be a fairly clear consensus that the key site for hallucinogen action is a particular type of serotonin receptor known as the
5-HT2A subtype (reviewed in Nichols, 1997; Aghajanian & Marek, 1999a;
Nichols, 2004). This conclusion was largely developed by correlation of
rat behavioral responses to hallucinogens with their afnities and efcacies
at the 5-HT2 receptor (Glennon, Titeler, & McKenney, 1984; Glennon,
Young, & Rosecrans, 1983; Titeler, Lyon, & Glennon, 1988). More

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compelling evidence for this conclusion has been provided by two clinical
studies that demonstrated that the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin could
be blocked by preadministration of 5-HT2A-selective antagonists (Carter
et al., & Vollenweider, 2005; Vollenweider, Vollenweider-Scherpenhuyzen,
Babler, Vogel, & Hell, 1998).
An explanation for low-dose visual effects produced by psychedelics
may lie in the high expression of 5-HT2A receptors in primate primary visual cortex (V1; Watakabe et al., 2009). Effects of 5-HT2A agonists on V1
neurons would lead to corruption of visual processing.
Most recent attention on the action of hallucinogens has focused on the
frontal cortex. Numerous anatomical localization studies demonstrated
that 5-HT2A receptors are expressed most highly in cortical regions of
mammals (e.g., McKenna & Saavedra, 1987; Pazos, Cortes, & Palacios,
1985; Pazos, Probst, & Palacios, 1987). In the rat prefrontal cortex, these
receptors were primarily localized to pyramidal and local circuit interneurons (Miner, Backstrom, Sanders-Bush, & Sesack, 2003). Interestingly,
5-HT2A receptors also were expressed on the surface of dendritic neuronal
outgrowths in regions that did not form direct synaptic junctions, suggesting that serotonin may exert at least some of its actions through volume transmission mechanisms. Based on their results as well as previous
data, Miner and coworkers (2003) proposed that cortical 5-HT innervation is largely nonjunctional and that the entire cortical volume may be
within reach of this neurotransmitter. Thus, some of the physiological
actions of 5-HT in the cortex may be constantly exerted, with more or less
efcacy, at the various 5-HT receptors expressed in the region, providing
widespread, global, and/or sustained inuence in the neocortex.
In vivo PET imaging of 5-HT2A receptors has shown highest density in
the anterior cingulate, followed by the parietal, orbitofrontal, temporal,
occipital, and frontal cortices (van Dyck et al. 2000). Of these areas, the
anterior cingulate appears to be a key site, at least in rats. Microinjections
of LSD into the anterior cingulate of rats trained to discriminate the effects
of LSD from saline led to complete substitution for the LSD cue (Gresch,
Barrett, Sanders-Bush, & Smith, 2007). Systemic administration of a
5-HT2A receptor antagonist completely blocked this discrimination.
Hallucinogens also enhance the release of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate in the cortex. Some controversy still centers, however, on the
details of the mechanism whereby hallucinogens increase cortical glutamate. It was initially believed that the glutamate was released from thalamic
afferents to the cortex. Lambe and Aghajanian (2001) proposed an indirect
role for 5-HT2A receptor-modulated glutamate release that involved the
release of a retrograde messenger. Such a substance could be produced as

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

a result of receptor activation, diffuse out from the postsynaptic membrane

and act on presynaptic terminals of glutamatergic neurons. More recently,
however, Beique and collaborators (2007) have presented compelling evidence that the cortical glutamate release characteristic of hallucinogens is
produced by activation of 5-HT2A receptors on a subpopulation of large
neurons in the deep layers of the prefrontal cortex.
In studies by Franz Vollenweider and his colleagues, positron emission
tomography (PET) studies with [ 18F]uorodeoxyglucose (FDG) were
coupled with Dittrichs APZ questionnaire (Dittrich, 1998), a rating scale
for ASC. Various changes in mood and perception were correlated with
changes in cerebral metabolic rate of glucose (CMRglu; Vollenweider
et al., 1997). Administration of psilocybin produced a global increase in
CMRglu bilaterally in areas of the cortex that are known to express a high
density of 5-HT2A receptors. Their data indicate that 5-HT2A receptor activation leads to a hyperfrontal metabolic pattern, which was correlated
with a depersonalization/derealization syndrome, thought disturbances,
and mania-like symptoms.

Connecting Neuropharmacology with Consciousness

Pyramidal cells, the principal neurons in the cortex, receive inputs from
a variety of brain areas, integrate them, are largely responsible for creating a
coherent reality from the incoming data, and send signals back out to subcortical areas to coordinate their activity. Current thinking is that brain
function is fundamentally related in a general way to thalamocortical interconnectivity and particularly to rhythmic oscillations of thalamocortical
loops (Llinas et al., 2005). Indeed, it is presently thought that large-scale
thalamocortical networks are necessary for consciousness (e.g., Izhikevich
& Edelman, 2008; Llinas & Ribary, 2001; Llinas, Ribary, Contreras, &
Pedroarena, 1998; Seth, Izhikevich, Reeke, & Edelman, 2006). An appreciation of how cortical and thalamic cells are regulated is crucial to understanding consciousness before one can understand how psychedelics can
alter consciousness.
It should rst be noted that overall regulation of waking/sleep cycles (i.e.,
consciousness) appears to be largely driven by midbrain aminergic neurons,
which, when active, promote waking and inhibit slow wave and/or rapideye-movement (REM) sleep (Hobson, 2009) [see Kokoszka & Wallace, this
volume]. Brain areas most relevant to the actions of psychedelics include the
midbrain dorsal raphe nuclei (DRN), which are serotonergic cells, the locus
coeruleus (LC), which is noradrenergic, and the ventral tegmental area
(VTA), which is dopaminergic.

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The resting membrane potential of prefrontal cortical neurons is very

negative, with alternating periods of membrane depolarization (UP
states) and hyperpolarization (DOWN states) of large neuronal ensembles (Contreras & Steriade, 1995; Mukovski, Chauvette, Timofeev, &
Volgushev, 2007). During activated states (waking and REM sleep), EEG
recordings are characterized by low-amplitude, high-frequency oscillatory
activity (3050 Hz; the gamma band; Destexhe, Contreras, & Steriade,
1999; Ribary et al., 1991). It has been proposed that spatially restricted
fast oscillations are an essential step in cortical processing of inputs
because they allow formation of temporally coherent but spatially segregated clusters of neuronal activity (Contreras & Llinas, 2001; Gray &
Singer, 1989; Steriade, Contreras, Amzica, & Timofeev, 1996).
Pyramidal cell discharge decreases or increases with stimulation of
5-HT1A or 5-HT2A receptors, respectively (Amargos-Bosch et al., 2004;
Puig, Celada, az-Matiax, & Artigas, 2003; Puig, Artigas, & Celada,
2005). The basis for these effects is rooted in the localization of these
receptors in the cortex; 5-HT2A receptors are highly expressed on pyramidal cells, where their activation increases excitatory postsynaptic currents
(EPSCs; Aghajanian & Marek, 1999b). Electrophysiological studies have
demonstrated that 5-HT2A receptors localized on cortical pyramidal cells
have excitatory effects on projection neurons in the neocortex (Araneda
& Andrade, 1991; Ashby, Jr., Edwards, & Wang, 1994). 5-HT2A receptors
also are expressed by GABAergic interneurons in the PFC (Puig et al.,
2010; Santana et al., 2004), where their activation appears to modulate
GABA release, thereby regulating pyramidal cell activity.
By contrast, 5-HT1A receptors are densely expressed on the initial axon
segment of the pyramidal cell (DeFelipe et al., 2001), where they hyperpolarize the cell membrane and inhibit action potential generation. Thus,
activation of 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A receptors on pyramidal cells has opposing functional effects on cell discharge. Further, 5-HT1A receptors have
higher afnity for serotonin than 5-HT2A receptors so that serotonin
released into cortical elds predominantly downregulates pyramidal cell
activity through stimulation of 5-HT1A receptors (Puig et al. 2003; Puig
et al., 2005).
Serotonin is released into cortical elds by afferent projections from
the dorsal raphe nuclei, which re at a steady rate during wakefulness,
decrease their ring 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 ring 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 Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocin also have high afnity for 5-HT1A
receptors and suppress raphe cell ring through direct activation of somatodendritic 5-HT1A receptors in the raphe. Hallucinogenic phenethylamines such as mescaline or DOI lack activity at 5-HT1A receptors and
thus have no effect when infused directly into the raphe (Penington,
1996). When given systemically, however, they also suppress raphe cell
ring and decrease extracellular 5-HT in the frontal cortex (Wright, Garratt, & Marsden, 1990). Inhibition of raphe cell ring 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 ring (Liu, Jolas, & Aghajanian, 2000).
LC neurons display slow irregular ring during quiet wakefulness but
change to sustained activation if the organism becomes stressed or excited.
LC ring also decreases markedly during slow-wave sleep and virtually
ceases during REM sleep (e.g., Page & Valentino, 1994). In response to
novel or behaviorally relevant stimuli, however, LC neurons display transient activation and burst ring (Aston-Jones & Bloom, 1981; Grant,
Aston-Jones, & Redmond, 1988; Sara & Segal, 1991; Vankov, HerveMinvielle, & Sara, 1995). Administration of LSD, mescaline, or phenethylamine hallucinogens to anesthetized rats decreased spontaneous activity
of LC cells but enhanced activation of LC neurons evoked by sensory
stimuli (Aghajanian, 1980; Rasmussen & Aghajanian, 1986). Chiang and
Aston-Jones (1993) have proposed that systemic administration of 5-HT2A
agonists suppresses LC ring 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 inuence of hallucinogens, ordinary
objects can seem new or novel, as if being seen for the rst time.
5-HT2A and a1-adrenergic receptors have a similar regional and laminar
distribution in the cortex, with heaviest expression in layer Va (Marek &
Aghajanian, 1999), and activation of either 5-HT2A or a1-adrenergic receptors modulates cortical pyramidal cells and interneurons in a parallel fashion

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(Marek & Aghajanian, 1994, 1996, 1999), leading to increased cortical cell
excitability.
Dopaminergic projections from the VTA to the prefrontal cortex also
may be involved in controlling membrane potential states that dene assemblies of excitable pyramidal neurons in the cortex (Lewis & ODonnell,
2000). Stimulation of the VTA with trains of stimuli resembling burst ring
evoked a long-lasting transition of pyramidal cells to the up state, an
effect that was blocked by a D1 dopamine receptor antagonist (Lewis &
ODonnell, 2000). The VTA receives 5-HT afferents from the raphe and,
important to this discussion, VTA dendrites express 5-HT2A immunoreactivity and tyrosine hydroxylase colocalization (Doherty & Pickel, 2000).
Nocjar, Roth, and Pehek (2002) also found that 5-HT2A receptors were
colocalized, in part, to tyrosine hydroxylase-containing cells throughout
all subnuclei of the VTA. Thus, hallucinogens also have stimulating effects
on dopaminergic cells in the VTA, leading to alterations in extracellular
dopamine in cortical elds.
Thus, psychedelic drugs have a multifaceted pharmacology, acting
directly on 5-HT2A receptors in cortical pyramidal cells to excite them
while at the same time acting on cells in the DRN, the LC, and the VTA,
all of which send monoamine projections to the cortex that ultimately lead
to increased excitability of cortical cells. 5-HT 2A receptors also can
positively modulate glutamatergic transmission in the prefrontal cortex
(Aghajanian & Marek, 1997; Beique et al., 2007; Ceglia et al., 2004;
Scruggs, Patel, Bubser, & Deutch, 2000).
Cortical cell function is also modulated by interneurons, where GABAmediated inhibition determines the spread of cortical activation by sculpting precise activity patterns (Llina s et al., 2005). As is the case with
pyramidal cells, GABA interneurons consist of at least two populations,
one of which expresses 5-HT2A receptors and the other, 5-HT1A receptors.
When the DRN is stimulated, however, the majority of responses elicited
in GABAergic fast-spiking interneurons (FSi) are inhibitions. Manipulations of FSi activity modulate the amplitude of gamma waves (Cardin
et al., 2009), allowing the serotonergic system to nely tune the amplitude
of gamma oscillations during cognitive tasks.
How does this information all t together in a model of hallucinogen
effects on cortical function? Although the functional circuitry of the cortex
is not yet well understood, results by Sanchez-Vives and McCormick
(2000) from experiments using ferret prefrontal cortical slices have suggested that the basic operation of cortical networks is the generation of
self-maintained depolarized states that are tightly regulated through interaction with local GABAergic neurons and intrinsic membrane

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

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 inuences on sensory information processing. Clearly, changes in cortical cell sensitivity induced by
psychedelics would dramatically affect these cortical networks.
Serotonin 5-HT2A receptors also are localized in areas of the thalamus
and in the reticular nucleus of the thalamus. Although very few functional
studies with hallucinogens have been carried out in these areas, the thalamus may be the second most important site of action for hallucinogens.
The thalamus, along with the amygdala, represents the major source of
glutamate afferents innervating the neocortex, and hallucinogens increase
glutamate levels in cortex. The thalamus not only processes somatosensory inputs but also receives afferents from both the DRN and the LC
(Asanuma, 1992).
Essentially all incoming sensory information is processed through the
thalamus, with modulation by the reticular nucleus of the thalamus,
which has afferents from specic thalamic nuclei and associated cortical
areas. Many thalamic nuclei as well as the reticular nucleus express
5-HT2A receptors. Alterations in the ring mode of thalamic neurons are
associated with dramatic changes in the neurons responsiveness to
peripheral stimuli (McCormick & Bal, 1997). Hallucinogens not only perturb thalamic functioning but also lead to increased concentrations of
cortical glutamate. Thus, hallucinogens reduce the signal-to-noise ratio
in the information stream arriving at the cortex from thalamic terminals.
In rat brains, signicant 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 specic thalamic nuclei according to characteristics of sensory input and attentional demands (Behrendt, 2003;
Smythies, 1997). It is thus in the thalamus, and in particular the reticular
nucleus of the thalamus, that we nd what might be a gate or lter for
determining which information is sent to the cortex.
Dysfunction in the reticular nucleus would lead to loss of sensoryspecic inhibition of specic thalamic nuclei and further impairment of

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the signal-to-noise ratio. Noise could then predominate over stimulusspecic activity, with relay cells being recruited into thalamocortical circuits without receiving adequate sensory input. The combination of
increased thalamic relay cell excitability and reticular thalamic nucleus
dysfunction could lead to activation of thalamocortical circuits and the
formation of coherent assemblies of thalamocortical oscillations that
would be independent of afferent sensory inputs, potentially giving rise
to underconstrained perception, such as hallucinations or dream imagery
(Behrendt, 2003).

Simplied Summary of the Mechanism Discussions

Hallucinogens appear to exert their effects at the molecular level
mainly by stimulating serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. In the prefrontal cortex, these receptors are localized on pyramidal cells and certain fastspiking GABA interneurons. Hallucinogens reduce the ring of raphe cells
either directly by stimulation of 5-HT1A receptors or indirectly by 5-HT2A
receptor activation of inhibitory GABA interneurons. Cessation or reduction of raphe cell ring would lead to decreased serotonergic tone, which
would include reduced activation of inhibitory cortical axonal 5-HT1A
receptors, enhancing cortical cell excitability. Activation of 5-HT2A receptors in the LC and VTA also leads to increased NE and DA release, respectively, also resulting in enhanced excitability of cortical cells.
Pyramidal cell conductance caused by spontaneous network activity in
vivo is remarkably well balanced between excitation and inhibition. This
proportion is maintained and remains stable during uctuations in total
membrane conductance. This proportionality is the result of the interaction between recurrent excitation and feedback inhibition, which scales
with the level of activity present in the local network. This stable, balanced
activity keeps neurons at a noisy and elevated level of depolarization near
their ring threshold (Haider, Duque, Hasenstaub, & McCormick, 2006).
One can now begin to appreciate that the overall effect of hallucinogens on brain function is extremely complex, involving multiple interactive
neurotransmitter systems. Keep in mind that these discussions are at a
very rudimentary level of understanding. Nevertheless, we can conclude
that hallucinogens produce marked alterations within all three of the
ascending brainstem monoamine activating systems, increase cortical cell
excitability, perturb thalamic gating functions, and induce action potentials in cortical cells through increased glutamate release.
One could envision, therefore, that hallucinogens greatly enhance sensitivity/excitability of cortical processing while at the same time altering

LSD and the Serotonin Systems Effects on Human Consciousness

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 amplied or distorted incoming sensory stimuli.
Probably the most important idea to keep in mind is that hallucinogens
render the cortex hyperexcitable, while at the same time the normal sensory information that it should be processing has been degraded or, at
high doses, possibly eliminated altogether by changes in thalamic gating
functions. We posit that the cortex may ll 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 signicant portion of the incoming data available for processing
during the actions of a hallucinogen. Memories, emotions, and ideas will
then rise to the level of conscious awareness. The external world may be
effectively shut out, with one being surrounded by a sensory vacuum.
With the cortex in a hyperexcitable state, but receiving input only from limbic structures, memory stores, and phylogenetically old brain structures in
the core of the brain, what will ll that void? We have arrived at the present
limits of our ability to speculate.

Conclusions
Although we may not yet be able to dene the underlying functional
basis for consciousness, we can say that psychedelics perturb key brain
structures that inform us about our world, tell us when to pay attention,
and interpret what is real. Psychedelics activate very ancient brain systems
that project to all of the forebrain structures that are involved in memory
and feeling; they sensitize systems that tell us when something is novel.
The mind is truly one of the last great frontiers of science. It is a genuine tragedy that hallucinogens cannot be more easily used in research to
help elucidate the neurochemical basis of consciousness. Coupled with
measures of subjective states, cognitive tests, and new brain scanning
technologies, hallucinogens could be extremely powerful tools to help us
understand who we are and how that identity is tied to the functions of
our brains. As a modern society, we must be open to the possibilities

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presented by these substances, not only for research on consciousness but

also for their ability to reconnect us with primary spiritual experiences that
are largely absent from modern religions. Sadly, delving too deeply into
these questions may provide knowledge that many people simply do not
wish to know, and perhaps that is part of the fear of theses substances.

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CHAPTER 7

Peyote and Meaning

Stacy B. Schaefer
Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a psychoactive plant core to the religious
beliefs and practices of certain indigenous cultures in Mexico and North
America. Peyote is pivotal in the cognitive foundation that denes the collective reality of the groups that consume it. This article provides historical,
cultural, scientic, and phenomenological interpretations for the altered
states of consciousness experienced from ingestion of this unassuming
small spineless cactus.
Huichol Indians of Mexico are well attuned to the attributes of peyote.
Of all the indigenous groups in Mexico and the United States, they have
the longest history of continuous peyote use. Today, in the 21st century,
peyote remains for many Huichols an extraordinary catalyst for individual
growth and cultural identity. The Native American Church, a more recent
peyote religion with syncretistic characteristics incorporating elements of
Christianity, also reveres peyote for its power to enable individuals to experience altered states of consciousness (ASC) that can be life transforming.
The approach taken here emphasizes Huichol peyote traditions, with some
references to Native American Church Peyote Ways, as a highly evolved
system for achieving ASC that are culturally dening to its members. It is a
system with a sophisticated framework structured so that individuals are
informed by these experiences and can integrate them into their consciousness as meaningful expressions of their collective cultural worldview.

Landscape and History of Peyote Use

Peyote occurs naturally from the Chihuahuan desert of San Luis Potos,
Mexico, north to the border regions of west Texas and into the Tamaulipan
Thorn Scrub of south Texas. Recognized by ancient indigenous peoples for
its ability to assuage hunger and thirst and stave off exhaustion, it was also
revered for its power to connect humans to the mystic realm of the gods.

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The earliest evidence of peyote use comes from two archaeological sites, one
in the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas and the other a rock shelter
near Coahuila, Mexico. The rock shelter specimens have a radiocarbon date
to 6,000 B.C.E.1 Further evidence of possible peyote use in the Lower Pecos
River Region is suggested by stylized themes found on rock art that have
been interpreted as representing visionary peyote experiences these indigenous people felt compelled to reproduce (Boyd & Dering, 1996).
There is a strong link between desert dwelling hunter-gatherers, their
knowledge and use of peyote, and the migrations of people and trade
in peyote that reached beyond the Chihuahuan desert (Sahagu n,
19501969). At the time Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the ritual use of
peyote had spread to a wide range of indigenous peoples, including agriculturalists in Central Mexico such as Aztecs, Tarascans, and Tlaxcalans
(Stewart, 1987, p. 17). Peyote was seen by the Spanish clergy as a diabolical plant, evoking hallucinations that came from the blasphemous world
of the devil himself. Priests prepared a catechism to be used when conducting confessions with Indians: Hast thou eaten the esh of man? Hast
thou eaten the peyote? Do you suck the blood of others? Do you adorn
with owers places where idols are kept? (Taylor, 1944, pp. 176177).
Efforts to eradicate peyote use were integral to the Catholic Churchs campaign to destroy indigenous religion and forever change the worldview of
these peoples, a task they never entirely accomplished. Peyote use survived and continues to provide to some indigenous groups an intrinsic
connection between native religious tenets and phenomenological experiences induced by this mescaline-containing plant. The Native American
Church with its chapters and its afliates, 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 chromatographymass spectrometry to 5,700 years ago (El-Seedi et al., 2005).
Peyote specimens from Shumla Caves and Shelter CM-79 near Cuatro Cienegas in Coahuila,
Mexico, have been radiocarbon dated to 5,195 years BP and 835 BP, respectively, Interestingly, peyote specimens from the Shumala Caves have been discovered to be composed of
a mixture of peyote with other plant material and appear to have been intentionally made
as peyote efgies (Terry et al., 2006). Martin Terry, Department of Biology at Sul Ross University, is carrying out a populations genetics study on peyote growing from south and west
Texas into northern Mexico (personal communication, June 26, 2010).

Peyote and Meaning

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 panNative American beliefs and practices with Christianity.
It arose as a revitalization movement, as a response to the decimation of the
Native American population and the concentrated effort of the United States
government to assimilate the remaining indigenous population into the
dominant western culture. In Mexico, Huichol Indians have maintained
their ancient peyote traditions over the centuries, adapting and incorporating changes into their practices so that even in contemporary times, peyote
remains a steadfast part of their cultural identity.
In Huichol culture, a deep, personal understanding of peyote and its
mind-altering effects is based on informed participation that brings an
emic perspective grounded in a cultural framework with which to interpret phenomenological experiences. Similarly, Native American Church
members have an interpretive cognitive structure in place to provide
meaning to the ASC they experience. Western scientists bring an etic view
to peyote studies; they are intrigued by peyotes pharmacology, neurochemical activity, and its physical and psychological effects in human
beings. As adeptly discussed by Cardena (2009), the western scientic
perspective seriously lacks conceptual models as well as a concise vocabulary to adequately discuss the study of consciousness. Cardenas discussion of the term different modalities of experiencing in place of altered states
of consciousness can be readily applied to peyote experiences. Both emic
and etic approaches are examined together in the following sections; the
phenomenological perspective of peyote-enhanced modalities of experiencing is emphasized.

Pharmacology and Brain Neurochemistry

Peyote contains more than 60 alkaloids, and more than half of these
chemical compounds are classied as phenylethylamines or tetrahydroisoquinolines. Mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine), the most abundant alkaloid in peyote, is credited with inducing mind-altering
experiences. When ingested, mescaline in peyote functions like naturally
occurring neurotransmitters in the brain. Depending on the dosage, mescaline can activate, inhibit, or block chemical transmission of impulses
between nerve cells at synaptic sites in the central nervous system [see Presti,
this volume]. This in turn affects how impulses are transmitted in the brain
and how the brain processes these signals. Mescaline has the same basic

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chemical structure as the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin, and

dopamine. Norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter to which mescaline is
most similar, is abundantly concentrated in the limbic system of the brain,
the site where emotions such as love, hate, joy, and sadness are stimulated.
Norepinephrine can also induce greater clarity of thought and plays an
important role in regulating behavioral responses to sensory stimulus as norepinephrine neurons descend to the spinal cord, inuencing the muscles in
the arms and legs (Snyder, 1996, pp. 146, 205). The serotonin system affects
sleep, mood, appetite, and depression, as well as sensory-motor processes,
Serotonin causes the secretion of growth hormones and acts as a vasoconstrictor, stimulating the smooth muscles. Dopamine neurons are linked to
motor abilities and serve to maintain thoughts and perceptions in accord
with the reality of ones mundane environment (Snyder, 1996, p. 209) [see
Nichols & Chemel, and Previc, this volume].
Recent pharmacological research on isoquinoline compounds in
peyote and other cacti provides an additional dimension to the complex
nature of such neurochemical interactions. Although more studies are
needed, the results so far indicate that alkaloids that may be orally inactive
could become active through their interactions with isoquinolines or other
monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOs) in the tissue of peyote and other
cacti (Bruhn et al., 2008; Shulgin & Perry, 2002).
The interaction of peyote alkaloids with the nerve cells of the brain
heightens and alters input to the senses. Within 3 hours of peyote ingestion, geometric patterns in brilliant colors are perceived in constant
kaleidoscope-like movement. These designs, sometimes referred to as phosphenes, are believed to arise, in part, from the discharge of neurons within
the eye. If the dosage of peyote is strong, a second phase is experienced in
which one feels as if in a lucid dream. Anthropomorphic and naturalistic
images of people, animals, plants, and landscapes are perceived. The fact
that phosphenes can be seen in total darkness has prompted some scientists
to theorize that the more complex imagery comes from the central nervous
system (Siegel & Jarvik, 1975, pp. 142144). 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. 287311; West, 1962, pp. 275291). 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

discussion, it is quite plausible that gurative images that arise

during inebriation from psychoactive substances are projections of preexisting models that are culturally determined (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1978,
p. 47).2
One Huichol man described his experience in their sacred desert
region, Wirikuta.
I felt I saw the re turn into tissue paper . . . the form of the re disappeared and I saw only tissue paper in the glowing form of owers like
the ones we make when we are going to sacrice a calf. There were many
colors of this owerlike tissue paper. Then in the very center of the re I
saw in the distance a person; afterwards the maraakame (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 Pacic
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 amplied and are perceived differently. These are the sensations experienced by a shaman renowned for his musical abilities as a
violin player,
For about the rst hour I dont feel anything. Then my voice will start to feel
strange and I wont understand very well what people are speaking. Then I
will have a very strong urge to play music, so I will play my violin. I will listen to music coming out of the air, pure air. Then Ill be feeling that the air
is coming down, like a cloud that is being lowered onto the earth. Soon Ill
be able to hear anything very close and clear, but Ill 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 ones skin. Personal accounts
from Huichols and Native American Church members of their experiences
while in ceremony include the stimulation of memories that arise from the
smell of burning copal in the case of the Huichol, and cedar, in Native
American Church meetings. The olfactory system includes neuromodulators
2

See Thurston (1997) for an outstanding review of the literature on hallucinogenic

imagery.

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that regulate storage of information related to the olfactory experience

(Wilson, 2006). Olfactory information is processed through the primary
olfactory cortex, forming a direct link with the amygdala, which is involved
in experiencing emotion and emotional memory, and the hippocampus,
which is implicated in memory (Herz & Engen, 1996). Further research
may reveal that stimulation of the olfactory system while in a peyoteinduced state may further potentiate stored memory perceptions and the
release of emotions that are associated with these memories.
One woman who is a member of the Native American Church shared:
My mother said that when I was born that my grandfather put up a tipi and
prayed for me, my tracks on this mother earth. Now, my life as an adult, I
go into the tipi. [During the meeting] somebody would do something, throw
cedar on the re, and it would trigger off a memory, like my (past) relatives
are there, their presence is there and I can see my relatives that have died.

Altogether, these physiological sensations make the experiences unforgettably distinctive and profound. As we have seen within Huichol and Native
American Church traditions, when peyote is consumed within a ritualized
context and under the guidance of a religious specialist, the experiences
can be so exceptionally out of the ordinary that they are life transforming.
Experiences from hallucinogen-producing substances under supportive
conditions within western culture can also evoke experiences that have
been reported to be so personally meaningful and spiritually signicant that
participants carry memories of these mystic experiences with them more
than a year after they occurred (Grifths et al., 2008).

Tobacco and Peyote as Psychointegrative Plants

Tobacco, particularly Nicotiana rustica, used by Huichols in conjunction with peyote ingestion, is another plant that must be discussed. Nicotine, the active substance in tobacco, can function similarly to naturally
occurring hormones produced by the brain. Nicotine, like mescaline,
can activate, inhibit, or block the transmission at synaptic receptor sites
in the central nervous system. Nicotine is also able to trigger the release
of norepinephrine. In addition to effecting clear, focused thought, nicotine
can produce effects such as excitement, restlessness, and wakefulness. In
both Huichol and Native American Church peyote ceremonies, the use
of tobacco is also highly ritualized and is smoked during crucial times to
prepare individuals for the ceremony and bring greater control to the

Peyote and Meaning

peyote experience when specic tasks are required or clear thinking is

desired (Schaefer, 1996a, 2005, pp. 188191).
The interaction of peyote and tobacco is explained by one Huichol
shaman:
You pray . . . that you will get something from it (the peyote) that you will
gain more knowledge, see things, not get nauseous or vomit . . . and then
when you smoke the makutse (Nicotiana rustica) you will not feel so empeyotado. Even if you eat lots of peyote, you will not feel it that much . . . it
makes one feel it very gently, thats how the people do it . . . .Because if
you eat peyote you feel differently, sometimes (the peyote) is gentle, sometimes it is very heavy . . . and then you hear things from far away, people
talking from far over there. But with the makutse no, it lessens the feeling
of being drunk with the peyote . . . so that you come down, thats why they
smoke . . . you get the urge to smoke when you eat peyote.

A member of the Native American Church recounts her experience in the

role of the Water Woman. In the morning, the Water Woman smokes
tobacco and prays aloud in front of everyone in the tipi before serving
the water she has brought.
You know when you go into prayer, it is like chaos. I did not know what I
really was going to pray about. The main thing that kept coming to me was
the peyote. I ate peyote all night, so I was peyote-affected. So I started talking about the re, and the replace 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 Alzheimers patients and the motor ability of
people suffering from Parkinsons disease (Jones et al., 1992; Morens
et al., 1995). Laboratory studies point to antibiotic qualities of peyote,
the alkaloid hordenine inhibits the growth of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that is resistant to penicillin (McCleary, Sypherd, & Walkington,
1960, pp. 24749). 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 benecial qualities in rehabilitation from alcohol and drug abuse, and has many additional salubrious
properties (Halpern et al., 2005; Schultes, 1938).

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The concept of psychointegrative plants proposed by Winkelman (1996)

corresponds well to peyote and tobacco and their effects on brain systems
and consciousness. According to him, psychointegrative plants integrate
three brain systems functioning in humans beings: the R-complex or reptilian brain, the paleomammalian brain, and the neomammalian brain. The
reptilian brain corresponds to the cognition required for the bodys behavioral actions, which also include habitual routines. This brain system regulates large amounts of dopamine. The paleomammalian brain manages the
limbic system and functions to integrate emotion and memory for processing
sensory and motor functions. It is also the center where feelings of attachment, emotional security, and identity are stimulated, and it serves a crucial
role in linking the R-complex and the frontal cortex. The neomammalian
brain is associated with the neocortex that surrounds the brain, housing
the vast majority of neurons in the human central nervous system (MacLean,
1990). To date, no formal studies have examined the interaction of tobacco
with visionary substances such as peyote. Nevertheless, it is suspected that
nicotine augments the psychoactive effects of other drugs by promoting
neurotransmitter releasethe same could be true for mescaline (N. Benowitz, personal communication, March 21, 2001.3 If nicotine does indeed
potentiate the neurochemical actions of peyote, then their interaction could
have the capacity to integrate all three brain system processes. The mescaline
in peyote and nicotine in tobacco both interact with norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine neurons that result in inhibiting feelings of depression,
boredom, and habituation. These interactions foster instead feelings of
renewal and revitalization, fundamental ingredients necessary for a mystic
or core religious experience (Mandell, 1977; Winkelman, 1996, p. 43).

Huichol Cultural Knowledge and Peyote Experiences

The essence of Huichol culture lies in the hands of the shamans. The
roles they play in Huichol peyote traditions cannot be overstated. Wise from
their own personal experiences with peyote over many years, they serve as
botanists, healers, pharmacologists, psychologists, and religious specialists.
Shamans are well versed in holistic aspects necessary to prepare the bodies
and minds of individuals for their peyote journeys into other realms of consciousness. As noted elsewhere (Furst, 1969, 1972; Myerhoff, 1974; Schaefer, 1996a, 2002), pilgrims participate in a purication ritual before leaving
3

Neal Benowitz, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, has been carrying out extensive studies for more than
20 years on the effects of tobacco on the human system.

Peyote and Meaning

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 bers for every name a pilgrim mentions. Standing in front of the re, the shaman passes this knotted cord over
each individuals body and then throws it into the re. 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 unied for the
entire journey and for subsequent peyote ceremonies until the season
changes and the agricultural cycle begins.
Physical and psychological preparations ready Huichols for their
peyote experiences. Everyone fasts throughout the pilgrimage, eating only
small amounts of food and drinking little water only late in the day or
early evening. Most pilgrimages take place anywhere from December to
March, one of the coldest and windiest times of the year in the desert.
These environmental factors also contribute to changes in the neurochemistry in the brain that inuence sensory perceptions. The desert is a dry,
dusty landscape with thorny shrubs, agaves, and cacti; one must walk
with great caution to avoid serious injury in this environment. Firewood
is scarce and the nights can be bitterly cold. The day can be extremely
bright from the sun or bitingly windy from sandstorms. The alteration of
consciousness through fasting and exposure to the desert elements prepares the pilgrims physically and psychologically for a transformative
experience. The leading shamans help guide the pilgrims on their journey.
As previously noted, tobacco is used judiciously to regulate the peyote
experience. Sometimes other plants are ingested along with the peyote.
Upon the direction of a shaman, some eat slices of a barrel cactus they call
maxa kwaxi along with peyote. It is eaten so that one does not become too
empeyotado. Slices of Ariocarpus retusus are sometimes consumed with
peyote, as are the grated pieces of the yellow root of the plant uxa, (Mahonia
trifoliolata) used for face painting (Bauml, Voss, & Collings, 1990).4
4

This species of barrel cactus belongs to either the genus Ferocactus or Echinocactus and is
commonly referred to as visnaga (James A. Bauml, personal communication, September 12,
1994). To date, no botanical identication or chemical analysis has been reported for this
particular species. However, Alexander Shulgin (personal communication, December 29,
1995) informed me that in the appendix of his cactus species tabulation he notes that other
varieties of cactus including Echinocactus caespitosus, Echinocactus horizontalis, Echinocactus
polycephalus, and Echinocactus texensis show positive tests for isoquinoline and phenethylamine alkaloids. Several Huichols have discussed with Bauml and me these desertdwelling plants and their personal experiences when ingesting them with peyote. More
research is needed to fully understand the depth of plant knowledge Huichols have regarding the environment in Wirikuta and the effects that are achieved by using admixture
plants with peyote.

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One Huichol shaman discussed his experience combining uxa and

peyote:
(The uxa) this you feel with the peyote. You feel more, but it is different, it is
not like smoking makutse . . . it does not lower the strength like with makutse . . . when you combine (uxa and peyote) it is as if they elevate you, they
raise you up zzzzzooooommmm. Thats how I felt. I saw the whole world
very small, very round. I was moving as if I were the sun, thats the way I
saw everything. I saw the gods, where they come from and where they
reside, I saw everything. Thats what happened to me when I ate uxa (with
peyote).

Shamans and experienced pilgrims know how to determine the dosage

strength of peyote and advise others on which peyotes and how many to
consume for reaching an optimum peak experience. As native botanists
and pharmacologists, they also know what additional plants may be optimal for an individual to consume. One never knows, however, how the
journey will turn out. In the event that a pilgrim has an uncomfortable
or disturbing trip, the leading shaman will assist the individual, providing counsel, interpretation, even a healing to help the pilgrims integrate
the experience into a meaningful, transformative event that they will carry
with them throughout their lifetime.

Peyote, Cultural Symbols, and Meaning

Key symbolic elements serve as enculturating forces that lay the foundation of Huichol cultural identity and worldview. These symbols are
introduced to Huichol children and are reinforced throughout their lives
in daily and ritual existence. Peyote and the peyote pilgrimage are omnipresent in Huichol culture. Myths, rituals, songs, formal speech, even casual discourse orally convey the knowledge, experiences, and meaning of
peyote in the consciousness of members. Brilliantly colored designs in
Huichol embroidered clothes, bags, and woven belts, as well as beaded
and yarn art for outside consumption, are visually stimulating reminders
of peyote in the cultural lives of the community. In fact, women are
expected to duplicate the bright geometric designs they experience from
peyote into their embroidery (Eger, 1978). These designs are considered
communication from the gods and a gift that must be visually shared.
Huichol artwork for commercial sale, be it yarn or beaded art, also vividly
portrays visual themes from peyote experiences. Dreams associated with
peyote and their interpretations by family shamans bring subconscious

Peyote and Meaning

messages revolving around this sacred plant as well as peyote-induced

experiences to the forefront of ones waking life.
Young children are encouraged to eat small amounts of peyote. Rarely,
if ever, are they required to eat more than they are ready to try. Some children are drawn to peyote and will eat enough of it to denitely have an
altered experience. Usually the amount of peyote consumed by children
increases when they reach pre-teen to teenage years. By then, if not personally, then vicariously they are well clued in to the corpus of core symbols that are fundamental to Huichol worldview and identity. One
powerful element is the deer god Kauyumarie, the tutelary spirit of the
shaman and guide for those seeking wisdom, knowledge, and luck from
the peyote. One Huichol man described the powerful experience he had
as a teenager encountering Kauyumarie on the pilgrimage.
I made some votive arrows for Kauyumarie, the deer god, to leave where
there is peyote in Wirikuta. They were for Kauyumarie because he knows
everything, he knows everything about the world . . . When I arrived to
Wirikuta I left one of the arrows . . . the other peyoteros [pilgrims] took
out a large gourd bowl and lled it with peyote. They told me that since this
was my rst 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 rst
appeared, how the re, the maize, the earth, and the god of rain rst
appeared . . . I continued eating [peyote]. Then I nished.
One of the votive gourd bowls [on the ground] was decorated inside
with beads in the gure 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
deerhow can that be? Im 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] own up there, I was seated in the middle of the peyote and I ew
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 worldthe ocean looked really small. I not only
saw the ocean but all the animals that live in the ocean, whales, snakes,
mermaids . . . everything. [The deer told me] . . . you should be calm . . .
then I was back down below in Wirikuta.

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A female shaman related a peyote experience in which the deer god,

Kauyumarie, appeared.
I saw a . . . deer where the peyote was. The deer acted like it was drunk. . . .
Then white foam started to come from its mouth, the kind of foam that
comes from grinding peyote. It was coming out of its mouth . . . but the deer
was talking to me. I didnt hear her very well until she saw me and we
looked each other right in the eye.

These peyote visions powerfully manifest Huichol core symbols, providing vivid experiences to individuals in which they actually interact with
their gods and participate in cosmological realms that structure Huichol
collective worldview. Such profound experiences reverberate at the core
of ones 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 ones waking reality.

Peyote and Perinatal Cognitive Development

Over centuries of peyote use, Huichols have acquired a deep understanding of the ASC that peyote brings. Many Huichols are experienced
travelers who have developed techniques to maximize the peyote experience and have evolved a ne-tuned cultural framework in which to understand and provide meaning to the journey. This last section examines the
traditional practice of some Huichols who consume peyote while pregnant
and then while nursing and the implications this may have on the cognitive development of their children.
Scientic 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 inuence 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 sacriced to examine the results (Greber,
1967; Maickel & Snodgras, 1973; Shah, Neely, Shah, & Lawrence, 1973;
Taska & Schoolar, 1972). Evidence collected in these research projects indicated that mescaline could cross the placental barrier, although the fetus did
not receive as high a dose as the mother did. Once the mescaline entered the
fetus, its movement to the central nervous system did not appear to be
restricted. Brain tissue of the fetus rapidly accumulated mescaline in high

Peyote and Meaning

concentrations, possibly because of the partially developed bloodbrain

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 rst 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 fetuss brain begin
to develop; the rst area is tactile, then visual, followed by the auditory
center. By 24 weeks, many of the neurons in the brain have developed.
The eyes are sensitive to light and the fetus reacts to sound. In the third trimester of prenatal development, there is rapid brain development that
causes sensory and behavioral capacities to expand (Berk, 2006, p. 86).
Much more is known about the cognitive development of infants and newborns; it is assumed that this information can be applied to the second and
third trimesters of a fetus.
One can imagine the kinds of sensory stimuli a fetus experiences from
the peyote. If hearing becomes more acute, sounds from within the womb
may take on different dimensions; consider what a mothers beating heart
may sound like under such conditions. The cells in the retina of the eye
and the optic nerve and other pathways that relay messages along the cells
in the visual cortex continue to develop even after birth. Newborns can
perceive light and show a preference for and processing of large, bold patterned forms (Berk, 2006, p. 155). By 2 months of age, they have adultlike
focusing abilities and perceive colors across the entire spectrum (Berk,
2006, p. 161). Researchers theorize that internal and/or external stimulation of the neocortex of the fetus may help with the connection of neurons
in the brain. It has been theorized that the reason newborns sleep so
5

It is crucial to understand that the animal experiments did not precisely replicate the
dose/response of peyote consumption, nor its effects on a human mother and her fetus.
Peyote contains many more alkaloids besides mescaline. Additionally, human beings ingest
peyote, they do not inject it. Differentiating factors also exist between research animals and
human beings, the dosage of mescaline administered, and the stage of fetal development.
In only one laboratory experiment congenital malformations of the fetus were found; this
was with hamsters that were injected with a large dose on the eighth day of pregnancy
(Greber, 1967)

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much, and that 50% of newborns sleep time is REM sleep, is because REM
provides the stimulation necessary for central nervous system development in young infants. Some believe that REM sleep provides stimulation
that the infant does not get from the environment because it spends little
time in an alert state (Berk, 2006, p. 130; DiPietro, Hoddgson, Costigan,
& Hilton, 1996; de Weerd & van den Bossche, 2003). The earlier the
stimulation, the better the childs central nervous system will develop,
including cognitive abilities, reex 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 denitely feel the effects
of peyote; after a quiet period, fetuses can become very active and move in
the womb. Some women say that the baby is dancing inside. As for communication between mother and fetus, one female shaman who specializes
in fertility and childbirth explained,
The baby naturally is much purer than others, the gods are helping it, like
the re and the deer, like the shaman who blesses the re and blesses the
sun . . . for this reason when the mother eats peyote she knows everything
that is happening and the baby knows, too.

She goes on to say that

The baby feels the same as the mother . . . when a woman is pregnant even the
baby inside receives messages from the deer, messages from the peyote . . . the
baby always feels the same as a person . . . the baby cannot talk, it communicates without words, only with its iyari (heart memory, a kind of soul).

One man, speaking for his wife said, When a pregnant woman eats
peyote, she and her baby get drunk with the peyote. My wife said that
when this happened to her, the baby got real quiet. He claried that the
two do communicate, not with words but through their thoughts, telepathically.
My wife said that when this happened to her that she and the baby went up
to the sky, to Niwetuka (the goddess who cares for the souls). The baby is

Personal communications (October, 6, 1996) with Gary Montgomery, Ph.D., professor of

psychology who has focused his research on child development at the University of TexasPan American.

Peyote and Meaning

still inside the mothers womb, but its iyari goes to Niwetuka. The mothers
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 sisters peyote experience in the
eighth month of her pregnancy.
At rst 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 didnt talk with the baby. She communicated with the gods to see that
everything was all right, that the baby was formed well and there was nothing wrong with it.

The children of female shamans may receive more peyote than children of
women who are not. Shamans tend to consume more peyote than others.
One shaman shared her peyote experience in Wirikuta when she was
2 months pregnant with her son.
(In Wirikuta) I thought we would eat a lot of peyote, to see what we could
encounter to learn more about our customs. So I ate eight large peyote, and
the peyote was strong, I got dizzy and then empeyotada. I never thought that
I was pregnant. Kauyumarie (the deer messenger) appeared like a person,
and told me how I was feeling . . . He was talking to me from his heart . . .
I think that Kauyumarie was talking to (my son in my womb). I didnt 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, thats why
he is peyote. I think he is peyote. He likes to eat peyote a lot . . . thats
how (some) are born.

It is interesting to contemplate these perinatal experiences. According to

Stanislav Grof, perinatal experiences transcend biology and have important psychological, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions. The existence
of authentic perinatal experiences, he argues, cannot be denied. The frequency of memories of their occurrence is of paramount clinical signicance (Grof, 1988a, 1988b). If memories from womb experience are part
of a human beings unconscious, it is interesting to contemplate how

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peyote-related perinatal experiences could inuence cognitive development and enable individuals access to dimensions of human consciousness generally unchartered in Western culture. Given the fact that
Huichols, like their ancestors, have been practicing their peyote traditions
for thousands of years, consuming this cactus does not appear to be a maladaptive trait. Huichols themselves say that their peyote customs come
from their gods and are orchestrated by the wise old shamans; the health
and well-being of their people and the fate of their children lie in the
hands of the ancient ones.
A female shaman explained it this way:
I always like to eat peyote. It doesnt 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 elds . . . or a deer hunter . . . Thats 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 ne-tuned an elaborate worldview that provides members with tools, rituals, set, and setting to explore
and advance their understanding of consciousness and human existence.
The introduction of peyote to babies while in the womb or as children
may create distinct pathways in their cognitive development. Exposure
to peyote and its psychoactive principles when young enables Huichols
to perceive the world through a variety of lenses. Through their peyote
customs, Huichols gain a strong sense of cultural identity that lasts
throughout their lifetimes, an identity that is well informed about consciousness and modied states of experiencing internally and externally
the many dimensions of the universe that surrounds them.

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CHAPTER 8

Addiction and the Dynamics of

Altered States of
Consciousness
Andrea E. Blatter, Jorg C. Fachner, and
Michael Winkelman
Drugs, Addiction, and Altered Consciousness
One of the foremost methods for producing altered states of consciousness
(ASC) is the consumption of drugs (Tart, 1969). The basic form of communications for neurons, the basic building blocks of our nervous systems, is
electro-chemical, allowing exogenous drug sources to play a role similar or
identical to that of our central nervous system. Major bodily neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, monoamines, noradrenalin, serotonin, GABA,
anandamide, and dopamine (Maisto, Glizio, & Connors, 2004, p. 45; see
Presti and various chapters on psychoactive substances, this volume) have
exogenous analogues found in drugs such as tobacco, opium, cocaine, and
cannabis. When a drug has a similar chemical structure to that of an endogenous neurotransmitter, the drug can bind with the receptor cells, duping
the receptor cells into reacting as if the original neurotransmitter was stimulating the neuron. Drugs can increase or decrease the synthesis of neurotransmitters, they can interfere in the transport, storage or release of
neurotransmitters, and they can inuence the breakdown of neurotransmitters, block the reuptake, or manipulate activity or blockage (Maisto et al.,
2004). As Previc [this volume] shows, these exogenous stimulants of our
endogenous reward systems can play a major role in a variety of cognitive
and emotional processes. Using and misusing drugs is an old phenomenon
and seems to be a biological universal of humankind like eating, drinking,
sex, and aggression.

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Drug consumption can have many dysfunctional effects, from acute

intoxication leading to bodily or mental damage to psychopathologies,
economic and social loss, accidents, and criminality. On the other hand,
many commonly used drugs have a variety of adaptive advantages. Smith
(1999) reviews evidence that tness benets accrued to our ancestors as
a consequence of their ability to respond to these psychoactive substances.
Across the diverse classes of plant drugs there are effects of enhanced vigilance, the ability to ignore pain in the interest of survival activities,
increased access to mating opportunities, reduction of apprehension and
stress, feelings of detachment and euphoria, increased endurance and
self-condence, enhanced sensory and mental acuity, reduction of defensiveness, and reduction of depression and self-defeating activities. Clearly
many adaptive mechanisms could have been involved in humans physiological and cultural adaptations to environmental sources of
consciousness-altering chemicals that provide relaxation, strength, anxiety
reduction, pain endurance, enhanced bonding, nutrients, and many other
effects. Sullivan and Hagen (2002) review evidence of a long-term evolutionary relationship between psychotropic plant substances and humans
cognitive capacities that indicate there were selective benets of substance
use. They characterize these benets in terms of the ability of plants to
provide neurotransmitter analogues that served as substitutes for endogenous transmitters that are rare or otherwise limited by dietary constraints.
These are primarily in the monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin, as well as acetylcholine, norepinephrine, and dopamine that are
crucial for normal brain function and require dietary precursors. These
neurotransmitters are central to managing stress, exerting selective pressures for metabolic systems that utilize these exogenous sources of precursors for these neurotransmitters.
Although drug taking is a universal phenomenon, it manifests a wide
range of culturally learned patterns that dramatically affect drug reactions,
including addiction (Blatter, 1990; Schivelbusch, 2002; Volger & 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

are taking, but for some the risks do not deter the addictive impulses. For
example, the recognized horrors of the addictive experience are ignored
by the user in the repeated search for the noted pleasurable effects associated with the high of a cocaine rush. To the outsider, the drug-intoxicated
users do not always seem to be in pleasurable states. People who try drugs
often rst 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 addicts dramatic indifference toward everything but his or
her favorite drug and refer to the paradox of addiction: Intoxication is not
an euphoric or pleasurable state anymore (Diekhoff, 1982; Plant 1999).
Consequently, some cultivate highly polytoxicomanic daily consumption
patterns of stimulants to work and depressants to relax, a typical feature of
modern societies. Consumption of drugs and their effects on consciousness
are at the core of one of the most serious problems of modern societies, that
of addictions.

The Constructions of Addiction

Across time and cultures, views of what constitutes addiction and its
causes have varied widely. Protestant (Calvinistic) conceptions of addiction provided the roots of the modern view of addiction (Nolte, 2007,
p. 52). This Reformation perspective of addiction as a moral failing was
succeeded by different phases leading to the systematization and institutionalization of the modern medical concept of addiction. The contemporary view of addiction as a phenomenologically perceivable disease with
many facets has evolved, but although religious-scientic discourse transformed into medico-scientic discourse, the main ingredients have
remained the same. The drunkard of Reformation times was dened as
ill because he did not live a holy life; the drunkard of the industrial era
is dened as ill because he does not meet standard norms such as productivity, functionality, and success, the keywords both of Calvinism and
capitalism (Nolte, 2007, p. 53). The addict of today suffers from a multifaceted and varied disease of compulsions and wanting with xations as
diverse as sex, gambling, food, fetishes, and of course a bewildering variety of natural and synthetic substances.

Several artists (see Volume 1) have described their experiences with drugs and addiction.
William Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, Thomas de Quincey, Eric Clapton, and Keith
Richards, to name just a few, have used drugs for inspiration and were known for their
excessive consumption (Diekhoff, 1982; Fachner, 2006; Plant, 1999; Shapiro, 2003).

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In the 19th century, the addictions of alcohol were expanded to the

opiates, which since then have been recognized as dependency forming.
In the course of time, more substances were included under addiction
theory. Since the second half of the 20th century, a dematerialization of
addiction has taken place and immaterial dependences (e.g., gambling,
sex, work) have proliferated. A new sensibility for nonsubstance addictions has come to public consciousness, and a new eld of social problems
emerged (Schetsche, 2007) in this new phase of the concept of addiction
(Nolte, 2007, p. 54). Since 1990, another change has been visible, mainly
in European politics in the trend toward a more accepting drug policy of
risk reduction, especially in case of opiate addicts (Valentine, 2007;
WHO, UNODC, & UNAIDS, 2004), but the farewell to the radical goal
of abstinence in favor of risk reduction strategies has not yet reached other
areas, like tobacco or cannabis consumption (Hess, Kolte, & SchmidtSemisch, 2004).
Since the second half of the 20th century, addiction has been
perceived as one of the great social problems of modern societies, and in
the 21st century, nearly every behavioral problem has been thought of as
an addiction. Nonetheless, the concepts of addiction and dependence
remain vague and value bound. By WHO standards, the term addiction
was ofcially replaced by dependence in 1974 because of the negative connotation of the term addiction. In its popular meaning, addiction carries a
moral tone of reproach, suggesting weakness or absence of the will and
lack of discipline (Luik, 1996, p. 23). In this sense, addiction involves a
value judgment and, strictly speaking, is no more of a scientic 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 reected in the medical classicatory systems Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) and International Classication of Diseases (ICD10) frames addiction as a psychopathological disorder characterized by a habitual behavior with main features of tolerance,
withdrawal, and craving. The DSM-IV denition of dependence is based
on a spectrum of possible criteria ranging from acute intoxication to withdrawal with attacks of sudden cramps. There is no consistent picture of
dependence, but there are many different types and widely varying
degrees. Dependence therefore is a multifactor phenomenon that is not

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness

limited to a single substance or object or situation. Notably, the medical

denitions of drug dependence, abuse, and habituation are based on
descriptions of habitual behavior, and they do not specify the role of drugs
(Maisto, Galizio, & Connors, 2004, p. 15ff ). Drug-related behaviors and
experiences such as physical and psychological dependence (requiring
the drug to function), tolerance (requiring increasing doses of the drug
to achieve the same effect), abuse, withdrawal syndromes (negative symptoms after discontinuing the use of the drug), craving, and cognitive and
psychotic disturbances used in DSM-IV for diagnostic purposes remain
vague and imprecise and include a moral, disapproving tone. The one collective and most important feature of addiction is craving, the strong,
sometimes irresistible desire to consume a drug, a rather subjective feature
not measurable in clinical settings; it remains an extremely vague concept.
There are no objectively observable behavioral standards, and craving
might be applied to any signicant 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 difcult to separate physical and psychological dependence from overpowering desire and habituation. Many critics conclude
that the denitions of dependence employ terms that are virtually indenable and heavily value laden. Only physical tolerance can be a straightforward measure of addiction, while psychological dependence is less
inevitably manifested and more susceptible to the elements of set and setting (Peele, 1985; Zinberg, 1984).
Although addiction is a heterogeneous group of pathologies or disliked
behaviors that exceed simple generalities (Luik, 1996, p. 21), there are
nonetheless noteworthy commonalities in the dominant perspectives of
medicine and science. One is the conviction that addiction, including tolerance, withdrawal, and craving, involves biochemical processes that leave
the organism no choice but to act in the stereotypical ways of addiction.
This process is thought to be inexorable, universal, and irreversible, independent of individual group, cultural, or situational variations, whether
animal or human, whether child or adult (Peele, 1985, p. 1).

Total Drugs Effect and Set and Setting

In contrast to the medical emphasis on the biological effects of drugs, the
concepts of environment, setting, expectations, and culture are central constructs in addiction theories of the social sciences (Dollinger & SchmidtSemisch, 2007; Maisto et al., 2004; Uchtenhagen & Zieglga nsberger,

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2000). Acceptance and use of a certain psychotropic substance in a population, a subcultural group, an occupational group, and so forth involve
learned behaviors determined by personal characteristics and sociocultural factors (Becker, 1963; Blatter, 2007). Expectations shape personal
behavior and experiences, and drug use involves signicant 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 (Blatter, 2000, 2007).
Individual and cultural variations in responses to drugs reect total
drug effects, how the physiological effects of substances are mediated by
personal, social, and cultural inuences. Helman (1994) makes the distinction between macro and micro context effects. Macro context drug
effects involve inuences from the sociocultural system; these include
social, political, economic, and moral factors and inuences 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 reected in
set and setting inuences. These involve the expectations of the recipient, including attitudes, knowledge, and cognitive preferences of the person (the set as in mindset) and the social and physical context (setting)
of the drug consumption or medication. These psychodynamic effects are
investigated as part of placebo effects, where nonpharmacological factors
include arbitrary drug attributes such as color and shape, the physical setting in which the drug is administered, and the prescribers characteristics
such as status and personality. The nding that drug effects, addiction,
and dependence are situationally, socially, and culturally determined
questions the disease view of addiction (Peele, 1985, p. 128). Nonbiological factors, such as personality, cognitive and developmental factors, cultural, social, situational, and ritualistic aspects, inuence the reaction to
drugs (Blatter, 2007). Situational factors reect a reality of desire, that
drug effects cannot be separated from the situation in which the drug is
taken. The rituals that accompany use and addiction are important elements in continued use and show the important ritualistic aspect of use
and dependence.

The Paradox of the Biomedical Concept of Addiction

There is a paradox in the medical approach to addiction in that practice
does not follow ideology. Although addiction is seen in the medical framework as a physical and biological condition, the dominant treatment models

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness

of American biomedicine have come to follow the Alcoholics Anonymous

(1976, 1987) approaches that do not share the medical concept of addiction. The underlying ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), reputed to
be the most widespread and effective treatment system in the United States,
advocates the perspective that addiction is a spiritual disease and that consequently the addict is powerless in the face of the addiction and can only
escape through a surrender to a higher spiritual power, however one conceptualizes that power. The AA approach explicitly conceptualizes addiction in terms of altered consciousness, with its 12-step program including
changes in consciousness and a spiritual awakening as fundamental to overcoming addiction. The AA recovery process emphasizes the importance of
an alteration of consciousness, calling for a new state of consciousness
and being (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1987, p. 106) designed to replace the
self-destructive pursuit of alcohol-induced altered states with a positive,
life-enhancing approach.
The engagement of biomedicine with this alternate framework is so
complete that the American Medical Association will only accept as
adequate programs for physician rehabilitation that are so extensive in
terms of frequency of meetings and other features (availability of followup, support systems) that the only program that may fulll 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 modication
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 eld
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 motherinfant bonding and especially breastfeeding as natural human
experiences in which extreme selective narrowing of consciousness occurs
(Metzner, 1994, p. 7).

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Dependence is a contracted state of consciousness that appears as a

compulsive behavior that is xed and repetitive. The addictive lifestyle
becomes more and more ritualistic and restricted, and attention and
behavior become isolated from interpersonal and occupational relations.
Some ASC such as transcendence and ecstasy involve an expanded awareness of consciousness that seems to exceed the normal baseline condition
of awareness, exemplied in mystical experiences of connection with the
entire universe [see Beauregard, Volume 2]. In this model, addiction is
represented by an extremely narrow, focused scope or even point of consciousness. In contrast, ASC are time-limited states in which the patterns
of thought, feeling, and mood of perception and sensation are altered from
the ordinary baseline conditions.
From a neurophysiological perspective (Tassi & Muzet, 2001), both
dependent and transcendent ASC may be produced by a variety of induction methods, not only drugs but also behaviors such as sleep or sensory
deprivation, meditation, and so forth. Additionally, Tassi and Muzet
(2001, p. 185) noted a wide range of physiological states of consciousness,
reecting spontaneously changing levels of vigilance, arousal, and biological rhythms. Human states of consciousness are constantly changing,
undergoing periodic uctuations during the 24-hour circadian cycle and
the regular modulation of physiological processes shifts in states of consciousness between waking, sleeping, and dreaming. A similar periodicity
of ASC is seen in a second endogenous cycle, the 90-minute ultradian
cycle of doing and resting, a shift from left-brain to right-brain predominance reecting differential sympathetic and parasympathetic activation
(Rossi, 1991; see Kokoszka & Wallace, this volume). These uctuations
of consciousness are natural and inevitable, with health, well-being, and
creativity linked to the ability to tune into and utilize naturally occurring
and articially induced modulations of consciousness (Metzner, 1994,
p. 4). Modulating consciousness with external stimuli is a pervasive and
natural human drive. Humans have developed a variety of catalysts and
triggers of ASC, including foods, sounds, rhythms, visual stimuli, movements, breathing exercises, hypnosis, meditation, shamanistic practices,
religious rituals, and mainly drugs that can capture our capacities for
addiction. Our addictive tendencies must be understood in relationship
to our similarly pervasive tendency to deliberately seek ASC.
When an external stimulus, like a drug or a certain behavior, has the
ability to produce an immediate, effective, and pleasant modication of
mood and sensation, there is a high likelihood for repetition and a potential for the development of attachment and dependence (Metzner, 1994,
p. 4). When a behavior becomes so habitual as to dominate the individual

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness

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 motherinfant bonding.
Dependence, compulsions, and attachments, whether or not they
involve drugs, involve a xation of attention and a narrowing of perceptional focus. This disposition to xate and focus attention is extremely
useful and benecial where there is a need to reduce pain, fear, or anxiety.
Addictive drugs are potent modiers 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 signicant; ingestion of drugs that
produce dependence is generally associated with ritualistic behavior.
Development of xed rituals is essential for the formation of addictive
behavior (Metzner, 1994). Compulsive repetition is described for alcohol,
opiate, and cocaine consumers, and ritualistic ingestion is quite obvious in
the well-known cases of socially sanctioned and commercially promoted
addictive substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee. Ingestion rituals are also evident in food addictions and in the case of activity addictions such as compulsive sexual activity, gambling, shopping, or
working. These patterns reect an ability of ritual to reduce anxiety and
change consciousness through absorption in routine tasks (Metzner,
1994, p. 8). Indeed, ritual is a cross-cultural pattern used to alter consciousness with deep biogenetic roots in primate rituals that function to
reduce aggression and enhance relaxation (Winkelman, 2010). Moreover,
rituals are important, too, when it comes to learning controlled, nonaddictive consumption patterns for highly addictive substances. Studies of controlled use of heroin (Zinberg, 1984) and cocaine (DeCorte, 2000) have
illustrated the possibilities of using these substances regularly without
developing tolerance, withdrawal, and dependence by following strict

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rules of rare collective ingestion. These ndings emphasize the importance

of factors beyond the physiological effects in explaining addictions and the
alterations of consciousness sought.
Although the search for transcendence and expanded or heightened
states of consciousness may involve drugs, it is not usually characterized
by dependence. Generally, the consciousness-expanding psychedelics do
not lead to addiction (McKim, 1991; Nichols, 2004). Their effects are
too unpredictable, varied, subtle, and delayed to allow the immediate pain
or tension relief the addict seeks (Metzner, 1994). Furthermore, in contrast to the narrowing focus of addiction, psychedelics tend to produce
experiences that widen the focus of attention beyond the boundaries of
the ordinary or baseline state. They represent the opposite of the addictive
contractions of consciousness. However, transcendent experiences themselves, whether induced by drugs or other means, can also become the
object of addiction with a similar state regularly involved and to the exclusion of other interests (Metzner, 1994, p. 9). This seems to be a rare exception. In contrast is the widely noted ability of psychedelics to counter
addictions (see Winkelman, 2009b).
Calabrese (2007) maintains that many addiction professionals consider the Native American Church (NAC) to be the only effective treatment
of alcoholism among Native Americans. NAC members consume peyote in
an all-night meeting during which all the community may participate in
singing, prayers, chanting, and drumming. Peyote contains mescaline,
with stimulant properties similar to ephedrine and amphetamines, and
has additional effects mediated through the serotonergic system (McKim,
1991). Peyote produces a physical and psychological afterglow (see
Halpern, 1996, for review) that has been noted to be conducive to therapeutic interventions by increased openness to communication regarding
ones problems.
Pharmacological effects are not the only treatment mechanism. The
effectiveness of the NAC as addiction treatment includes a variety of
supportive psychotherapeutic modalities: a master guide, marathon group
sessions, ego-reduction techniques, social networks, and self-actualization
(Calabrese, 1997, 2007; Wiedman, 1990). The NAC also addresses addiction through social psychological mechanisms, forming a sense of community that promotes a new identity and a social support group that does not
use nor tolerate alcohol use. The NAC brings hope to Native American
communities, instilling a moral code of devotion to family and obligation
to the community and producing feelings of spirituality and unity (Aberle,
1966). Peyotism provides Native Americans with religious healing, transcendence, release from guilt, guidance, and a sense of purpose.

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness

Heggenhougen (1997) suggests that therapeutic effects involve managing

cultural alienation experienced by young Native Americans, providing a
context for a ritual death and rebirth, and construction of a positive identity with ones culture. Jilek (1994) conveys the peyotists perspective that
the peyote ritual combats alcoholism through reducing physical and
mental stress and enhancing mental and physical strength through contact
with the supernatural. Calabrese (1997, 2007) describes the Peyote Way as
a cultural psychiatry that increases suggestibility and leaves adults more
open to education and mental health interventions. In this sense, peyote
rituals heal by shaping consciousness in ways that facilitate symbolic healing processes. Calabrese (2007) also notes that unlike many traditional etiologies that attribute personal misfortune to supernatural causes (e.g.,
witches, taboo violations), the Peyote Way instead places the causal factors
in a lack of personal responsibility for ones 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 inuence of these substances, which Winkelman
(2007) calls psychointegrators, people can acquire spiritual insight, learn
to recognize and identify their own restricted and destructive patterns of
addictive behavior, and switch to new, healthier perspectives and behaviors. These effects are dependent on set and setting but have cross-cultural
manifestations that reect physiological mechanisms.
The interrelationship of drug addiction, ASC, and spirituality is
a theme repeated across cultures (Heggenhougen, 1997; Jilek, 1994;
Winkelman, 2001, 2009a, 2009b). The universality of spiritual practices
associated with ASC suggests a need for experiencing alterations of consciousness that are intrinsically linked to concepts of spirituality. The
association of drug addiction with our drive for seeking alterations of consciousness involves a common biological basis in the brain for rewarding
and addicting experiences, particularly in relation to others. The concept
of meaningful social connections links spiritual states and our addictions
in our deep-seated need and desire for social bonding, a function of our
paleomammalian brain where the predominance of opioids are found
(cf. MacLean, 1990).

The Reward System and ASC

Recent ndings in the neurobiology of addiction research using brainimaging techniques provide insights into the development of addiction
involving anatomic and functional connections between hippocampal

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and amygdala structures that modulate emotions and regulate affects. A

common quality of all psychoactive drugs is that they alter the evaluation
of sensory input and its conceptual comparison and assessment with
known information (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). This happens through
drug-specic individual activation and inhibition of the interaction among
the midbrain, cerebrum, and cerebellum. One of the basic functions of the
hippocampal structures seems to be the generation of reasonable internal
world-models and the comparison of expected and incoming data. Metzner
(1994) discussed the effect of drugs on contracted and expanded consciousness using a circle model of potential awareness (p. 5ff). Awareness is narrowed under the inuence of addictive drugs or expanded
under the inuence of psychedelic drugs. The model is based on the
potential sum of sensory information reaching the brain structures, throttled by regulatory mechanisms in the neuronal pathways.
The mesolimbic system of the midbrain changes the evaluation parameters through emotional coloring of sensory data. This paleomammalian
brain process provides the emotional dynamics of life, memory, and the
basic sense of social self. This area of the brain managing our emotional
and social life is also the primary anatomical location for the receptors
involved in drug responses: our endogenous reward system.
At the center of neurobiological theories of addiction is the concept of
the endogenous reward system. Anatomically, it includes connections of
neurons that lead from the tegmentum (area ventralis tegmentalis, origin
of dopaminergic mesolimbic neurons) and project into the nucleus
accumbens, prefrontal cortex, and other areas of the brain (Emrich &
Schneider, 2006). The nucleus accumbens is the center of the reward system, with numerous opiate receptors as well as dopaminergic neurocytes.
Those are modulated by endorphins, the endogenous opiate of the brain
(Emrich & Schneider, 2006). The human brain contains various kinds of
opiate receptors, (e.g., -, -, -, and -receptors enkephalines and dynorphin) with different functions. Activating -receptors, for example, leads
to a euphoric feeling, while activating -receptors triggers fear and dysphoria. Endorphins are neuropeptides able to dock at the various kinds
of opiate receptors in the brain. Precursory proteins, from where the
endorphins emerge, are found in notably high density in all areas of the
brain where emotions and motivation are modulated (Emrich &
Schneider, 2006).
Another neuropharmacological system involves an endogenous cannabinoid receptor system that is evolutionarily highly conservative and has a
high density of receptors in diverse parts of the human and animal brain
(Iversen, 2008). These anandamides appear to increase release of dopamine

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness

in the reward system, as does cannabis use (Mechoulam, Hanus, & Martin,
1994). Other substances like cocaine, amphetamines, and MDMA also
lead primarily to increased release of dopamine in the reward system.
Following dopaminergic release, endorphins are also released in the reward
system.
Psychoactive substances, as well as physical stimuli or behavioral patterns perceived as pleasurable, have reinforcing properties that can be
ascribed to the neuronal reward system. The complex systems of neurotransmitters interacting with the nervous system to arouse euphoria are
not yet satisfactorily understood. The reward system theory postulates that
reaching pleasurable or euphoric states is the major goal of drug users and
addicts; further, that emotional assessment of occurrences leads to the
preference for states that are perceived as pleasant by the nervous system.
Psychoactive drugs as well as specic behavioral patterns can activate the
rewarding system and are therefore used to close the cycle of motivationsearch-fulllment (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). Eating chocolate or a
refreshing drink with some sugar, as well as various other activities, can
also activate the reward system (Small, Zatorre, Dagher, Evans, & JonesGotman, 2001).

Dopamine: Pleasure, Lust, and Desire

Pleasure, lust, and desire are essential evolutionary programs that guarantee reproduction and satiation and are mediated by the feeling that
something we like has happened (Esch & Stefano, 2004). Intense emotions connected to pleasure, lust, and desire connotate the valence and
meaning of an experience and inform about the salience of an event being
different from normal. Depending on the stimulus, we may develop an
increasing desire to experience this intensity again. However, pleasure
and desire are regulated in different ways. Pleasure is the state in which
we feel satiated, happy, and ne, and which we seek. Desire, or lust, is
the drive that brings us to this state but has a mechanism of its own.
In pleasure, desire, and lust, the dopamine system is active in a tonic
and a phasic way. First, the tonic component of dopamine release in the
prefrontal cortex of the brain regulates the readiness to react to stimuli.
Second, there is an increase in dopamine release (phasic) when meaningful objects are in the focus of attention; the more dopamine is released, the
higher is the personal meaning and valence of the object in focus. All
drugs of abuse increase dopamine release and therefore affect these two
ways of dopaminergic functioning (Yacubian & Buchel, 2009). As a result
of unconscious sensory input changes under the inuence of the drugs

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taken, a variety of possible neurotransmitter interactions will start to

modulate the experience of pleasure.
Although pleasure is mainly mediated by the dopamine system, a longing for satisfying experiences like the taste of chocolate remains even when
dopamine release is inhibited. Pleasure involves a variety of neurotransmitters and endocrinological communicators (Berridge & Kringelbach,
2008). Although the opioid system is mainly responsible for pain reduction, the endocannabinoid system seems to enhance sensory experience
and therefore enhance the longing for pleasure (Esch & Stefano, 2004;
Mahler, Smith, & Berridge, 2007).

Opiate and Dopamine Interaction

In the case of opiates, external neurotransmitters seem to stimulate the
mesolimbic dopaminergic system more than endogenous neurotansmitters (endorphins) do. Repeated application of opiates leads to tolerance
with the decrease of several pharmacological effects like analgesia, respiratory depression, and emetic effects. Tolerance is reversible and declines
after a few days. Tolerance and withdrawal symptoms are explained by
accelerated metabolism, restriction, and decoupling of receptor systems
and neurobiological adjustment on diverse levels, for instance raised sympathetic tonus and alteration of calcium channels on cellular level. The opiates change intracellular transduction of signals and lead to a change in
transcription rates and changed activity of the relating neuronal circuits
(Kamphausen, 2009). Although tolerance and withdrawal disappear
rather quickly, behavioral changes can be very robust. Even after a longer
period of abstinence, the risk of relapse persists. This may be explained by
persistent neuroplastic changes (see below) including CREB and DeltaFoSB-mediated triggering of the craving processes (Ammon-Treiber,
Mayer, & Hollt, 2006). One possibility for the development of addiction
then is that repeated stimulation leads to a change in motivation and
amplifying mechanisms, mediated via neurobiological adaptation of drugs
with a solid internal assessment: that is, drug effects are determined from
the drug action itself. Moreover, it has been shown that release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens seems to correlate more with the anticipation of reward than with reward in itself. The repeated application of
opiates leads to a raised longing rather than to a heightened award
(Ammon-Treiber et al., 2006, p. 53).
Neuroanatomically, some pathway seems to lead from the prefrontal
cortex directly to the temporal lobes and hippocampus, where comparative functions of sensory stimulus (bottom-up) and internal representation

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness

(top-down) data take place (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). Within this context, there are two possibilities to develop addiction:
a. Drugs with a relative solid internal assessment (like opiates) are to a large
extent independent of situational cues. They have a hermetic or closed,
context-independent, and immediate effect on pain and tension while acting on the primary mesolimbic centers of assessment and induce pleasurable states with the accordant reinforcement properties, independent of
contextual or situational cues.
b. Drugs with a contextual bonding and assessment (like cannabis and
hallucinogens) are more situational in their effect. Emotions and perceptions mediated by the hippocampal comparator systems modulate the
drug effect much more than drugs with a solid internal assessment
(Emrich & Schneider, 2006, p. 16).

There are differences in the degree and frequency of striving and fullling 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 nancial deal. The nancial crisis in 2008 suggests that those who were making
big money exhibited the same pattern of loss of control and irresponsibility as addicted drug users. Neuro-economical research has shown that
expecting to make monetary prot 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 inuence decision-making processes by
valencing expected rewards and their intensity. This illustrates a fundamental feature of addiction, its relationship to some extrinsic system of
reward and evaluation.

Drug Sensitization and Neuroplasticity

When it comes to drugs, the separation of pleasure and desire is the
most tricky trap for the consumers on their way from drug use to abuse.
Addiction research has identied the two culprits for this process of
drug sensitization. While dopamine levels rise after drug ingestion, a protein that serves as a nuclear transcription factor abbreviated as CREB
(stands for cAMP [cyclic adenosine monophosphate] response element-

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binding) is released, and this leads to a reduced sensitivity of the reward

system to the drug. Another transcription factor called DeltaFos-B then
comes into action and acts like a drug memory concerning the amount
of reward the drug has offered (McClung et al., 2004). This memory trace
increases its somatic impact with the amount of drug use. As the CREB
release is terminated after drug action, the DeltaFos-B activity and its corresponding information stays stable, inducing a memory trace that makes
the consumer long again for that experience (Esch & Stefano, 2004).
However, this process of sensitization also happens with other rewarding pleasure experiences like sex or satiation after food. The context of
drug use and the experiences of the rewardsthe social setting and
psychological statecontribute 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 brains reward centers. Drugs act directly on the neurotransmitter systems of the brain; therefore, the remaining drug memory trace is very strong. Opioid and
dopamine signal pathways bypass orbitofrontal control functions, and
the memory traces induced by DeltaFos-B alert the pleasure-seeking system when cues associated with the drug experience are present (Esch &
Stefano, 2004). If this cue has become certain music or an associated lifestyle and arouses the person within a state-dependent recall (Fachner,
2006, 2010), the desire or craving (the narrowed scope of searching for
immediate satisfaction) starts again.

Conclusions: Addiction as Culturally Shaped Consciousness

The contemporary problems of addiction are socially fashioned phenomena, emerging with modernity. The social-constructivist approaches
illustrate that the effects of drugs and the experiences of dependence and
addiction are not merely physiological processes but rather social products. Addiction is a multifaceted phenomenon that takes place along a
continuum and is not limited to single substances or objects but is a compulsive behavior, and consequently it involves a narrowed scope of awareness. Generally, socio-cultural learning is crucial to use patterns, making
the concepts of set and setting central to explanations for vulnerability to
addictive behavior and cultural differences in addiction potential to substances.
Neurobiology gives insight into the basic physiological mechanisms
that promote pleasure-seeking behavior. The similarity between

Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness

endogenous and external neurotransmitters suggests a biological function

for the human striving to enhance and constrict consciousness and reach
especially pleasurable states. Transcendent or ecstatic experiences and
psychedelic drugs represent the opposite of the addictive contractions
and involve a widening of the focus of attention beyond the boundaries
of the ordinary or baseline state. As their effects are too unpredictable, varied, subtle, and delayed, they do not foster dependence and this may be
because they are serotonin rather than dopamine based.
With regard to ASC, the view of addiction as the tunnel perspective of
a heavily constricted state of consciousness is central for understanding
and treatment. The disposition to xate and focus consciousness on pleasurable states can be useful and benecial where there is a need to reduce
pain, fear, or anxiety, but it bears the danger of habituation and dependence. Searching for transcendence and expanded states of consciousness
is a pervasive and natural human activity. In psychedelics therapies,
patients widen their awareness with the help of drug effects. They may
get acquainted with spiritual insight and learn to overcome addictive patterns of behavior. In successful cases, they may adopt new, healthier perspectives, while their addictive tendencies mature out. Thus, spiritual
perspectives become crucial tools in a maturation process that links isolated and addiction-prone individuals into broader social and symbolic
networks. These provide meaningful connections that assure well-being
and self-comfort in ways that precludes a need to rely upon external sources of chemical reward.

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CHAPTER 9

Altering Consciousness Through

Sexual Activity
Michael Maliszewski, Barbara
Vaughan, Stanley Krippner, Gregory
Holler, and Cheryl Fracasso
One thing [is] missing . . . in the whole of the sexological literature, is a good
set of phenomenological studies. We simply do not have a literature comparing one sexual subjective consciousness with another. We do not have
reports on how male or female sexuality feels to the particular person . . .
I think we are ready now to try to get the feeling, the consciousness, of what
the sexual feeling is like from the inside.
Maslow, 1965, p. 135

Introduction
The topic of human sexuality has held a prominent position throughout history. A variety of different perspectives has been applied to the understanding of sexual behaviors, including psychobiology (Davidson, 1980; Passie
et al., 2005), phenomenological and existential psychology (Kockelmans,
1987; Koestenbaum, 1974; Valle, 1998), and humanistic and transpersonal
psychologies (Boorstein, 1996, 1997; Frankl, 1966, 1978; Friedman, 1992;
Hart & Tomlinson, 1970; Holbrook, 2008; Kleinplatz, 2001a; Wade, 2004;
Washburn, 1994). In human sexuality research, contributions of content,
method, and approach from humanistic psychology (Farber, Brink, &
Raskin, 1996; Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989; Maslow, 1987; May,
1969; Rowan, 1988) as well as experiential orientations (Kleinplatz, 1998,
2001b; Wade, 2004) have enriched our understanding of the human aspect
of sexual activity. Historical surveys of sexual behavior have revealed
the ubiquity of the human preoccupation with sex both substantially
and historically (de Riencort, 1974; Lewinsohn, 1958; Sussman, 1976;

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Taylor, 1953). To a great extent, the degree to which the different patterns
of sexuality were either accepted or condemned has reected specic
cultural beliefs that were adhered to within a given time and setting (e.g.,
Bloch, 1933; Jensen, 1976; Sussman, 1976).
There is a great deal of material that supports the cultural relativity of
sexual practices and beliefs in our culture today (e.g., Gould, 1976). A
review of the historical trends and contemporary attitudes held toward
sexuality quickly illustrates the developmental sequences that have led to
the current state of sexual expression, be it behavioral or attitudinal, in
many parts of the world (e.g., Brecher, 1976; Sussman, 1976). Present cultural trends demonstrate many social changes, and there is little question
that these changes have an impact on the ways we view or conceptualize
sexual behavior. New scientic discoveries, changes in the legal statutes
concerning sexual behavior, and humanitys 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 rening 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 briey 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 peoples experiences during sexual intercourse. 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

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 specic 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 rst person to record very small numbers
of detailed descriptions of peoples experiences in this area. Unfortunately,
his writings (Von Urban, 1949, 1958) did not attract much attention.
Marghanita Laskis contribution to this area was to survey individual
descriptions of ecstasy and to isolate those events that triggered these
experiences (Laski, 1961). Among the triggers in her group of participants
(18 women and 8 men), she found that sexual love was the most important factor responsible for inducing ecstatic states within a signicant percentage of her research participants. Ecstasies triggered by sexual love
were characterized by strong feelings of release or renewal, a decrease in
feelings of indifference and of ones 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 specic details or descriptions of the experiences.
Nevertheless, despite these limitations, Laski must be credited with at least
exploring this neglected area of study.
A third set of studies in this area was conducted by Andrew M. Greeley
and William C. McCready involving some 2,300 research participants
(Greeley, 1977). These investigators explored the relationship between
(a) marital condition and satisfaction and (b) three types of mystical experiences: those triggered by lovemaking, childbirth, and a third variety that
was termed a light experience. Greeley and McCready found that 6 percent of their sample reported experiencing ecstasy only during lovemaking, while 1 percent of their sample reported visualizing lights while also
experiencing ecstasy during lovemaking. The largest group of people
reported having these lovemaking experiences were married (the majority
of them happily married), although unmarried men more often reported
having ecstatic experiences than unmarried women. Unfortunately, this
study had a number of limitations: The limited number of people reporting their ecstatic experience, the lack of detail concerning the nature of
the experiences reported, and methodological issues concerning the validity and reliability of the respondents reports.

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A study conducted by Wade (2004) was designed to explore the nature

and frequency of transcendent sexual experiences. Consisting of 53
females and 38 males who participated in person in semistructured interviews, this investigation revealed a variety of transcendent experiences
among some of the participants. Among these experiences were merging
with partners, body shape alterations, experiencing the sense of a eld or
force between partners, and becoming one with nature. These types of
experiences also impacted on the participants by enhancing relationships,
personal growth, healing from past traumas, and experiencing sex as
sacred. As Wade indicated, this study was purposive rather than
representative and no attempt was made to focus on quantitative analyses
or assess an entire range of altered-state sexual experiences.
More recently, Holbrook (2008) conducted a pilot study to explore the
psychological characteristics associated with altered states of consciousness (ASC) during transcendent sexual states among 13 participants
(9 women and 4 men). Utilizing a questionnaire approach, Holbrook
identied 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 individuals developmental focus as opposed to the sexual experiences per se. Aside from a very
limited number of participants, respondents were selected from a group of
people actively engaged in the practice of meditation and yoga, limiting
generalization of ndings to the population at large.

Early Psychological Theories: Unconscious Aspects of Sexuality

Sigmund Freud
A brief review of Freuds work is relevant here since he theorized that
sexual repression leads to neurosis (Freud, 1905, 1933). From this theoretical lens, Freud suggested that the personality is made up of both conscious and unconscious parts that are composed of the id, ego, and
superego. The id is the largely unconscious part that seeks pleasure,
immediate gratication, and is driven by sex and aggression. As Freud
(1933) famously stated, We call it . . . a cauldron full of seething expectations (p. 74). In contrast, the ego is the mostly conscious part of the
personality that operates by the reality principle and is driven by reason
yet has the goal of satisfying the ids instincts. The third part of the personality is the superego, which represents morality and our sense of right and
wrong. According to Freud (1905, 1933), anxiety is experienced when the

Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity

ego feels threatened by conicting 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 ve psychosexual stages of development where sensual pleasure is obtained through different erogenous
zones at specic ages. These ve 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 (02 years), the anus during the
anal stage (24 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 conicting feelings
against the same-sex parent. According to Freud, if these conicts 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 conicts are not resolved during any of these stages, Freud suggested
that developmental arrest may occur, marked by sensual preoccupation
with specic 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 gratication
by inicting pain or humiliation on a sexual partner, while masochism is
the practice of deriving pleasure from experiencing pain and humiliation
inicted by others or by oneself. Both practices can lead to extreme alterations in consciousness, often of an ecstatic nature. One variation of the
latter, auto-erotic asphyxiation, is the practice of cutting off ones air supply to heighten sexual pleasure, a procedure that can cause injury or death
if it goes out of control.

Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich expanded on Freuds concept that the ego is bodybased (i.e., based on erogenous zones), and portrayed psychological
defense mechanisms as both internal cognitive processes and external manifestations that he referred to as body armoring (Reich, 1980/1933). Reich
described body armoring as chronic muscle tensions that protect the ego
from being overwhelmed with unacceptable feelings (cited in Friedman,
2005, p. 1) and considered that through therapeutic touch and other means
a liberation of the natural orgasmic reex could be achieved.

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Conceptual Models: Sexuality and ASC

In contrast to the abovementioned investigations, Charles T. Tart, a
research psychologist, proposed a more sophisticated methodological
approach toward investigating the phenomenological and psychological
experiences during sexual intercourse. Based upon previous investigations
in the area of consciousness studies, particularly his own investigation of
marijuana intoxication (Tart, 1971), Tart proposed a systems approach
to understanding sexual behavior in terms of ASC. The basic premise of
his work was that high sexual arousal, interacting with social, cultural,
and psychological factors, can induce a radical, transient reorganization
of consciousness that differs from ordinary, waking awareness. He
referred to this experience as the sexual discrete altered state of consciousness (Tart, 1978). Tarts systems approach is primarily phenomenological (as opposed to the study of objective facts such as frequency
of intercourse, etc.). He pointed out that people engage in sexual activity
primarily in order to have certain kinds of experiences and, therefore,
investigations should be approached from this perspective. In this context,
sexual experiences can be viewed in what could be termed basic awareness patterns interacting with psychological structures (components of
the mind/body performing one or more related psychological functions).
According to this model, the nature of sexual experiences can be
determined by outlining experimental criteria useful in detecting different
states of consciousness (Tart, 1978). Categories that could be used in such
an analysis would include emotions, memory, identity, cognition, perception, space-time sense, and the like. By comparing and contrasting the
nature and quality of experiences that occur during sexual intercourse to
those observed during the ordinary waking state, the phenomenology of
sexual experiences can be explored empirically.

Orgasm as an Altered State of Consciousness

Julian Davidson (1980) suggested that orgasm could be classied as an
ASC since it has several features in common with mystical states. Utilizing
Tarts (1975) denition of an ASC as a qualitative departure from customary
experience, Davidson proposed that orgasm meets this criterion since it represents a temporary shift in space/time orientation, departure from ordinary
consciousness, and letting go. As he (Davidson, 1980) described it:
Destabilizing conditions occur in the case of orgasm. These include intense
physical stimulation, exercise, rhythmic motion, and focused attention

Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity

all of which tend to disrupt the normal state of consciousness and stop the
internal dialogue that is a condition of its maintenance. Major physiological
changes that operate here include vasomotor and muscular events and,
generally, strong autonomic nervous system activation, which resemble
destabilizing events for many other ASCs. The capacity to let go of inhibition and self consciousness is necessary to some extent for orgasm, as it
seems to be for mystical (and other) ASCs. (p. 293)

Although the orgasm itself is generally short lived, Davidson (1980)

pointed out that some people are able to prolong this ASC, particularly
women who have reported successive, multiple orgasms extending over
a relatively long period of time.

Psychophysiological Models for Understanding Sexuality and ASC

Davidson (1980) suggested that sexual experiences are transactional in
nature, containing both sensory and cognitive components. Physiological
and biological changes that occur during sexual arousal and are well documented include hormonal changes (increased testosterone in men, estrogen in women), decreased central nervous system activity, muscular
contractions, vascular changes, (e.g., increased blood ow to the sexual
organs), and increased limbic system activity. Interestingly, Davidson proposed that the limbic system is a more primitive system (the oldest in evolutionary terms) and its dominance during transcendent sexual states may
contribute to the sense of timelessness, absorption, and letting go of
ones sense of boundaries [see Beauregard, this volume].
From another view, Torsten Passie and colleagues (2003, 2004) suggested that hyperventilation may be correlated to ASC experienced during
sexual arousal. From this perspective, accelerated breathing and involuntary groaning during sexual arousal lead to physiological changes that
can induce a state of hyperventilation (increased heart rate, decreased oxygen ow to the brain, decreased central nervous system activity). It is well
known that hyperventilation is associated with ASC (Masters & Johnson,
1966, reported similar ndings) and may serve as a mechanism that intensies and/or induces transcendent states of sexual experiences. Increased
prolactin secretion may also play a role in ecstatic states and ASC experienced during and after sexual activity (Passie, Hartmann, Schneider,
Emrich, & Kruger, 2005). Studies examining the physiological effects of
MDMA (a drug commonly known as ecstasy) found that increased prolactin accounted for euphoric states reported and for a decrease in sexual

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desire (although users felt extremely sensual). Interestingly, Passie and

colleagues (2005) found this to be similar to the postorgasmic state, which
also showed an increase in prolactin secretion.

Transpersonal Categories of ASC Triggered by Sexual Activity

Stanislav Grof (1985), a transpersonal psychiatrist, has suggested that
sexual activity can lead to two types of transpersonal experiences that he
referred to as oceanic sex and tantric sex. Oceanic sex consists of a playful
and mutually nourishing ow and exchange of energies resembling a
dance. The aim here is to experience a loss of ones 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 ow of life in its external ux and becoming one with

Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity

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

very suspicious of rituals, techniques of salvation, and against the performance of any sexual practices. Different factions or groups, which fall
within scholarly designations of religious Daoism and Daoist yoga developed later in time and embraced sexual practices (Wile, 1992). Goals of
the practitioner could vary, ranging from a householder trying to nd 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 specic techniques, the circulation of qi along circuits (meridians) and different centers was the core practice. Mind was directed to
the dantian (elixir eld) 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, specic postures, visualizations, and sphincter control were involved in this process. Distinct from
practices in the other religious traditions, the qi was then directed down
the ren meridian beginning in the eyebrows, entering the mouth, and traveling down the throat, past the heart and stomach and back to the dantian.
Today this practice is generally called the microcosmic orbit. Without
this phase of the practice, it was held that medical problems could develop
(Wile, 1992).
As to those seeking the most rareed experiences, the goal sought by
these practitioners was immortality, which was viewed as a transcendent
state. The techniques associated with sexual practices developed largely
because people were not achieving the desired results through solo practices. Immortality involved the creation of an etheric replica of ones 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 rst tentatively takes a few astral steps
outside of the body and gradually, with practice, it is able to freely roam
the universe and become the equivalent of an astral body. At this point,
the practitioner can drop the dense, physical body and become an
immortal. For this school of thought, this constituted experiencing the
Dao (Wile, 1992).

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Hindu Tantra
Tantra is a spiritual practice associated with achieving enlightenment
and transcendent states through the use of rituals, art, meditation, visualization, mantras, breathing techniques, yogic postures, and sexual asanas
(Johari, 1986; Padoux, 1981). According to Johari (1986), both Hindu
and Buddhist Tantra are believed to have originated from India in the
7th century as a rebellion against prevailing Hindu beliefs that limited or
forbid the practice of sex, although its origins and main goals are still
debated among scholars. Both of these traditions emphasize the importance of female deities (e.g., sakti), engage in the ritualistic use of meat,
wine, and meditation to unify with the chosen deity, and use mantra,
mandalas, and symbolic speech and diagrams. Although spiritual beliefs
for each tradition are slightly different, both have the goal of attaining
enlightenment through the use of these practices.
The ritual in Hindu tantrism that used sexual intimacy as a vehicle for
achieving transcendence was known as maithuna. Maithuna was employed
to hasten the awakening of kundalini. Kundalini referred to the female
energy existing in latent form. The goal was to awaken this energy to unite
with Siva, the Pure Consciousness pervading the universe (Mookerjee,
1991). Through yogic techniques, this energy is raised up along a central
channel or nadi through six centers (cakras) of the body to the crown of
the head, leading to a state of liberation and transcendence. A detailed
description of the esoteric physiology involved in these practices
appeared in Eliade (1969) and specic features of the maithuna ritual
appeared in Bharati (1965) and Marglin (1980).
Within this practice, there are a number of interrelated goals that may
be achieved. These include raising the kundalini, experiencing liberation,
experiencing the divinity of the act, and so on. Eventually, there is no need
to have sexual intercourse with a physical woman. One can visualize having intercourse with a woman, visualize the union of Shiva and Sakti and
the topmost cakra, imagine the kundalini rising and piercing the cakras,
or visualize the union through use of symbolic (geometric) gures.

Tibetan Buddhism
Within Tibetan scholarship, there has been the question of whether or
not taking a consort is a metaphorical, visualized practice or a concrete ritual (see Maliszewski, 1993). To this end, descriptions of the esoteric
physiology appear in Gyatso (1982) and a somewhat disguised description
of the sexual process can be found in Mullin (1981). Within Tibetan

Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity

Buddhism, nearly one fth of the practices involve use of a human consort. Voidness and compassion must be experienced before the sexual ritual; otherwise it remains on the level of an ordinary couple practicing
yoga. A monk must rst practice visualization of a consort (male and
female together) alone in meditation. Signicantly, it is important to note
that the experience emerging from use of a consort is much more
advanced than full realization of the Void (Maliszewski, 1993).
As with Hindu tantra, there is an emphasis placed upon directing energy
into the central channel transversing the spine. Directing of the prana in to
the central channel (avadhuti) depends upon internal and external circumstances. When one reaches this level of practice, one is close to the attainment of Buddhahood. The man must refrain from ejaculation. Seminal
uid is directed up the central channel instead of outward. If the yogi
releases, he needs to begin all over again: retake initiations, purify himself,
and perform all the preliminaries. The state of mind achieved through the
ritual is maintained after the practice, the physical union serving as a
boost. The term given to this mind state is the great union beyond learning (mislobpai zung jug). According to Tibetan doctrine, the nal 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 signicant 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 eld. Regrettably, although some theoretical writings
have touched upon this topic briey (e.g., Eliade, 1971; Greeley, 1974;
Lewis, 1969, 1971, 1977; Parrinder, 1980; Sargant, 1974), there has been
no formal attempt to explore the specic topic of psychological and phenomenological dimensions of sexuality in any depth. To overcome this
drawback, a detailed inventory called The Psychological Dimensions of Sexual Experience Inventory, Form I, was developed to explore a number of
psychological dimensions experienced during sexual activity that could
assess both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
The Psychological Dimensions of Sexual Experience Inventory (PDOSEI),
Form I (Maliszewski & Vaughan, 1978) is a comprehensive self-report
inventory designed to investigate various components of sexual experience.
It consists of ve major sections that investigate several aspects of psychological functioning: (1) attributes of alternate states of consciousness, (2)

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ecstatic states and transcendent experiences, (3) personal and interpersonal

modes, (4) dimensions of sexuality, and (5) miscellaneous factors. Scales in
the rst test sections are used to explore participants reports in the areas of
cognitive processes (i.e., thinking, concentration/attention, reection),
emotions, spatial and temporal senses, and sensations/perceptions. The
ecstatic states and transcendent experiences sections contain items descriptive of intense sexual experience. Scales in the personal and interpersonal
modes section are used to evaluate psychological issues related to matters
of identity, self-concept, individual differences, and interpersonal relationships. The dimensions of sexuality section contains items that note the
physiological and behavioral factors associated with phenomenological
reports. Specic test item descriptors were derived from an exhaustive literature review across the elds of anthropology, psychology, comparative religions, medicine, biology, and other specialized areas. These were selected to
address the quality, variety, and frequency of particular experiences during
sexual intimacy.
Frequency of occurrence is rated along a 7-point category system to
reduce central tendency error (Guilford, 1954), a problem observed in
other phenomenologically based questionnaires (Tart, 1971). Details concerning semantics, item construction, and technical format of the test followed the design noted in an earlier test developed to assess the
phenomenology of meditation (see Maliszewski, Twemlow, Brown, &
Engler, 1981). Some test items were answered along a 4-stage continuum
of when the experience occurred temporally, complementing Masters and
Johnsons (1966) 4-stage physiological sexual response cycle.
In brief, Masters and Johnson (1966) outlined four stages or phases in
the physiological sexual response cycle for both men and women: excitement, plateau, orgasmic, and resolution. The excitement phase is the rst
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 intensication 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 nal
resolution phase is marked by a return of the sexual system to its unstimulated, resting, usual state. For purposes of this study, these four terms were
changed to reect more of a psychological focusarousal, amplication,
orgasm, and postludeand were also dened in the PDOSEI.
The conceptual foundation of the questionnaire itself evolved out of
the theoretical position developed by Tart (1975) that evaluates the qualities and components of psychological experience by comparing these

Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity

features to the experiences of some normative baselinein this case, the

ordinary waking state of consciousness. Any descriptive deviations that
appear as a result of this comparative analysis may be said to characterize
phenomenological experiences occurring during sexual intercourse.
As to section II of the PDOSEI, ecstatic states and transcendent experiences, denitions of these terms appear in the inventory itself. Ecstatic
states are dened as those states of consciousness characterized by an
overwhelming sense of joy or rapture. Ecstasy is dened (from the Greek
ekstasis: being beside oneself ) as (1) an emotional state so intense that
one is carried beyond rational thought or self-control; (2) rapture associated with mystical experience. Transcendent experiences are those intense
periods in consciousness lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience
and characterized by an expansion of ones awareness that exceeds an
individuals customary or familiar concept of self-identity.
Addressing indices of reliability or validity, test items within the miscellaneous factors section were actually a repetition of select items found
in earlier scales of the inventory and were utilized for the purpose of establishing some preliminary estimates of reliability. Validity estimations were
focused on the attempt to eliminate the possible biases of clinical psychopathology and social desirability (response sets). This was accomplished
by administering two additional tests, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC) and Goldbergs modied versions of the MMPI. Crowne
and Marlowe (1960) dened 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 inuence of socially desirable responding on self-report measures has been a
matter of concern. Some research participants may become embarrassed
or threatened when asked to provide information about their sexual
encounters (Meston, Heiman, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 1998). However,
under anonymous testing conditions, Wiederman and Whitley (2002)
found that participants were more willing to admit personal, potentially
embarrassing information about their sexuality when they are completing
an anonymous questionnaire compared with when they believe others

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have access to their answers (p. 44). The respondents in the present
inquiry completed their questionnaires anonymously.
Goldbergs initial modication 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 proles. 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 proles diagnostically (see Graham, 1987). Several Goldberg indices were later developed, discriminating psychiatric from sociopathic and normal from
deviant (non-normal) proles (terminology used by Goldberg, 1972).
This investigation used all three indices.

Experimental Design
The design of this study was a survey conducted (a) for the purpose of
eliminating those test items from the questionnaire that people do not experience or that they have difculty understanding; (b) to test the reliability and
validity of the PDOSEI, Form I; and (c) to provide preliminary pilot information as to the types of sexual experiences reported by a sample of people in
the United States (Maliszewski, Vaughan, Krippner, & Holler, 2008).
The PDOSEI, Form I, and three validity scales were administered in a
counterbalanced order to 98 participants (41 males, 57 females) recruited
from friends, professional colleagues, and personal acquaintances of
the principal researchers. All respondents in the study were told that the
objectives of the study were to determine the types of experiences people
have during sexual intercourse and elucidate personality factors that may
inuence or determine the nature of such experiences. Demographic variables included age, marital status, education, and income.

Data Analyses
A number of the items within the scales of the PDOSEI, Form I, are
presented in terms of the frequency with which they were experienced
as well as at different stages or periods during sexual intercourse. Descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated. Pearson r scores were calculated to determine the degree of interrelatedness among items of the sexual

Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity

response cycle for the entire sample, as well as by gender. Reliability coefcients were derived by correlating items within the questionnaire with
retest correlations ranging from .12 (p < .05) to .69 (p < .01). The test
retest reliability coefcients were signicant. 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 .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 0.51 to 0.58. Correlation
of amplication stage with the two following stages (i.e., arousal and
orgasm) was higher (r .86 and .83, respectively), and so was correlation
of orgasm with postlude (r .83). The correlation pattern of the 41 male
participants was similar. However, there was one noticeable difference
for the 57 females. Correlation between arousal and other stages was considerably lower than for men. Correlations among other stages were similar to males. This suggests that ecstatic states and transcendent
experiences among women were less strongly related to similar experiences during the preliminary arousal state than they were among males. In
other words, a males 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 0.74), that
while entering this alteration of consciousness respondents were physiologically aroused (i.e., sexually aroused; mean 0.70) and that this state is different from drowsiness (mean 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 0.73). The next highest
scores for females were found on the item stating that while in the waking

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state, you nd that you are physiologically aroused (i.e., sexually aroused;
mean 0.68), and entering a sexual state of consciousness, you nd that
you are physiologically aroused (i.e., sexually aroused; mean 0.67). Of
the paired differences between males and females, the most signicant differences were found on questions related to ecstatic states or transcendent experiences being triggered by vaginal and anal stimulation.
Additionally, for the question related to entering into an ASC during
sexual intercourse that is experienced as being distinct from the normal
waking state, males had a mean score of 0.40 and females had a score of
0.54. Thus, females had higher levels of agreement than males. When
examining at what point during the sexual response cycle respondents
tended to experience an alteration of consciousness, males and females
reported that this tended to occur during the arousal phase (Maliszewski,
et al. 2008).
Results from the present inquiry showed that both males (70%) and
females (86%) had experienced ecstatic states and transcendent experiences
during sexual intimacy. In the case of the transpersonal component, a high
percentage of both males and females reported experiencing a sense of unity
with their partner while simultaneously maintaining their personal identities.
This pattern was consistent across all ecstatic experience and transcendent
state items for all four phases of the sexual response cycle. Although females
tended to have slightly more frequent levels of arousal, amplication,
orgasm, and postlude than males, these differences were not signicant.
When examining the intercorrelations of the phases of the sexual
response cycle for variables related to transpersonal and ecstatic states,
statistically signicant ndings 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 amplication,
whereas for females arousal and postlude had the highest correlation.
Males may have utilized arousal and its subsequent amplication 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 amplication 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

and transcendent experiences, the intermediary phases (i.e., amplication

and orgasm) may be less important than the beginning and ending of the
sexual experience to more deeply access these experiences.
Females tended to have more ecstatic states and transcendent experiences without drugs or alcohol, while males tended to have more experiences with substance use. Further, females tended to have more ecstatic
experiences in nature and during prayers than did males, but both were
almost equal in experiencing these states in accidents or near-death experiences. Although males and females tended to have low frequencies on
items that assessed ecstatic states during sexual intercourse, both genders
scored almost identical frequencies on items across all phases of the sexual
response cycle, and for orgasm they did score identically.
In examining why male and female respondents reported that the sexual
state of consciousness is different from sleep, it appears that the shifts in consciousness fostered during sexual arousal are qualitatively different from similar shifts in consciousness associated with sleep. It further appears that
respondents are psychologically insightful enough at attenuating these differences, particularly when differentiating the feelings and affect associated with
drowsiness. It is also interesting to note that when respondents reported
entering the sexually induced alteration of consciousness, they were not only
psychologically aroused but physically (i.e., sexually) aroused as well, which
gives rise to the association frequently reported between the so-called mind
and body that occur during ASC. One aspect of sexual alterations of consciousness where males and females differed was in the association of this
state with drowsiness, with males reporting a high frequency and females less
so. While females had higher levels of agreement than males about entering
an ASC during sexual intercourse distinct from the ordinary waking state,
both males and females tended to experience an ASC during arousal more
than any other stage in the sexual response cycle. Some of the implications
of these ndings include that males and females display greater similarities
in terms of experiencing ecstatic states and transcendent experiences during
sexual intercourse than previously thought. Consideration should also be
given to the social context in which these data were obtained. The possibility
that females scores were more similar to males scores in terms of sexual
functioning may have been an outgrowth of the more sexually permissive
attitudes during the late1970s prior to the AIDS epidemic.

Summary
Most sex researchers acknowledge that sexual experiences and other
factors associated with sexuality are ultimately mental events. However,

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most empirical studies and literature surveys have largely ignored this
issue. To date, there have been few serious attempts directed to a comprehensive exploration of the psychological, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of human sexual experience, ironically in areas that concern
peoples motives for engaging in sexual relations in the rst place. We have
provided a cursory overview of surveys, pilot studies, conceptual writings,
and other essays that have provided some preliminary details as to the
nature of consciousness and sexual experience. So long as the phenomenological dimensions of human sexuality are ignored or given only minor
credence, humanitys understanding of sexuality will remain, at best,
incomplete. This chapter has attempted to remedy some of these shortcomings with a summary of current literature and a preliminary empirical
analysis of extensive data collected that analyzes several components of
sexual phenomenological experience.

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CHAPTER 10

Altered Consciousness and

Human Development
Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman,
and Etzel Cardena
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
dened as advances in complexity, differentiation, and integration (Carlson,
Yates, & Sroufe, 2009). Relatedly, no conceptualization of human development is complete without serious consideration of individual differences.
Naturally, such individual differences in paths of development are also
related to alterations in consciousness (e.g., some states are experienced
by some individuals more than others). Matters are complicated further
by the absence of an agreed-upon taxonomy for states of consciousness, a
term associated with conceptual vagueness and obfuscation (Cardena,
2009, p. 305). This is highly unfortunate, as knowledge about the emergence of different states of consciousness, understood developmentally
as discontinuous ensembles of self-organizing variables (Wolff, 1987,
p. 21), may be foundational for a fuller understanding of child and adult
development in general.
This chapter will describe the general organization of the normative state
of consciousness at different stages of development, along with specic
altered states of consciousness (ASC) more prone to occur in the different
phases of life: infancy and toddlerhood, early and middle childhood,

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adolescence, adulthood, and old age. We will also discuss relevant genetic
and environmental factors on the propensity to enter ASC (e.g., the heritability for dissociation, as well as how the attachment quality between
children and their primary caregivers can inuence the risk for dissociation
later in life). This chapter, however, does not cover the different issue of proposed frameworks for how modes of consciousness may manifest different
levels irrespective of age (e.g., Wilber, 1998, p. 43). Wilber has also proposed a developmental scheme in which there is a chronological sequence:
magic (25 years), mythic (611 years), rational (11 onward), and vision
logic (adulthood, if at all; 1998, p. 109). However, matters are far more
complicated than this scheme. For instance, Gopnik (2009) has reviewed
the literature showing that although infants and children engage in a lot of
counterfactual, fantasy thought from early on they are also engaging in
establishing causal events in their surroundings.

Genetic Predispositions
A review of anomalous experiences and related constructs such as hypnotizability and dissociation strongly suggests that some individuals are
more likely than others to experience a variety of alterations of consciousness, irrespective of whether they also manifest psychopathology or not
(Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). Cross-cultural research has suggested that such phenomena as shamanism runs in families (cf. Halifax,
1980) and it is likely that this marked, cross-cultural individual difference
has a genetic component. A diathesis for dissociation and hypnotizability
has been proposed (e.g., Butler et al., 1996) and there is evidence for a
genetic contribution to dissociation (Becker-Blease et al., 2004; Jang,
Paris, Zweig-Frank, & Livesley, 1998), hypnotizability (Morgan, 1973),
and absorption (Tellegen et al., 1988). Hypnotizability has also been associated with the COMT gene (Lichtenberg, Bachner-Melman, Ebstein, &
Crawford, 2004). Furthermore, hypnotizability has been related to the
construct of mental boundary thinness and the character trait of selftranscendence (Carden a & Terhune, 2008). The latter shows a 90%
unique variance when analyzed along other major character/temperament
constructs (Gillespie, Cloninger, Heath, & Martin, 2003). Thus, different
strands of evidence support some type of heritability for the propensity
to alter ones 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

States of the Infant and Toddler

In early infancy, states of consciousness are often treated as more or
less synonymous with behavioral states, which are in turn closely associated with states of arousal. This is probably explained by the unusually
close association among them at such an early period of development,
resulting from a relative lack of differentiation (e.g., because of the infants
limited self-regulatory skills, behaviors and experiences cannot be easily
distinguished). For example, it is assumed that a smiling infant is very
likely to experience joy and a crying infant to experience distress, but, as
Daniel Stern (1985) rightfully points out, knowing the subjective world
of the infant is impossible; we can only speculate about it. Relatedly,
Alison Gopnik (2009) has recently reviewed the literature on early development and, based on behavioral and neurophysiological indicators,
proposes that early in life the general state of waking consciousness of a
baby and very young child is characterized by very large and undifferentiated attention to most things in the surrounding world, which produces
an intense but fairly uncontrollable experience (lantern consciousness).
As the child grows up, that experiential intenseness, driven by the manifold changes in the environment, gives place to a more focused and
controlled attention (spotlight consciousness), but with a concomitant
loss of experiential intensity. Gopnik also shows that although babies
and toddlers have memory, can plan, and have a sense of self (mostly
somatic; see also Stern, 1985), they only begin to have a sense of self
across time, both with respect to their past and probable mental occurrences, around 4 years of age. When they are younger, they may deny that
they had past psychological experiences, not anticipate which ones they
are likely to have, and rely on their caretakers verbalizations to describe
what they may have experienced (see Natsoulas, 1983, for a discussion
of the sense of consciousness across time). Before an extended self, their
experience may be of one intense moment after another, without much
organization or coherence [see Schaefer, this volume, for a discussion of
possible peyote effects on the developing fetus].

Arousal States of the Neonate, Differentiation, and the Emergence of Basic Emotions
When conceptualizing the states of the neonate, it is common to simply
distinguish between different states of arousal, ranging from regular deep
sleep (non-REM or State I) and irregular dream sleep (REM or State II), via
alert inactivity (drowsiness or State III) to quiet alertness (State IV), to waking activity (bursts of uncoordinated motor activity) and crying (State V;

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Wolff, 1987). Moreover, these states are believed to be universal and

present in all healthy newborns. The amount both of sleep in general and
of the proportion of REM versus non-REM sleep changes dramatically
throughout life. At birth, the neonate sleeps about 16 hours, about half of
them in REM sleep, but by the teen years the typical person sleeps only
about 8 hours, one fourth of which are REM sleep; the decreased proportion
of REM sleep and decrease or disappearance of deep sleep (i.e., stages 3 and
4) will continue throughout the lifespan (Hobson, 1995).
A central principle in psychobiological conceptions of development is
that the ontogenetic maturation of many psychobiological systems is characterized by increased complexity and differentiation (e.g., Bowlby, 1969/
1982; Hinde, 1966). For example, presuming the accessibility of a lactating
mother, the newborns eating builds entirely on primitive reexes, most
notably the sucking reex. Although eating in adulthood has the same biological function of obtaining nourishment, it usually requires the enactment
of a considerably more complex plan hierarchy, consisting of a number of
behaviors that are in themselves unrelated to eating (e.g., writing a grocery
list, driving to the grocery store, etc.). At the same time, the sucking reex
has since long disappeared, while sucking itself is still available in the adults
behavioral repertoire, but now under volitional control and subjected to
more differential usage (e.g., sucking on a popsicle).
Although states of consciousness are by no means conceptually synonymous with psychobiological systems, the increased complexity and
differentiation of such systems may well be intertwined with and have
consequences for how states of arousal/behavior/consciousness unfold
from infancy onward. For example, brainwaves and sleep stages become
far more complex and differentiated in both REM and non-REM sleep after
birth and during the rst years of life (Hobson, 1995). Also, over the
course of the rst months of life, the waking states described by Wolff
(1987) and others will come to be further differentiated. Changes in attentiveness and social signaling during these states are one example of such
differentiation. Newborns display quiet, simple attention, mostly without
emotional expressions, in face-to-face communication with their smiling
mothers (Lavelli & Fogel, 2005). Gradually, faint smiles emerge. Smiling
often seems to occur randomly at rst 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 infants attention is a source of pleasure, such as a smiling mother,
the infant expresses clear and unmistakable delight, evident in social smiling (i.e., a broad, unmistakable grin, with eyes xated on the interaction
partner) andshortly thereafterfull laughter (Sroufe & Waters, 1976).

Altered Consciousness and Human Development

Moreover, although associated with waking activity, these behavioral

expressions are presumably linked to consciousness experiences (emerging experiences of love and joy) that differ markedly from the neonates
state of mere waking activity. In a similar vein, the newborns expression
of generalized distress, characteristic of unregulated crying (State V), will
branch off during the course of the rst 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 rst 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 rst few months of life to
an increasingly salient preference for the familiar caregivers, coupled with
stranger anxiety, during the second half of the rst year. A direct implication of this process is that pleasant experiences (such as joy, happiness,
and love) will be increasingly experienced when the infant is in contact
with the caregivers, especially with caregivers who are sensitive to the
infants 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 infants needs.

Attentional Shifting, Self-Regulatory Skills, and Temperament

With the development of self-regulatory skills (i.e., strategies to modify
the intensity of emotional experience and expression), the growing infant
will also increasingly make his or her own contribution to the states experienced and expressed. Already in the rst few months of life, infants may
shift their attention from unpleasant to pleasant stimuli. However, newborns are very inexible attention shifters; their gaze occasionally gets xated even on unpleasant stimuli, which often results in full crying. From
about 4 months of age, they gain more exibility in shifting attention
(Hood, Atkinson, & Braddick, 1998) and will from then on more actively
contribute to what information enters the sensory channels and, consequently, what they will experience.

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If they are also fortunate enough to be cared for by accepting and sensitive caregivers, they will typically come to learn that distress that cannot be
avoided by shifting attention can nevertheless be managed so that it does
not become overwhelming. This reassurance is initially accomplished by
the caregivers 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 newborns relatively ungraded high-intensity crying to the growing infants and toddlers
more graded distress responses (i.e., they take more time to build up to full
crying). In other words, the states experienced and their behavioral expressions will increasingly come under the developing individuals own control.
Children whose self-regulation skills fail to develop favorably during the
rst 2 years of life are sometimes thought to possess a difcult temperament (Thomas & Chess, 1977), characterized by, for example, impulsivity
(associated with states of frustration and urgency), negative emotionality
(associated with states of anger and distress), or marked behavioral inhibition to novelty (i.e., amygdala-based hyperreactivity, associated with states
of fear and weariness; Buss & Plomin, 1984; Kagan, 1984; Rothbart,
2003). Although temperamental dispositions are at least partially malleable
by contextual factors, such as an environment that provides a goodness of
t with the childs disposition (Thomas & Chess, 1977), they are also moderately heritable (Wachs & Bates, 2001). Furthermore, these dispositions
tend to become increasingly stable and predictive of other aspects of development with maturation. For example, temperament inhibition (i.e., a failure to down-regulate fear responses) during the second year of life has
been found to predict social anxiety in adulthood (Schwartz, Snidman, &
Kagan, 1999). Thus, a failure to develop self-regulation skills is not just
associated with unfavorable high-intensity experiential states but may also
pave the way for later adjustment problems.

Emotional Contagion and the Development of Self and Self-Conscious Emotions

Another characteristic of human infants is their hypersensitivity to
others states, as observed in studies of mimicry and emotional contagion.
Thus, when infants hear another infant crying, they may well break down
in full crying themselves. This is currently believed to be an expression of
the activation of the mirror neuron system, which humans are held to share
with some other primates (Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006). Presumably
because of their relatively undeveloped capacity for selfother distinctions,
infants are especially prone to emotional contagion. However, a tendency

Altered Consciousness and Human Development

for the self to be affected by the states of others naturally lingers throughout
the life cycle (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). The comparatively basic emotional contagion phenomenon may in fact be a developmental precursor
not just of empathy but also of suggestibility in general, including hypnotizability (cf. Cardena, Terhune, Loof, & Buratti, 2009).
Self-awareness unfolds during the rst 2 years of life from a presumably mere implicit capacity for selfother distinctions in the case of the
neonate (e.g., he/she rotates more reliably when another person touches
the babys cheeks rather than the baby him/herself; Rochat & Hespos,
1997), via the 4- to 6-month-olds gradual realization that the hands and
other body parts do not only belong to the self but can actually be volitionally controlled by the self, to the toddlers explicit realization that the self
is what is reected in a mirror (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979; see also
Gopnik, 2009). In the wake of such increases in self-awareness comes a
capacity for self-control/regulation (as described above) and the experience of being an intentional agent. Also, unlike the infant, the toddler will
typically start to experience self-conscious states of pride, shame, selfdoubt, and embarrassment, which build upon and are believed to reect
complex combinations of the basic emotions that gradually unraveled
during infancy (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989).
However, it should be understood that not only does self-development
affect states of consciousness. Even more importantly, states of consciousness
also affect and indeed partly organize self-development. From a developmental perspective, organization and integration of experiences in general,
including states of consciousness, is what denes the self (Loevinger,
1976). Daniel Stern has vitally contributed to our understanding of the experiential states of the infant and how they are intertwined with the developing
self. His (1985) contention that the experience of self not only requires that
the individual distinguish the self from others but also identify the self with
others highlights the intersubjective nature of much of the young infants
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 infants development of a sense of self and other(s). In favorable conditions, the infant sees him/herself in the caregivers gaze of reverie. This is
presumably associated with a pleasant affective tone (i.e., a vitality affect)
on part of the infant. Moreover, consistently responsive caregiving throughout infancy is likely to enable the recognition of consistency in the self and
affective experience across time and context, whereas aberrant, abusive, or
neglecting caregiving may thwart the developing organization of the self,
which may instead wind up as fragmented (Carlson et al., 2009).

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Disorganized Attachment and the Emergence of Dissociation

As noted by Carlson and colleagues (2009), if the development of core
self processes advances toward greater complexity and differentiation
without complementary integration, pathological dissociation may ultimately result. Dissociation has been dened as a disruption in the usually
integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, and perception
(American Psychiatric Association, 2000), and is clearly a complex, multifaceted construct. Several scholars have suggested a distinction between
dissociation as experiential detachment and as cognitive compartmentalization (Brown, 2006; Cardena, 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 decit in
the ability to deliberately access or control normally accessible processes
or actions, such as recalling basic personal information (e.g., selective
amnesia) or self-identifying previous or current behaviors. Although such
examples of pathology-related dissociation tend to be noted later in development (when most other individuals have developed a rmly integrated
sense of self), a disorganized infantcaregiver attachment bond may
underlie proto-dissociative states already in the infant-to-toddler period
and foreshadow a propensity for pathological dissociative states later in
development (Silberg & Dallam, 2009).
Disorganized (D) attachment is thought to represent a breakdown in
attachment-related patterning during stress (Main & Morgan, 1996), possibly stemming from a fragmented self system (Carlson et al., 2009). Using
the strange situation procedure (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall,
1978), D attachment is identied in behavioral expressions that are displayed in the presence of the caregiver, such as prolonged freezing with an
unresponsive facial expression, simultaneous displays of opposite behaviors
(such as approaching the attachment-gure with one part of the body while
moving away with another), and direct indices of apprehension of the caregiver (Main & Morgan, 1996). According to a meta-analysis, the prevalence
of D attachment in the general population is about 15%, and considerably
higher in clinical and at-risk samples (van IJzendoorn, Schuengel, &
Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1999).
Disorganized attachment is conceptually aligned with Bowlbys (1973,
1980) idea of segregated processes, which are believed to result from

Altered Consciousness and Human Development

inescapable fear/trauma that overloads the individuals defense system (see

also Cardena, 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 childs relationship with caregivers is because of
the behavioral paradox in which children nd themselves when their caregivers are simultaneously the source of alarm (e.g., being abusive, frightening, or dissociative) and the only possible solution to it (because the
offspring relies on the attachment gures to deal with potential danger;
e.g., Hesse & Main, 2006).
Long prior to Bowlbys description of segregated systems, however
and dating back to Breuer and Freuds studies of hysteria (1895/1957)
psychoanalysts have held that trauma-related fear may provoke dissociation, understood as a primitive defense mechanism. More recently, Liotti
(1992) suggested specically that infants whose relationship with the
attachment gure produces a behavioral paradox of the kind described
above are prone to later episodes of dissociation. Early D attachment would
then comprise two aspects of dissociation: an unusual quality of conscious
experience (i.e., a trance-like state) and the simultaneous multiple representations of aspects of reality normally construed as unitary (Liotti, 2006,
p. 58). Liottis (1992) hypothesis was supported by long-term, longitudinal
studies showing that infant-toddler D attachment status was indeed related
to a higher occurrence of dissociative states and behaviors throughout childhood and adolescence (Carlson, 1998), especially following intervening
trauma (Ogawa, Sroufe, Weineld, Carlson, & Egeland, 1997). Various
other strands of research with adolescents and adults also show that the discontinuity in experience brought about by traumatic events will also produce acute or chronic dissociative experiences (Carden a, Butler, &
Spiegel, 2003).

Early (2 to 6 Years) and Middle (6 to 12 Years) Childhood

Although a greater expansion of cognitive and experiential capacities
occurs in infancy and toddlerhood than during any other life period, the
psychological worlds of infants and (to a lesser extent) toddlers are relatively
concrete (cf. Piagets, 1926/1930, idea of sensorimotor cognition, but see
Gopnik, 2009). As the growing child increasingly starts to rely on language,
mental representations, mentalizing abilities, and symbolic thinking, new
psychological avenues emerge, and with them a greater capacity for
counterfactual thinking (Gopnik, 2009). For example, metacognitive
capacities are typically under steady development in the preschool years.

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By age 4 to 6, most children correctly solve false belief tasks, indicating a

functional theory of mind or a mentalizing ability that enables them to distinguish between the knowledge contained by their minds vis-a`-vis the
minds of others (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). This ability makes
the child considerably more socially skilled.
Also, via a combination of greater mentalizing abilities and symbolic
thinking, the child is now better able to imagine the existence of and attribute agency to unobservable others (e.g., Barrett, Richert, & Driesenga,
2001). Consequently, and at least as far as adult researchers are concerned,
the child becomes fantasy-prone; the childrens 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 gures tend to be normative during this age period,
a pathological process of dissociative development may be difcult to distinguish from normal imaginative involvement (Silberg & Dallam, 2009).
However, like the transitional objects described in object relations theory,
imaginary gures tend to be short lived, distinguished from reality, and to
have passed their due dates by middle childhood (Hoff, 20042005). 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 gures as
real will ultimately be a hallmark of serious psychopathology, including hallucination, delusion, and frank psychosis, by adolescence and adulthood
(American Psychiatric Association, 2000).
Early childhood is also typically an age of conscience formation and
moral awakening (e.g., Gibbs, 2003), although some type of moral
judgment is already present earlier on (Gopnik, 2009). States of moral
indignation now naturally start to manifest themselves, especially when
the childs 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 ones own perceived transgressions also start to
develop. Although feelings of guilt are generally conducive to the development of empathy and the sense of self as moral agent (Hoffman, 2000),
malevolent parenting discipline, such as prolonged love withdrawal, may
lead to developmentally unfavorable feelings of shame on the childs 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

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 inuences (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 ones representational . . . resources,
Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974, p. 268) is sown during the course of the preschool years. Not coincidentally, preschool children tend to remain
engaged with one activity for longer bouts of time than earlier in development (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000), and their playing often consists of prolonged bouts of make-believe play. Children who have failed to
make such a normative gain in sustained attention and executive functioning by school age are potential candidates for a diagnosis of attention decit hyperactivity disorder (Barkley, 1997).
Thus, both metacognitive capacities and episodes of absorption will
typically increase in this life period. However, when all (or most) processing resources are occupied, as in absorbed states, the usual metacognitive
monitoring of ones perceptions and thoughts is likely counteracted
(Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974). Perhaps for this reason, later in development a propensity for absorption is one of the most reliable personality
predictors of suggestibility in general and hypnotizability in particular
(Roche & McConkey, 1990).
Although not immune to methodological criticisms, research suggests
that hypnotic responsiveness can be rst measured around 5 years of
age, reaches a peak in the preteen years, and then diminishes slightly
(Olness & Kohen, 1996) but remains fairly stable throughout adulthood
(Piccione, Hilgard, & Zimbardo, 1989). This statement hides some complexities, however, in that some hypnotic suggestions such as posthypnotic amnesias may not be even comprehensible to a very young child,
while at the same time younger children may become more absorbed in
their fantasy lives than older children.
Research on the lifespan of dissociation, a related but by no means
identical construct to hypnotizability, shows a similar developmental line.
Dissociation has been posited to be higher in younger children of around
5 to 6 years of age and then to generally decline with age for both

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

different review of studies proposes that dissociation peaks in early adolescence (Vanderlinden, van der Hart, & Varga, 1996). A way to integrate
these seemingly disparate conclusions is to distinguish different phenomena subsumed under the complex construct of dissociation (e.g., depersonalization episodes become more common in adolescence; see below).
In any case, it seems that in childhood dissociation may be a normative
reaction to disruption and distress, whereas in later years chronic dissociation is a likely indicator of psychopathology (Ogawa et al., 1997). Dissociation may also interact with other phenomena such as use of drugs
during teen years (Tolmunen et al., 2007).
As noted, traumatic events such as abuse from caregivers may provoke
dissociative responses. In view of the false memories preschool children
are prone to report when inadequately interrogated, it is of interest to note
that some of the children who are most likely to be interrogated (i.e., those
who have actually suffered abuse) are the very children who are most
easily suggestible and thus most likely to experience false memories as real
after being exposed to misleading questioning (Bruck & Melnyck, 2004),
but they may also be open to suggestions that something did not happen
when it actually did (Cardena et al., 2003).
Although younger children have typically already initiated some extrafamilial activities and relationships (e.g., peer relations in preschool), in
middle childhood they increasingly turn to the outer worlds of school,
leisure activities, and friendships. Naturally, the extent to which they succeed with these extrafamilial activities and relationships has implications
for various other aspects of development, not least for the sense of self as
competent or inferior (Erikson, 1998). Children who do well in school
and are liked by peers also tend to feel good about and take pride in themselves, whereas those less fortunate may come to suffer a range of negative
effects related to poor self-esteem (Harter, 1999). In particular, from
middle childhood on, friendships come to be identied 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 dened by disconnectedness (e.g., Goth, Satanists, criminals) may still
offer a sense of connection, with potentially negative implications for the
surrounding.

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Adolescence (12 to 19 Years)

Adolescence is a developmental phase particularly associated with
experimentation with what may be considered to be risky behaviors, such
as careless sex and use of drugs. With the increased production of sex hormones associated with puberty comes an enormous upsurge in sexual
urges (Halpern, Udry, & Suchindran, 1997). By whatever means accomplished, whether through solitary sex or sexual activity with someone else,
most adolescents are also hit from below by the novelty of orgasms. They
are characterized by intense pleasure coupled with tension release and
succeeded by a sense of calm and emotional harmony (i.e., homeostasis),
in part caused by the release of neurohormones such as oxytocin which
can lead to ASC [see Maliszewski et al., this volume]. The combination
of strong sexual urges and the novel, addictive pleasures of orgasm will,
not surprisingly, keep many adolescents busy trying to nd 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 inate the sense of the self as powerful, and psychedelic drugs
may yield dramatic ASC, including a sense of connection with everything
[see various chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume] Without ignoring biologically, socially, and culturally determined individual differences,
the development of the adolescent brain partly explains the tendency to
experiment with drugs, and risky decision making in general, that seems
so characteristic of adolescence. The most important changes in the adolescent brain related to risky behavior, and thus to drug use, involve the
remodeling of the prefrontal cortex (Spear, 2000) and the increase in
dopamine activity in the context of an immature serotonergic system
(Chambers, Taylor, & Potenza, 2003). Behavior is preceded by the making of a decision, do I or dont I, which involves considering the possible
consequences of an action. In this process, the prefrontal cortex is
assumed to play a crucial part, and damage in this brain area has been
associated with the inability to distinguish between a positive and a negative future outcome (Bechara, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1996).
Coupled with greater behavioral capabilities, the relative immaturity of
the prefrontal cortex in adolescents and the remodeling involving a
decline in its relative size, with some neural connections lost and others
added, may indicate why decisions made by adolescents tend to be riskier
than those made by adults.

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In their turn, dopamine and serotonin have been called the accelerator
and the brakes, respectively, in the drive to risky behavior, particularly in
the area of drug use and abuse (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000). Dopamine
has been associated with novelty seeking and plays an essential role in the
brains reward circuitry. The increase in dopamine activity in the prefrontal
cortex during (early) adolescence suggests that rewarding stimuli are experienced as more rewarding, which might be an explanation of the increase
in sensation seeking during this developmental stage (Steinberg, 2008).
And all this takes place in the context of a relatively immature serotonergic
system; studies suggest that a more mature serotonergic system would have
an inhibitory control function (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000).
We hasten to add here that although the emergence of drug use and
sexual behaviors may be characterized as risky in terms of future adaptation and development, we have no desire to express alarmism surrounding their occurrence in adolescence. For example, according to data from
the San Francisco Bay area, experimentation with (as opposed to frequent
usage of and complete abstinence from) drugs such as alcohol and marijuana may be associated with favorable adolescent development, and sensitive parenting in childhood may be a precursor of drug experimentation
in adolescence (Shedler & Block, 1990). It has also been noticed that most
sensation seeking by adolescents is realized in the company of peers
(Steinberg, 2008). Although relationships with parents typically still tend
to be the principal attachment throughout adolescence, concurrent with
reinitiated and intensied autonomy strivings, adolescents gradually
transfer the components of attachment from parents to peers, most typically love partners and close friends, with whom they prefer to spend
increasing amounts of time and to whom they start to turn when distressed (Zeifman & Hazan, 2008). The immense inuence that peers have
on the adolescent individual could be related to the inuence 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
adolescents own drug use (Bauman & Ennett, 1996).
Adolescence may be associated with emotional turbulence, especially
for those with a history of insecure attachment (Allen, 2008). Not coincidentally perhaps, a century of research indicates that adolescence also represents an age of religious awakening (Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi, 1975),
which may also include ritually induced ASC [see St John, Volume 1]. As

Altered Consciousness and Human Development

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

appeals to adolescents sentiment such that although the cognitive machinery required for a belief in unobservable agents is set in motion already
in early childhood, it is typically not until adolescence that the emotional
fuel required for deep religious feelings is poured into that machine. Neurological support for this conjecture has been offered by Alcorta and Sosis
(2005). The religious rites of passage, as they observed, generally consist
in creating new symbolic cognitive schema and connect these to emotions
like fear and awe [see Whitehead, Volume 1]. Conditioning the association
of these emotions with the symbolic cognitive schema will result in the sanctication of symbols, such as places and words. The authors propose that
adolescence is a sensitive phase for the learning of emotionally intense symbolic systems, explained by specic changes in the adolescent brain. More
specically, the initiation of an attachment-like relationship with a transcendent being may be especially likely during adolescence to young adulthood,
particularly for individuals who may nd in God an appealing attachment
surrogate to other unsatisfactory or even absent attachment gures (e.g.,
Granqvist & Kirkpatrick, 2008). Consequently, if experienced at any point
in life, transcendent states of consciousness in general and religious experiences in particular (e.g., sudden religious conversions) tend to occur during
adolescence or young adulthood and often in times of trouble (Argyle &
Beit-Hallahmi, 1975).
Once a perceived relationship with the divine has developed, it may
well become a central motive (e.g., a perceived moral compass, but see
Epley et al., 2009) around which the individual organizes other aspects
of his/her life and experiences (cf. Allports, 1950, idea of intrinsic or
mature religiousness). Also, by adolescence, dissociation tends to take
a more clearly differentiated, adult form with full-edged experiences of
depersonalization, derealization, and selective amnesia (Silberg & Dallam,
2009). Consequently, dissociation-related expressions associated with
adulthood emerge more often in adolescence than previously in development. They include self-mutilation during emotional numbing (Yates,
Carlson, & Egeland, 2008), disordered body perception in anorexia nervosa (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), and a spirituality that may
center around various ASC (Granqvist, Fransson, & Hagekull, 2009).
Music is heavily consumed by adolescents and young adults. In its
many different forms, music, and especially repetitive music, is a wellestablished facilitator of ASC (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993) [see
Fachner, Volume 1], either on its own or in combination with psychoactive
drugs, as it happens in raves.

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Adulthood and Aging

As the aspects of development that form the foundation for most states
of consciousness are sufciently 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
difcult to characterize ASC in the adult. Nevertheless, some states will
typically crystallize themselves, and some will be experienced in new situations or in relation to novel objects. For instance, there is some evidence
that the likelihood of having a unitive, mystical experience increases with
age (Wulff, 2000). Creativity-related states of ow (Csikszentmihalyi,
1990) or peak experiences (Maslow, 1976), are likely to get increasingly
common in young adulthood in the context of work and career aspirations, especially in areas such as competitive sports, arts, and science.
Such states presumably build upon basic capacities for sustained attention, executive functioning, and absorption (Privette, 1983), which made
notable improvements already in early childhood but may now be increasingly employed as required by the new tasks that face young adults. Flow
states are clearly self-organizing in that they potentiate optimal performance. Young adulthood (roughly 2030) may also be especially conducive to such states because, as compared with previous periods of
development, formal operational (i.e., abstract) thinking has typically
been rmly established (Piaget, 1926/1930) and the individual has normally succeeded in reaching some level of autonomy. Also, as compared
with later periods of adulthood, there are generally fewer competing
demands that require the young adults 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 difcult to
arrive at a normative yet non-stereotypical conceptualization of states of
consciousness in the elderly. Yet there seems to be cross-cultural consensus that a seless balance between cognition and emotion known as
wisdom is more likely to emerge with increasing age (Jeste et al.,
2010). On the other hand, most elders have decreased sensory acuity,
information processing speed, and working memory capacity (Hedden &
Gabriele, 2004). This state of lessened sensory acuity may well be selforganizing to the extent that it inadvertently affects the aging persons perceptions of him- or herself (Im old, Im a social plague) and leads to a
restriction of engagement in activities that were formerly enjoyed.

Altered Consciousness and Human Development

Consequently, as sensory acuity lessens, the elderly report lower selfefcacy, more loneliness and depressive symptoms, and smaller social networks (e.g., Kramer, Kapteyn, Kuik, & Deeg, 2002).
In spite of such general declines in sensory and cognitive functions,
most elderly people are capable of experiencing at least low to moderate
levels of the states of consciousness that they acquired a capacity for earlier
in the lifespan, as well as to manage and enjoy their everyday activities.
However, pathological aging such as dementia, which results from
progressive structural damage to the brain (most notably the cortical
regions), is a contrary example. Initially, dementia is associated with
memory loss, states of spatial disorientation, distorted body perception,
and depression (Yaari & Corey-Bloom, 2007). As dementia progresses,
metacognition, autobiographical memory, and executive functioning are
decreased, and generalized distress, delusions, and basic arousal states
(such as alert inactivity and crying) may ensue (Gwyther, 2001), which
illustrates that although prospective differentiation, increased complexity,
and integration are the norm in (healthy) development, the progression of
dementia represents a reversed process.
Although the loss through death of loved ones may occur at any point in
the life cycle, it is clearly overrepresented among the elderly. Thus, grief or
mourning is close to normative for the elderly, in particular following the
death of a spouse, typically the principal attachment gure of adulthood
(Bowlby, 1980). Loss of a principal attachment gure is a powerful stressor,
indeed a potentially traumatic event. Consequently, spousal bereavement
is associated with depression as well as with elevated risks for suicide
(Rosenzweig, Prigerson, Miller, & Reynolds, 1997). To proceed favorably
in terms of promoting adaptation to a life without the spouse, the mourning
process requires that bereaved individuals eventually accommodate information regarding the permanence of the spouses death into their representational world (Bowlby, 1980). Otherwise, the individual is at risk of
remaining unresolved or disorganized with respect to the loss; for example,
they may display continued searching for the spouse and slip into states of
disbelief regarding the spouses 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 Eriksons 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 ones own life is part of an extended chain

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of human existence, death may lose its sting (Vaillant, 2002). Relatedly,
religious beliefs and spirituality often gain increased importance for the
elderly (Krause, 2006) and may offer additional benets to the states experienced such as a sense of the interrelatedness of all things, of life as meaningful, and of security within a transcendent realm. The term
gerotranscendence (Tornstam, 1997) has been coined in the literature to
characterize the states of inner calm and serenity, of peace of mind when
engaging in quiet reection and reminiscence, which characterizes favorable development in the very nal stages of life. This term refers to nothing
less than a cosmic and transcendent perspective, directed forward and
outward, beyond the individuals self, and is consistent with the postulate
that a transcendent stage of development may include but go beyond
rationality rather than being just a regression to a prerational state (see
Wilber, 1998, p. 90) [see also Beauregard, this volume].
At the very end of the day, some people who are about to die (Osis &
Haraldsson, 1977) or who have encountered near-death experiences
(NDEs), which may happen at any age but are more likely as the individual suffers a serious illness, report that as the brain discharges its nal
electrical impulses before closing shop, an ASC ensues associated with
a profound sense of promise. This state is marked by, among other phenomena, a sense of peace and painlessness, unconditional love, and an
experience of light at the end of a tunnel. A purely neurophysiological
decit explanation for NDEs may be inadequate to explain all the available
data (Greyson, 2000), so a fair and comprehensive explanation remains a
challenge for the future. It is, however, paradoxical that for some, the vast
expansion of consciousness present after birth may have some parallel
with their experiences at the moment of dying.

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PART II

Psychological Perspectives

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CHAPTER 11

Altered States of Bodily

Consciousness
Sebastian Dieguez
and Olaf Blanke
Introduction: The Bodily Self
Concepts such as consciousness and the self have proven notoriously difcult to dene and have yielded enormous amounts of literature in a large
array of disciplines (e.g., Bermudez, Marcel, & Eilan, 1995; Metzinger,
2003). Recently, these concepts have been approached from the biological
side by investigating their neurobiology and more generally how they are
grounded in the organism and its physiology (i.e., the body). Neuroscientists, neurologists, experimental psychologists, and philosophers have joined
forces and developed several lines of research trying to understand how the
central nervous system dynamically represents the body and provides a basis
for the sense of self. As the self, in the wider sense, is a manifold concept of
staggering complexity, investigating the bodily self is often considered a fruitful approach to break down its minimal constituents and determine how
extended aspects of the self are grounded on the body (e.g., Blanke &
Metzinger, 2009; Damasio, 1999).
An important strategy has been to exploit the insights offered by the
scientic study and phenomenological accounts of persons undergoing
altered perceptions of their bodies. Such understanding of the bodily self
and its neural mechanisms may also provide clues about the nature of
altered states of consciousness (ASC), which often involve bodily manipulations in their induction (e.g., drug intake, exhaustion, fasting, body
posture) and a modication 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 specic cases of
alterations of the bodily self in clinical neurology and other states of

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altered consciousness, we rst discuss the nature of the bodily self and
introduce the concept of altered states of bodily consciousness.
The bodily self is a more restricted concept than the notion of embodiment, which can be dened as the idea that cognitive functions such as
perception, language, reasoning, and social interaction are grounded on
bodily processing (Gibbs, 2006). By contrast, the bodily self as a theoretical concept refers to those aspects of the self that can be associated with
the structure and functions of the individuals body. Culture, society, personal memories, and politics can probably be embodied to some extent,
but the bodily self only relates to an organisms more basic properties,
such as how we localize our own body in the environment, perceive its
ongoing posture and movement, detect changes in internal homeostasis,
experience its actions to be self-generated, and identify its parts as selfbelonging (Bermudez et al., 1995; Legrand, 2006).
The bodily self is historically associated to other concepts such as corporeal awareness, cenesthesia, the body schema, and the body image.
Generally, all these notions refer to how the body is consciously or unconsciously experienced and represented. The brain is constantly receiving
and sending, as well as updating, information from and to the body.
Giving rise to the bodily self thus involves the dynamic integration of visual, tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular, auditory, olfactive, visceral, and
motor information, as well as higher-order representations such as beliefs,
desires, memories, and knowledge about bodies in general. This integration is achieved not by a single system in the brain but by a wide array
of subsystems and bodily representations that, when impaired, can lead
to altered states of bodily consciousness.
The very idea of the bodily self is closely tied to clinical neurology. The
concept was born out of the observation of neurological disturbances affecting how some patients perceived their own body. French otologist Pierre
Bonnier (1905) coined the word aschematie 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 ones
own body in the environment, feel the space it is occupying, know its current posture, and localize tactile sensations on its surface. Some neurological symptoms, Bonnier realized, seemed to suggest that such a sense
existed and was disturbed in specic occurrences. Other authors independently presented similar ideas. British neurologists Henry Head and Gordon
Holmes (19111912) notably highlighted the importance of motor mechanisms and the ability of the body schema to automatically and involuntary

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

update its representations by integrating ongoing movements and postural

changes. These authors located the body schema, or what they called an
organized model of ourselves, in the parietal lobe.1
Although terminology has differed widely ever since these early proposals, the bodily self and its neural basis have to a large extent continued
to be studied through manifestation of its disorders. Throughout this
chapter, we use the term altered states of bodily consciousness to refer to disturbances of the bodily self. In such states, the person does not perceive
his or her own body accurately, that is, the current state of the physical
body is misrepresented (Revonsuo, Kallio, & Sikka, 2009).
Erroneous representations of the body differ widely as to their content.
They can involve a specic 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 neuroscientic point of view, to ascertain the exact
territory of the altered perceptions of the body, as this can point to the
involvement of specic neural mechanisms.
Sometimes, the body is the only aspect undergoing an alteration, while
perception of the environment or other persons is spared. On other occasions, however, altered states of bodily consciousness seem to involve an
extension of the bodily self to external objects, other persons, or even
ones 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 Cardena, this volume]. The
distinctions between self and other, self and object, as well as between self
and world, and their disturbance during altered states of bodily consciousness, might thus also be associated with specic underlying neural mechanisms (e.g., Maravita & Iriki, 2004).
Independently of the content of the bodily misrepresentation, the persons 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 ones body, involving visual, mnesic,
verbal, emotional, sexual, social, and cultural information pertaining to ones own body.
Both termsbody schema and body imagewere and still are often used interchangeably
(for a recent discussion, see de Vignemont, 2010).

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different experiential approaches from each other: A person might be indifferent to what he or she is experiencing, critical about the illusory or unusual
nature of his or her experiences, or delusional about certain specic beliefs
concerning the bodily self (Dieguez, Staub, & Bogousslavsky, 2007).
Neurological patients who are indifferent do not notice that their perception and experience of their bodily self is anomalous. Such disorders
are thus found only when an external person (e.g., the clinician) specically
investigates and detects the disorder. Thus the patient may be asked, for
example, to move a limb or to describe her current bodily experience and
only then respond in a way that is indicative of an altered state of bodily
consciousness. In some cases, patients cannot even be brought to realize
that they are misguided about their perceptions and beliefs concerning their
bodies. This is the case of neurological patients who ignore their paralysis
(anosognosia) or fail to pay any attention to the existence of half of their
body (hemiasomatognosia).
In other instances, patients are critical of the alteration of the bodily
self they are undergoing, and a rational evaluation as well as a generally
accurate perception of the illusory nature of the experience can be
achieved. For instance, patients retaining full awareness during migraine
or seizure episodes may be able to describe in some detail, even during
such experiences, how they perceive their bodies as abnormal.
Finally, patients presenting delusional alterations of bodily consciousness hold false beliefs that are impervious to any attempt at correction.
Such patients not only perceive and report that something is wrong about
their bodies but also claim that the alteration is actually happening or really has happened. Examples include reduplication of body parts, disownership of ones body parts, and claims of being invaded by bugs or
having ones internal organs rotting. In the next sections, we describe in
more detail such instances of altered states of bodily consciousness.

Neurological Alterations of Bodily Consciousness

In what follows, we present selected examples of altered states of
bodily consciousness caused by neurological disease. These disorders provide relatively pure instances of altered states of bodily consciousness,
which have been extensively described and studied since the end of the
19th century, and furthermore allow a unique window into the
neurological basis of bodily consciousness (Blanke, Arzy, & Landis,
2008; Dieguez, Staub, & Bogousslavsky, 2007).

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

Phantom Limbs, Illusory Movements, Supernumerary Phantom Limbs

The phantom limb phenomenon is present, transiently or permanently, in the majority of amputees (Brugger, 2005; Ramachandran &
Hirstein, 1998). Persons with phantom limbs vividly experience the presence of a limb that is physically absent. This is perhaps the clearest demonstration of the existence of a body schema implemented as a cerebral
body representation. Indeed, it has been reported that cortical damage
can dispel phantom limbs (Appenzeller & Bicknelle, 1969) and that
experimental manipulations of the vestibular system (Andre, Martinet,
Paysant, Beis, & Le Chapelain, 2001) or stimulation of premotor cortex
(Bestmann et al., 2006) can modify phantom limb experiences. Research
on phantom limbs suggests the causal involvement of a plastic reorganization of somatosensory and motor areas, a multilayered and innate network
underlying bodily experience dubbed the neuromatrix, cross-callosal
hemispheric interactions, as well as complex multimodal interactions
(Giummarra, Gibson, Georgiou-Karistianis, & Bradshaw, 2007).
Nonamputated individuals can also experience phantom limbs in the
form of illusory movements. These refer to the experience that some hemiplegic patients have of performing movements without actually moving.
When confronted with their failure to move, most patients acknowledge
their mistake, but some will vehemently maintain that a movement has
been performed despite evidence to the contrary (Ramachandran, 1995).
These patients are often unaware of their paralysis (see below, anosognosia)
or present unilateral neglect (Feinberg, Roane, & Ali, 2000). It is unclear,
however, whether these claims reect a genuine illusory movement or a
verbal confabulation. Indeed, illusory movements are sometimes accompanied by delusional claims, such as when a patient not only claims having performed a movement but having seen his arm move or being able
to perform and hear sounds of clapping, or even being able to touch the
clinicians nose (Ramachandran, 1995). In nondelusional patients with
hemiplegia, illusory movements can be induced by providing a false visual
feedback using a fake hand placed where the patient thinks his real hand
lies, whereas patients unaware of their paralysis tend to perceive selfgenerated movements in the fake hand even when the latter remains
motionless (Fotopoulou et al., 2008). Hemiplegic patients presenting disorders of the body schema also tend to experience movements in their
paralyzed limb when looking at mirror-reected movements of their contralateral healthy limb (Zampini, Moro, & Aglioti, 2004). Lesions associated to illusory movements involve predominantly the right hemisphere

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and most often the frontal and parietal but also the temporal cortex
(Feinberg et al., 2000). It is also possible to induce illusory movements
by stimulating electrically the right temporo-parietal junction (Blanke,
Ortigue, Landis, & Seeck, 2002), in which case the illusion may have
not only sensorimotor but also visual characteristics such as seeing that
ones own limbs are approaching ones face.
Such phenomena should be distinguished from supernumerary phantom limbs, a condition dened as the perceptual experience of an additional body part, felt as an entity sharing properties of a real body part
and occupying a different place in space. Unlike patients with illusory
movements, patients with supernumerary phantom limb distinctly experience a third arm. Some can critically evaluate the feeling as an illusion,
but others will entertain the delusion that they actually own an additional
limb or even experience more numerous duplications of arms or legs and
perceive these multiple limbs as real. In the latter case, the term delusional
reduplication of body parts has been proposed (Weinstein, Kahn, Malitz, &
Rozanski, 1954). Most supernumerary phantom limbs involve a somesthetic perception of an immobile limb, localized separately but on the
same side as the paralyzed limb (Antoniello, Kluger, Sahlein, & Heilman,
2009). Movements of such phantoms are usually rare and most often automatic or involuntary. It can also happen that the extra limb simply
mimics the movements of the contralateral real limb or follows with some
delay the movements of the ipsilateral real limb (McGonigle et al., 2002).
There are, however, two cases in the literature describing intentional
supernumerary phantoms in which the patients, paralyzed on one side,
nevertheless experienced the movement of a phantom limb whenever
(and only when) they wished to move it (Khateb et al., 2009; Staub et al.,
2006). What is more, one of these patients also claimed to be able to see
the phantom and use it to scratch her own face (Khateb et al., 2009),
pointing to multimodal pathomechanisms [mechanisms by which a pathological conditions occurs] and similarities to heautoscopy, exosomesthesia,
and asomatoscopy (see below). Lesions have involved the right basal ganglia (Halligan, Marshall, & Wade, 1993), the right subcortical capsulolenticular region (Khateb et al., 2009), the left anterior choroidal artery
territory (Staub et al., 2006), the right frontomesial cortex (McGonigle
et al., 2002), and parietal structures in the case of delusional reduplications
(Weinstein et al., 1954). A few functional neuroimaging studies have been
conducted in such patients, showing activity in the supplemental motor
area during phantom movements mimicking movements of the duplicated
limb (McGonigle et al., 2002), abnormal activity in subcortical thalamocortical loops during intentional movements of the phantom (Staub et al.,

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

2006), and activity in somatosensory and visual areas correlating with the
patients claim of being able to feel and see her intentionally moved supernumerary phantom limb (Khateb et al., 2009). Given the variety of phenomenological proles, 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 conict between
impaired current proprioceptive afferences, caused by thalamo-cortical
disconnections, and a spared internal representation of the body. Kinesthetic phantoms may best be conceptualized as the result of preserved
motor efferences and action planning in the context of defective multimodal integration (Khateb et al., 2009). Additional pathomechanisms involving other modalities and higher cognitive functions could be involved in
cases with delusional beliefs.
The diversity of phantom limb phenomena, whether arising from
amputation or brain damage, points to a complex and highly efcient network of body-related brain functions that smoothly provide a coherent
bodily self in healthy persons.

Tactile Hallucinations and Mislocalizations

Whereas visual and auditory hallucinations have been dened according to the absence of an external object giving rise to a percept, tactile hallucinations have led to conceptual problems, as it is not easy to objectively
ascertain the absence of itches, numbness, and aches (Berrios, 1982). For
instance, amputees can feel so-called referred sensations in a nonexisting
limb concomitantly with a brush to specic body parts (Cronholm, 1951;
Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1998). Although the sensation is felt in a nonexisting limb, the regularity of the phenomenon argues against a hallucination.
Unusual or altered tactile experiences have frequently been reported in
the neurological literature. Like visual hallucinations, tactile misperceptions
range from the simple to the elaborate. Parkinsons disease and related disorders are a frequent etiology of simple tactile hallucinations (Fenelon, Thobois, Bonnet, Broussolle, & Tison, 2002), whereas in advanced dementia,
psychiatric conditions, substance abuse, and cerebrovascular disease,
patients sometimes present with delusional parasitosis, the type of abovementioned bugs hallucinations, also called Ekboms syndrome or dermatozoic hallucination (de Leon, Antelo, & Simpson, 1992).
The absence of tactile awareness from one body part is a frequent
accompanying feature of many disorders discussed in this chapter. Socalled paresthesias, most notably, are a frequent rst alert to patients
undergoing a neurological event. These involve tinglings, pins and

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needles, numbness, and alterations in the experience of weight, size, temperature, and motricity, even in the absence of motor disorders. In turn,
such feelings can lead to an experience of alienation from ones body parts
and even partial depersonalization, perhaps underlying rare cases of apparently healthy persons who wish to be amputated (Blanke, Morgenthaler,
Brugger, & Overney, 2009).
Neurologists have also observed mislocalizations of touch following
brain damage. The phenomenon of alloesthesia refers to the perceptual
transfer, usually from left to right (in the case of right-sided brain damage), of tactile sensations (Bender, 1970). Such patients are usually not
aware of their mistakes. Although alloesthesia is most often caused by
large lesions in the temporo-parietal areas of the right hemisphere, similar
tactile mislocalizations are easily induced in about a quarter of healthy
participants under laboratory conditions (Marcel et al., 2004).
Perhaps more strikingly, touch can sometimes be experienced outside
of ones body. This is what some rare reports have referred to as exosomethesia. This experience can happen under a variety of conditions, for instance during testing for alloesthesia (Shapiro, Fink, & Bender, 1952)
and in Tourettes syndrome (Karp & Hallett, 1996). As mentioned earlier,
amputees sometimes report tactile sensations in their phantom limbs.
However, there is at least one instance of phantom exosomesthesia in
which an amputee has reported a referred touch as arising from slightly
outside of the phantom (Cronholm, 1951). Some persons otherwise
healthy also report feeling touch when they see someone else being
touched, a synesthetic experience related to empathic tendencies (Banissy
& Ward, 2007). However, it does not seem that these individuals actually
feel touch as if it arose in the other person (i.e., they feel it in their own
body concomitantly to the touch they see on the other person). It is nevertheless relatively easy to induce the experience of touch as arising from
objects or fake body parts, usually by inducing visuo-tactile conicts (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), but also after practice with an extended tool (Maravita & Iriki, 2004) and the induction of spatially contiguous tactile inputs
(Miyazaki, Hirashima, & Nozaki, 2010). A feeling of numbness seemingly
arising from someone elses nger can also be achieved simply by simultaneously touching ones own nger together with another persons nger
(Dieguez, Mercier, Newby, & Blanke, 2009).

Bodily Transformations (Illusory Amputation, Size Changes, Disconnections)

Some neurological patients can experience the sensation that a part of
their body has vanished. These are cases of sensation of absence or true

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

sensation of amputation (as opposed to amputees who feel a phantom

limb and have an experience of bodily completeness and therefore do
not feel their amputation as an absence), and are part of what Frederiks
(1963a) named conscious hemiasomatognosia (see below, hemiasomatognosia
and anosognosia), meaning a critical awareness that something is lacking
from ones bodily experience. This symptom has also been described in
the visual modality, whereby a patient reports being unable to see a specic 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 oating 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 (Hecaen & Ajuriaguerra, 1952) affecting premotor, primary motor, or parietal cortex, as well as subcortical
structures of either hemisphere. These illusions can appear in isolation,
without any accompanying neurological symptoms.
Other phenomena are characterized by more diffuse sensations of alienness, disconnection, or absence of body parts from the rest of the body,
which are felt as numb, anesthetized, or empty. These forms have been
called hemi-depersonalization (Heydrich et al., 2010; Lhermitte, 1939), as
an analogy to full-edged depersonalization, which usually involves the
entire bodily self.
The terms micro- and macrosomatognosia refer to alterations in the perception of size and weight of certain body parts (Frederiks, 1963b). Thus,
a limb can be experienced as shrunken to the size of a babys hand or grotesquely immense (sometimes also referred to as Alice in Wonderland
Syndrome; Todd, 1955). Again, such illusions are typically found in
migraine and epilepsy, as well as damage to sensorimotor structures in
either hemisphere.

Hemiasomatognosia, Anosognosia
The term hemiasomatognosia was coined by French neurologist Jean
Lhermitte (1939) to refer to unawareness of a body part or a hemibody.
Frederiks (1963a) tried to clarify some conceptual issues by distinguishing
between conscious and nonconscious hemiasomatognosia. Conscious
hemiasomatognosia refers to patients who perceive their body as incomplete
or amputated while realizing that what they experience is an illusion (see
above, Bodily transformations), whereas nonconscious hemiasomatognosia

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refers to the disappearance of body parts from ones 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 ones own body. Personal neglect refers to the classical picture
where a patient forgets to comb, shave, or make up the left side of his or
her face. Motor neglect refers to patients who underuse or fail to use
altogether their left limbs despite having no motor impairment. Conversely, patients with anosognosia for hemiplegia behave as if they were
not paralyzed, as they ignore their left hemibody altogether and/or deny
that there is anything wrong with it. Nevertheless, anosognosia for hemiplegia is a complex phenomenon, with patients differing widely as to
their explicit and implicit insight of being paralyzed (Cocchini, Beschin,
Fotopoulou, & Della Sala, 2010). For instance, some patients deny their
impairment but nevertheless never act as if they were not paralyzed, while
others might admit being paralyzed but still attempt actions that are
impossible for them.
Recent lesion-mapping analyses comparing patients with righthemispheric damage with and without anosognosia have highlighted the
specic involvement of the right posterior insula (Baier & Karnath,
2008; Karnath, Baier, & Nagele, 2005) and an additional network of sensorimotor areas including the somatosensory, primary motor, and premotor cortices, as well as the inferior parietal lobule (Berti et al., 2005).
Anosognosia is a multifaceted syndrome involving defective awareness of
motor control, impaired integration of multimodal information, and disturbances of attentional and cognitive monitoring (Orfei et al., 2007).

Somatoparaphrenia
German neurologist Joseph Gerstmann sought to distinguish between
particular cases of hemiasomatognosia and used the term somatoparaphrenia
for strongly delusional instances (Gerstmann, 1942). Somatoparaphrenia
thus refers to false beliefs concerning a body part or a hemibody, the most
frequent being disownership of ones hand (whereby patients repeatedly
claim that their own left hands do not belong to them, or more explicitly
that they belong to someone else, the doctor, a nurse, a roommate, or some
undetermined person; review in Vallar & Ronchi, 2009). However, such
delusions can vary considerably, suggesting that the notion covers various
disorders. Some patients will deny the ownership of a limb without attributing it to someone else explicitly. Others will state spontaneously that their

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

limb belongs to someone specic, even someone altogether absent from the
current environment or already dead. Some patients will elaborate their
claim by stating that their limb has vanished or has been stolen, sometimes
leading to complaints to the hospital staff. The strength of the delusion can
also vary, some patients being able to acknowledge that there is something
bizarre about their belief and others maintaining their claims despite overwhelming counter-evidence.
Moreover, there are two types of misattribution in somatoparaphrenia:
Parts of ones own body can be attributed to someone else or, conversely,
parts of someone elses body can be attributed to oneself (Gertmann,
1942). Patients with somatoparaphrenia can display strong emotional
reactionsfor instance, they can fall from their bed after trying to kick
out what they think is an alien limb. Similarly, patients presenting with
misoplegia can display hatred of the paralyzed limb that borders on the
delusional but without presenting explicit feelings of disownership
(Loetscher, Regard, & Brugger, 2006).
Some cases of somatoparaphrenia suggest an association with other
disorders of the body schema such as supernumerary phantom limbs,
when a limb is disowned while an extra one is present, or the feeling
of a presence, when the disowned limb is perceived as a whole person
lying nearside in the bed.
Most of the reported cases of somatoparaphrenia involve the left side of
the body following a right-sided stroke. Lesions generally involve an
extended fronto-temporo-parietal network, with a predominance of posterior areas, such as the temporo-parietal junction, the posterior insula,
as well as subcortical structures (Vallar & Ronchi, 2009). Involvement of
medial frontal and orbitofrontal areas seems to distinguish delusional
types of disownership from mildest types of limb estrangement (Feinberg
et al., 2010). Interestingly, the posterior insula is the most commonly
involved area in both somatoparaphrenia and anosognosia for hemiplegia
(Baier & Karnath, 2008). Although these two disorders can be separated,
this nding 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 havent addressed here, can conceptually be extended
to the entire body (see Blanke et al., 2008; Dieguez et al., 2007).

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Almost four centuries ago, Descartes was greatly impressed by

accounts of phantom limbs in amputees, which might have led him to
wonder about the potential results of a radical amputation in the fourth
part of his Discourse on the Method (1637) (as suggested by Ferret, 1998,
pp. 161162). 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 Cotards syndrome) as a full-body analogy to his concept of hemiasomatognosia. In such cases, patients may go as far as to
claim to be nonexistent or dead (Young & Leafhead, 1996).
The extension of altered states of bodily consciousness from body parts
to the whole body seems to require the involvement of the vestibular system. Vestibular disturbances are indeed known to induce dissociations
between the experienced and the actual posture, movement, and orientation of the body. In the tilt-room illusion, for instance, patients might feel
a complete disconnect between the actual position of their bodies and the
orientation of their surroundings, which can appear tilted as far as 90
(Tiliket, Ventre-Dominey, Vighetto, & Grochowicki, 1996). More diffuse
disturbances are also found in patients with vestibular disturbances and
healthy participants undergoing caloric vestibular stimulation [water or
air irrigation into the auditory canal], a procedure that stimulates the vestibular system and induces symptoms comparable to depersonalization
(Sang, Jauregui-Renaud, Green, Bronstein, & Gresty, 2006). Interestingly,
caloric vestibular stimulation has been shown to activate brain areas
involved in several altered states of bodily consciousness, including the
right temporo-parietal junction and posterior insula (Fasold et al., 2002)
and also to alleviate such symptoms (Bisiach, Rusconi, Vallar, 1991).
Bodily mislocalizations, hallucinations of body parts, and supernumerary phantom limbs have recently been linked to autoscopic phenomena
(Blanke, Landis, Spinelli, & Seeck, 2004; Brugger, 2002). This group of
disorders involves multimodal illusions inducing the experience of more
or less complete duplicata of ones own body. An autoscopic hallucination
is one where experiencers perceive a visual double of themselves in
extrapersonal space. However, such visual perception of ones body can
also involve mislocalizations of the bodily self. Thus, during heautoscopy,
a person can experience the bodily self alternatively, or even at the same
time, in the physical and the seen body. In neurological patients undergoing this Doppelganger experience, an involvement of the left temporoparietal junction and the left mesiobasal temporal lobe has been found
(Blanke & Mohr, 2005). In an out-of-body experience, a person feels her

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

self as spatially localized outside of the physical body and experiences seeing the latter from an elevated perspective (see below).
Another related illusion, referred to as the feeling of a presence, is characterized by a closely projected double that is not visible (Brugger, Regard,
& Landis, 1997). The presence of a person can be felt sideways, behind,
or in front of ones physical body, and may even involve multiple presences (Brugger, Blanke, Regard, Bradford, & Landis, 2006). Such a feeling
of presence has been induced by cortical electrical stimulation of the posterior part of the left superior and middle temporal gyrus (Arzy, Seeck,
Ortigue, Spinelli, & Blanke, 2006). For both heautoscopy and the feeling
of presence, damage to or abnormal activity in parietal and temporallimbic structures, and a resulting vestibular dysfunction, have been posited
as plausible pathomechanisms underlying such complex experiences.

Out-of-body and Near-death Experiences

The out-of-body experience (OBE) can be dened as a waking experience combining disembodiment, elevated perspective, and autoscopy.
However, specic features, such as how the disembodied self is perceived, the modalities involved, the ability to move, and so forth, can vary
widely across persons (Alvarado, 2000), suggesting multiple etiologies
and mechanisms. The neural correlates of such extraordinary experiences
are beginning to be understood, highlighting the roles of multisensory
integration and vestibular processes. An OBE was recently induced by
cortical electrical stimulations during presurgical investigations for intractable epilepsy (Blanke et al., 2002). At lower intensities, stimulation of the
right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) induced simple vestibular illusions,
whereas stronger intensities at the same region induced an OBE (see also
De Ridder, Van Laere, Dupont, Menovsky, & Van de Heyning, 2007).
The rTPJ, and especially the angular gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, was later found to be the critical overlapping region in a group
of brain-damaged and epileptic patients with OBE (Blanke et al., 2004;
Blanke & Mohr, 2005), and was involved in a task where healthy participants had to mentally project themselves out of their body to resolve a task
of laterality (Blanke et al., 2005).
Studies of persons with sleep paralysis reporting OBE-like experiences
and related disorders, as well as healthy persons with an experience of
OBE (about 510% of the general population report at least one such
experience during a lifetime; Alvarado, 2000), suggest that neural mechanisms related to REM intrusion (Nelson, Mattingly, & Schmitt, 2007), the
vestibular and motor system (Cheyne & Girard, 2009), emotions (Nielsen,

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2007), synesthetic tendencies (Terhune, 2009), as well as personality factors such as absorption, dissociation, schizotypy, and body image dissatisfaction (reviewed in Blanke & Dieguez, 2009) are associated with the
experience of disembodiment and altered states of bodily consciousness
involving the whole body.
Such mechanisms are also likely involved in OBEs that occur under
stressful events or extreme medical situations, so-called near-death experiences (Blanke & Dieguez, 2009; Holden, Greyson, & James, 2009). In
addition to disembodiment, such experiences may be associated with the
experience of a passage through darkness or a tunnel, the perception of
a divine light, a panoramic review of ones 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 difcult to envision a neurocognitive account of NDEs as there is a dearth of systematic empirical neuroscientic research on this class of phenomena,
perhaps due to its paranormal overtones and the lack of a consistent and
operational denition. Indeed, a number of conditions have been reported
to induce similar experiences, most often involving some alteration of
the bodily self and not being necessarily life-threatening, such as syncope
(Lempert, Bauer, & Schmidt, 1994), intracranial brain stimulation (Vignal,
Maillard, McGonigal, & Chauvel, 2007), the perception of danger (Noyes
& Kletti, 1977), and psychological stress (Siegel, 1984).
All in all, it seems that the OBE in neurological patients, healthy persons, and under life-threatening situations, is associated with a disintegration of sensory modalities, notably vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive
information, together with a variety of factors reecting cognitive, emotional, and perhaps cultural factors, leading to failures of self-localization
and displacement of the rst-person perspective.

Behavioral and Experimental Alterations of Bodily Consciousness

We cover in this section a variety of classical altered states of consciousness and how they affect the bodily self, as well as experimental
methods developed to study the bodily self in the laboratory.

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

Mystical States
Altered states of consciousness associated with mystical states or meditation have been reported to induce alterations of bodily consciousness
from times immemorial. In these states, dissolution of the ego or pure
consciousness are often reported, referring to an experienced merging
of the self and bodily self with external space and accompanied by a felt
transcendence from spatial and temporal constraints, a sense of sacredness
and ineffability, and an overall positive mood (Pahnke & Richards, 1990/
1966; Wulff, 2000). Such states can also be close to, or even cause, OBEand NDE-like episodes. An involvement of the limbic system, associated
to a sudden release of endorphins (Prince, 1982) or in the form of ecstatic
epileptic seizures of temporal lobe origin (Picard & Craig, 2009), has been
highlighted as a neurobiological correlate of such experiences. A recent
investigation of the impact of brain damage on the personality trait transcendent self also suggests the importance of the temporo-parietal junction (Urgesi, Aglioti, Skrap, & Fabbro, 2010), an area also involved in
other cases of altered bodily awareness of body parts (such as anosognosia
and somatoparaphrenia) as well as illusory full-body perceptions (such as
out-of-body experiences). Physical and environmental factors can also be
involved, as experiences of bodily dissolution and separation of the self
and body have been reported during physical exhaustion of runners
(Morgan, 2002) and in high-altitude mountaineers (Brugger, Regard,
Landis, & Oelz, 1999).

Hypnosis
Hypnosis is perhaps the most compelling area of overlap between neurology and ASC, at least historically [see Cardena & Alvarado, Volume 1].
Early investigation of hysteric patients suggested an inuence of hypnosis on bodily function and experience. At least in certain persons,
neurological-like symptoms have been relieved or induced by different
methods of hypnosis. Most notably, anaesthesia/analgesia and paralysis
during hypnosis have been the focus of much attention and recently been
revived in neuroscientic research (Cojan et al., 2009). Hypnotic induction of altered states of bodily consciousness has also been incorporated
as a tool in the cognitive neurosciences of belief formation in healthy participants (e.g., Cox & Barnier, 2010). We also note that hypnosis has been
used to induce OBEs (Irwin, 1989). Although the mechanisms underlying
hypnosis are far from understood, these ndings point to the importance
of suggestibility and higher-order belief systems, as well as the inuence

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of conducive bodily states (e.g., quiescence, Cardena, 2005), as part of the

etiology of altered states of bodily consciousness.

Drugs
Drugs have probably been the most salient articial 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 ows of vivid colors, wind rushing
through his hair, sensations of lightness and contraction, visual hallucinations of parts of his own body, and the feeling of being inside his own
body and looking through it as through a thin transparent skin (in
Lhermitte, 1939, pp. 167168). In addition to feelings of dissolution
and various forms of transformations, getting high often involves the
sensation of levitating and ying, as well as leaving ones body, as
described by French poet and painter Henri Michaux in his monograph
on the effects of marijuana (Michaux, 1967, pp. 132135).
Indeed, apart from well-known effects such as distortion of sense of
time, increase in self-condence, heightened awareness, and complex
mental associations (Hastings, 1990/1969), marijuana is also well known
to inuence bodily consciousness. Charles Tart (1971) conducted a survey of marijuana users that showed a very wide range of bodily self alterations: Users sometimes experience their whole body as bigger or smaller
than usual, the shape of their body as strangely altered, the body felt as
numb, as well as full-blown OBEs.
The Good Friday experiment conducted by Pahnke in 1962 (see
follow-up by Doblin, 1991) demonstrated that psilocybin, unlike a placebo,
allowed inducing mystical states along with alterations of bodily consciousness sometimes similar to OBEs and NDEs. More recently, Grifths and collaborators replicated this nding 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 (Grifths, Richards, McCann, & Jesse, 2006). Reporting on the
effects of LSD, Pahnke and Richards (1990/1966) also described a wide
range of bodily effects, such as intriguing somatic sensations, feeling as
though [the] body is melting, falling apart, or exploding into minute fragments (p. 493), changes in kinesthetic and cutaneous reception and
claims of merging with oorboards or feeling unity with the walls of a

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

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 scientic tool for investigating the interactions between bodily awareness and
cognition. In such studies, participants lie in an isolation tank, deprived of
as many sensory signals as possible (Zubek, 1969). The effects of such
experiments have been compared to medical conditions involving sensory
and motor impairments (Jackson, Pollard, & Kansky, 1962) and more
recently to the effects of mind-altering drugs (Mason & Brady, 2009).
Altered states of bodily consciousness have also been reported during such
conditions, with illusory movements, complex tactile hallucinations, feelings of a presence, depersonalization, and OBEs (Heron, 1957).
As is the case with other ASC, it is known that OBEs are favorably
induced when lying down or relaxing (Zingrone, Alvarado, & Cardena,
2010), an important observation in the light of accounts of the OBE in
terms of vestibular hallucination (Schwabe & Blanke, 2008). Individuals
claiming to be able to deliberately self-induce OBEs have also used a variety of sensory deprivation and meditation methods (reviewed in Blackmore, 1982). More recently, laboratory investigations have delineated
controlled approaches to induce, or at least mimic, some aspects of OBEs.
Most notably, visuo-tactile conicts have been exploited to investigate the
OBE (Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager, Tadi, Metzinger, & Blanke, 2007).
These studies have used virtual reality as a method to provide participants
with visual perceptions of their own bodies (via a recording camera feeding a head-mounted display) while experiencing tactile sensations congruent or incongruent with those applied to their visual double. Measures of
self-location and subjective reports about self-identity in such experiments
have revealed the importance of congruent visuo-tactile information for
the bodily self (review in Aspell & Blanke, 2009).
These paradigms have been inspired by experimental approaches to
modify bodily consciousness of body parts. The rubber-hand illusion,
for instance, operates under similar visuo-tactile conicts, whereby a person looks at a fake hand being stroked by a brush while feeling the same
sensation on her real (and hidden) hand. In such circumstances, it is often
reported that the felt brushes seem to be located onto the fake hand, and
objective measures reveal that participants experience their real hand to

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Altering Consciousness

be located closer to the fake hand than it really is (Botvinick & Cohen,
1998). Interestingly, feelings of illusory ownership during the rubberhand illusion have been found to correlate with objective changes in temperature in the real hand (Moseley et al., 2008), suggesting that similar
processes underlie experimentally-induced illusory ownership in healthy
persons and a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions involving altered states of bodily consciousness (reviewed in Moseley et al.,
2008). Coupled with clinical investigations, the experimental study of
full-body illusions provides a very promising approach for understanding
the neurocognitive processes underlying the bodily self and altered states
of bodily consciousness.

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have covered a wide array of altered states of bodily
consciousness. Perhaps most striking is the sheer phenomenological variety of these bodily experiences. Misrepresentations of the physical body
can involve selected body parts, half of the body, or the entire body and
self. Whereas some of them are critically perceived as illusory by the experient, even sought after in some cases, others can be outright delusional.
Their content can involve varied phenomena such as mislocalizations,
illusory movements, presence of nonexistent body parts, disappearance
of body parts, size and shape transformations, denial of ownership, incorporation of external objects, merging of boundaries, complete disembodiment, and denial of impairment.
At this stage, an encompassing theoretical framework to explain and
reliably induce such states is not available. It is indeed difcult 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 rst personperspective, self-location, and self-identication) 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 identied to be crucially involved in the integration of body parts
and representations of the whole body, as well as the calibration of an egocentric spatial frame of reference allowing one to coherently locate ones

Altered States of Bodily Consciousness

body with respect to gravity and the surrounding environment. Future work
should allow scientists to ne-grain these observations and disentangle the
systems underlying specic alterations of the bodily self. A worthwhile
question, for instance, would be whether body parts and whole-body
alterations can be mapped unto an anatomo-functional continuum or
whether they arise from different processes altogether.
Most importantly, any insights have been and will be the result of
investigations carried out from a wide range of perspectives, including
analytical philosophy, phenomenology, clinical neuropsychology, experimental psychology, and the cognitive neurosciences. New therapeutic
methods and creative experimental paradigms, incorporating pharmacological improvements, braincomputer interfaces, as well as robotic and
virtual reality technology, will also emerge in the near future. Merged with
the insights offered by approaches and traditions often considered as outside the reach of science, such as hypnosis, shamanism, mysticism, religious rituals, and the use of mind-altering drugs, the study of altered
states of bodily consciousness holds the potential to offer important scientic insights about the brain processes involved in creating our everyday
experience of the self. Conversely, careful theoretical and conceptual work
on the bodily self can guide our understanding and the development of
experimental approaches to ASC at large.

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391

Index
shaman and pilgrims, 15456; symbols
and visions, 15657
Huichol Indians: Mexico, 147; plant
knowledge, 155 n.4
Human development: adolescence,
22326; adulthood, 226; complexity
and differentiation, 214, 215, 218;
consciousness, 21112; early
childhood, 21922; infant and toddler,
213, 21519; late adulthood, 22628;
middle childhood, 222; self-awareness,
217; self-regulation, 215, 216
Human sexuality: cultural relativity of
practices, 190; studies of, 18990. See
also Sexuality
Hunt, H. T., 291, 31819
Husserl, Edmund G., 329, 330, 346
Huxley, Aldous, 77
Hypertensive crisis, tyramine-rich foods,
104
Hyperventilation, 56; sexuality and
ASC, 195
Hypnagogic sleep stage, 360, 361, 367
Hypnopompic sleep stage, 360
Hypnosis, 331, 33536; bodily
consciousness in, 25152; and
emotion, 28182; ESP experience,
36364; fMRI studies, 334; healing
effects, 335
Hypnosis Induction Prole (HIP), 68
Hypnotic responsiveness, 221
Hypnotic susceptibility, ultradian cycle, 8
Hypnotizability, 338; genetic
component, 212
Hypothermic cardiac arrest, 76
Iatrogenic problems, misdiagnosed
VSEs, 317
Ictal period, temporal lobe epileptic
seizure, 64, 65
Ictus-related religious experience, TLE,
6465
Igoga plant, 51
Illusory amputation, 24445
Illusory movements, 241
Imaginary gures, childhood, 220
Immortality, daoist yoga, 197
Inca Cueva site, Argentina, 86

Infant and toddler cognitive development,

213, 21519
Information, AIM model of
consciousness, 7
Information processing, and imagery
production, 13
Infradian biological rhythm, 45
Inner heros journey, shamanism,
335, 342
Inner voices, 315
Institut fur Grenzgebiete der Psychologie,
ASC therapeutic recommendations,
295
Integrated consciousness,
transcendental, 11
Interictal period, temporal lobe epileptic
seizure, 64, 65
Interictal personality syndrome, TLE, 66
Internal awareness, 26364
Internal locus of control, 44
International Classication of Diseases (ICD10) drug dependence, 170
Intoxication, 33
Intracellular messenger molecules, 28
Ion-channel opening and closing, 28
Ionotropic receptors, 28, 29, 30; and
nicotine, 32
Isoquinolines, cacti, 150
Jackson, M. C., 317
Jaffe, J. H., 122
James, William, 22, 36, 63, 75, 225, 279,
355; on altered consciousness, 39;
pre/transpersonal fallacy, 318
Jet lag, 16
Johari, H., 198
Johnson, V. E., 200
Jung, Carl G., 343; pre/transpersonal
fallacy, 318; rebirth of self, 343;
spiritual themes, 3034
Jurema, bark beverage, 89t, 92, 107
Kabbalistic practice, 313
Kafka, Franz, 343, 344 n.1
Kallio, S., 340, 341
Karezza, sexual method, 191
Kauyumarie, Huichol deer god,
157, 158, 161

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CHAPTER 12

Altering Consciousness and

Neuropathology
Quentin Noirhomme
and Steven Laureys
For neurologists, consciousness can be reduced to its two main components, namely wakefulness (i.e., the level of consciousness or arousal or
vigilance) and awareness (i.e., the contents of consciousness of the environment and of self; see Figure 12.1). You need to be awake to be aware [but
see discussion on lucid dreaming, below]. There is, of course, an irreducible philosophical limitation in knowing for certain whether any other
being possesses a conscious perception. There is, at present, no validated
objective consciousness meter. Consciousness is a subjective rst-person
experience, and its bedside evaluation is limited to mainly measuring the
patients motor responsiveness. Wakefulness is neuroanatomically supported by the function of the subcortical arousal systems in brainstem, midbrain, and both thalami. Clinically, wakefulness can be scored by assessing
eye opening. Awareness is thought to be supported by the functional integrity of the cerebral cortex and its subcortical connections, but its underlying
neural code remains to be elucidated (Laureys, 2005a). Awareness can be
further reduced to external or sensory awareness (i.e., auditory, visual,
or somatosensory perception of the environment coming through the
senses) and internal or self-awareness (i.e., stimulus-independent
thoughts, inner speech, and mental imagery; Vanhaudenhuyse, Demertzi,
et al., 2010). The clinical quantication of awareness is limited to evaluating patients motor responsiveness to commands and nonreex or willed
behavior, such as eye tracking or oriented responses to painful stimulation.
Internal or self-awareness is a more ill-dened concept that can be
assessed by using auto-referential stimuli, such as the patients responses
to presentation of their own face in the mirror or voicing of their names

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

level of consciousness (i.e., arousal or wakefulness) and the content of consciousness (i.e., awareness), and the way they correlate within the different physiological, pharmacological and pathological modulations of consciousness. Rapid eye
movement sleep (REM) is a state of sleep propitious for dreaming. (Adapted from
S. Laureys. (2005). The neural correlate of (un)awareness: Lessons from the vegetative state. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, 556559. Used by permission of
Elsevier.)

(Majerus, Gill-Thwaites, Andrews, & Laureys, 2005) [see Dieguez &

Blanke, this volume].
An example of the relationship between the two components of consciousness is the transition from conscious waking to deep sleep: The less
aroused we get, the less aware we become of our surroundings and ourselves (see Figure 12.1). Patients in pathological or pharmacological coma
(i.e., general anesthesia) are unconscious because they cannot be awakened.
Vegetative state (now called unresponsive wakefulness syndrome; Laureys et
al., 2010), absence seizures, and complex partial seizures are unique dissociated states of consciousness (i.e., patients are seemingly awake but lack
any behavioral evidence of voluntary or willed behavior). Minimally conscious patients are unable to communicate their thoughts and feelings but
demonstrate nonreex movements or command following. The locked-in

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syndrome is an infrequent condition in which patients awaken from their

coma fully aware and conscious but remain mute and paralyzed; it is called
pseudocoma because patients supercially look unconscious but in reality
are fully aware although unable to show it because of severe paralysis. Some
epileptic patients (e.g., absence and complex partial seizures) may present
transient loss of awareness (meaning they show no command following)
while seemingly awake and making automatic movements.
In contrast to unconscious states such as general anesthesia and deep
sleep (in which impairment in arousal cannot be disentangled from
impairment in awareness), pathological disorders of consciousness are
characterized by a dissociation of arousal and awareness, offering a unique
lesional approach to identifying the neural correlates of awareness. Besides
the clinical evaluation already mentioned, scientists now use functional
neuroimaging techniques (positron emission tomography, functional
magnetic resonance imaging, magneto/electro-encephalography) to track
neural changes that correlate with changes in the level and content of consciousness and identify the neural correlates of consciousness.
In the following sections, we will present the three main clinical types
of altered states of consciousness (ASC): physiological, pharmacological,
and pathological alterations of consciousness. Our normal sleepwake
cycles can be considered as a daily physiological change in conscious
states. Pharmacologically induced unconsciousness is commonly named
deep sedation or general anesthesia. The last category of ASC refers to pathologic altered conscious states, such as epileptic loss of consciousness and
comatose, vegetative, and minimally conscious states that can be seen after
severe brain injury of various origins.

Physiological Alterations in Consciousness

Normal altered states of consciousness like sleep and dreaming are discussed elsewhere in this book [see Kokoszka and Wallace, this volume]. In
the following section, we summarize the most relevant facts for the discussion on the functional neuroanatomy of pathological loss of consciousness.
For centuries, scientists assumed that consciousness ceased at sleep
onset and resumed only when we woke up. Dreaming was assumed to
occur only during the process of awakening. Because memory is so severely
affected by sleep, it was difcult to get reliable and valid descriptions of
mental activity during sleep. Nowadays, this view does not prevail anymore
and sleep is no longer considered a homogeneous uniform entity but is divided into cycles where the sleeper passes through several stages classied

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as either nonrapid-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 orid character, the content
of consciousness may come close to wakeful experience (Hobson, 2005).
Neuroimaging techniques showed that the regional activation of the
brain during NREM and REM sleep stages is very different from each other
and from wakefulness (Maquet et al., 2005). During NREM sleep, as compared to wakefulness, the global brain activity decreases to roughly 60% of
normal values. But, although consciousness is dulled and the brain
appears globally deactivated, the deactivation is only relative and the brain
is still capable of some information processing. During REM sleep, vigorous brain activation occurs but sensory inputs and motor outputs are
simultaneously blocked, putting the brain off-line. Neuroimaging studies in sleep have emphasized the critical role of a frontoparietal network
(Figure 12.2). They have demonstrated the presence of preserved activity
levels in the individual network components during sleep but also that
sleep-induced changes in consciousness are reected in reduced functional connectivity between frontal and posterior areas of this network.
The level of activity and connectivity in the network does not fall at sleep
onset, presumably because thoughts do not abruptly cease but rather
decrease gradually as a person falls asleep (Horovitz et al., 2009).
Few imaging studies have been done during unusual sleep such as
somnambulism or lucid dreaming. Somnambulism occurs during deep
sleep and the person presents transient nonresponsiveness but partially
preserved arousal and semipurposeful behavior such as walking. In the
only patient studied with imaging techniques so far, it was reported that
large areas of frontal and parietal association cortices remained deactivated during sleepwalking (Bassetti, Vella, Donati, Wielepp, & Weder,
2000, pp. 484485). Lucid dreaming is a dissociated state with aspects
of waking and dreaming combined where a healthy person is aware of
being in a dream and controls his or her actions during the dream. Lucid
dreaming occurs during REM sleep from which it differentiates by showing changes in electrophysiological activity in the frontal regions (Voss,
Holzmann, Tuin, & Hobson, 2009). Lucid dreamers are able to reason
clearly, to remember the conditions of waking life, and to remember all
lucid dream experiences (Holzinger, LaBerge, & Levitan, 2006).

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Figure 12.2 The wide frontoparietal network supposed to be involved in consciousness. The network encompasses the polymodal associative cortices: lateral
and medial frontal regions bilaterally, parieto-temporal and posterior parietal areas
bilaterally, posterior cingulate and precuneal cortices. The internal awareness network, also known as the default mode network, includes the more active areas at
rest. The level of consciousness is linked to activity in both internal and external
networks and in the thalami as well as the connectivity between them. (Adapted
from S. Laureys. (2007). Eyes open, brain shut. Scientic American, 296, 8489).

Pharmacological Alterations in Consciousness

Sedative anesthetic agents aim at inducing unconsciousness but also
amnesia, immobility, and areexia. They can be separated into three main
categories: the classic anesthetic agents, the dissociative anesthetic agents,
and the minimally sedative agents. Classic anesthetic agents such as

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propofol or sevourane are able to induce graded states of sedation and

combine alterations of wakefulness and awareness. Dissociative anesthetic
agents such as ketamine or nitrous oxide are able to blunt out conscious
processes while maintaining signs of wakefulness. Finally, minimally sedative agents induce graded alterations of wakefulness while preserving
several cognitive brain functions (P. Boveroux et al., 2008). At lowsedative doses, anesthetic agents cause a state similar to drunkenness.
Anesthetized healthy individuals present distorted time perception,
increased sleepiness, and depersonalization. Furthermore, they show
reduced response to pain and loss of memory. Anesthetists then can
increase slightly the anesthetic dose until the person fails to move in
response to a command and is therefore considered unconscious. During
surgical operation, higher anesthetic doses are used to prevent movement
and response to painful stimulations. In rare cases (about 0.10.2% and
currently decreasing in frequency), uctuation of the awareness level of
patients caused by overly light anesthesia, increased anesthetic requirement, or failure of drug delivery systems can lead to awareness under
anesthesia. If neuromuscular blockers are used, then patients cannot communicate their awareness, which can lead to pain, anxiety, or delayed psychiatric symptoms (Serfontein, 2010).
The experts think that anesthetic agents alter brain activity by interacting with ion channels that regulate synaptic transmission and membrane
potentials. Anesthetic agents increase inhibition or decrease excitation,
resulting in a hyperpolarization of the neurons. The various anesthetic
agents affect differently key regions of the brain and spinal cord (Alkire,
Hudetz, & Tononi, 2008). Neuroimaging studies on ASC induced by
anesthesia have shown that activity in primary sensory cortices (the cortices that perceive external stimulations and transmit these stimulations to
higher-order processing cortices) are often unchanged during anesthesia.
Higher-order areas react differently to anesthesia. A recent study has
shown that propofol-induced loss of consciousness correlates with a selective alteration of connectivity inside the frontoparietal network that is also
impaired in normal sleep (P. Boveroux et al., 2010, Figure 2). The thalamus has long been suggested as a consciousness switch because of the
consistent reduction of activity observed during anesthesia. Nevertheless,
thalamic activity does not decrease with all anesthetics and, therefore,
anesthetic effects on the thalamus may be largely indirect (Alkire et al.,
2008). Despite the daily use of general anesthesia, it seems our understanding of pharmacological loss of consciousness remains at present
incomplete.

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Pathological Alterations of Consciousness

Epilepsy
Epilepsy is not a singular disease entity but a variety of disorders
resulting from pathological neuronal activity (i.e., seizures) that can occur
in different brain areas. The origin and the spread of the seizure determine
the resulting brain alteration. Epilepsy may result from many different
causes. Epileptic seizures are characterized by transient signs or symptoms
caused by abnormal excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the
brain. Seizures are unpredictable and interrupt normal brain function
affecting sensory, motor, and autonomic function; consciousness; emotional states; memory; cognition; or behavior. Not all seizures affect all of
these factors, but all inuence at least one (Fisher et al., 2005). Electroencephalography is often used to establish the diagnosis as epileptic seizures
are accompanied by marked electroencephalographic patterns. Three
main types of seizures can cause impaired consciousness, namely absence
seizures, generalized tonic-clonic seizures, and complex partial seizures.
Absence seizures present as brief episodes of staring and unresponsiveness while awareness briey vanishes, often accompanied by eye blinking
and lip smacking. Their duration is usually less than 10 seconds. These
seizures occur most commonly in childhood. Their severity varies from
one person to the next depending of the impaired brain networks. Simple
repetitive motor tasks are less impaired than tasks requiring complex decision making. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have
shown widespread deactivations in fronto-parietal associative cortices
during absence seizures (Blumenfeld & Taylor, 2003) .
Generalized tonic-clonic seizures can be divided into primarily generalized, in which there is no obvious focal onset, and secondarily generalized, in which seizures begin in a focal brain region and then spread. In
the starting phase, there are sustained muscle contractions accompanied
by high brain activity. Usually, after 10 to 20 seconds, this is followed by
rhythmic contractions of the limbs. After a few minutes, clinical and
electroencephalographic seizure activity usually stops abruptly and the
patient remains deeply lethargic, unresponsive, and with markedly suppressed electroencephalographic activity for a variable period of time.
Generalized tonic-clonic seizures cause impaired consciousness through
involvement of widespread brain regions (Blumenfeld & Taylor, 2003).
Temporal lobe seizures originate in limbic structures of the medial
temporal lobe, such as the hippocampus and the amygdala. Although
awareness can be spared at the beginning of the seizure, they often

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terminate with impaired awareness and are called complex partial seizures. Otherwise, if they terminate without impaired consciousness, they
are called simple partial seizures. Loss of responsiveness and awareness
in complex partial seizures usually persists for up to several minutes,
and epileptic patients may show oral and manual automatisms (e.g., picking, fumbling, and cycling). They are followed by amnesia for the episode.
Simple partial seizures stay in the temporal lobe while complex partial
seizures show marked bilateral deactivation in frontal and parietal association cortex. By contrast, simple partial seizures (where patients remain
conscious) are not accompanied by these widespread changes. Complex
partial seizures can propagate to the rest of the brain to produce a secondarily generalized tonic-clonic seizure (Englot & Blumenfeld, 2009) [see
Cardena, this volume, for some specic changes in the content of consciousness during seizures].

Coma and Related Disorders of Consciousness

Progress in medicine has increased the number of patients who survive
severe brain damage. Different clinical entities are encountered on the
gradual recovery from coma. Restoration of spontaneous or elicited eyeopening (in the absence of voluntary motor activity) marks the transition
from coma to vegetative state, now called unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. The passage from the vegetative to the minimally conscious state
is marked by reproducible evidence of voluntary behavior. Emergence
from the minimally conscious state is signaled by the return of functional
communication. Note that our clinical evaluation of cognition depends
upon motor responsiveness. The locked-in syndrome is the extreme
example of intact cognition with nearly complete motor decit (only permitting eye-coded communication; Laureys, 2005a).
Brain Death

Brain death is death determined by brain or neurological criteria. Death

is dened as the permanent cessation of the critical functions of the organism as a whole (i.e., neuroendocrine and homeostatic regulation, circulation, respiration, and consciousness). Most countries, including the
United States, require death of the whole brain including the brain stem,
but some (e.g., UK and India) rely on the death of the brain stem only,
stating that the brain stem is at once the through-station for nearly all hemispheric input and output, the center generating arousal (an essential condition for conscious awareness), and the center of breathing. Clinical

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diagnostic criteria of brain death, however, are widely accepted and are
based on the loss of all brain stem reexes and the demonstration of continuing termination of respiration (by carefully performing an apnea test) in an
irreversibly comatose patient. There should be an evident cause of coma and
confounding factors such as hypothermia and drug intoxication should be
excluded. Conrmatory tests include a at electroencephalogram and
absence of arterial circulation to the brain shown by arteriography or
echo-Doppler techniques. Brain death is most often caused by a massive
brain lesion (e.g., trauma, intracranial hemorrhage, anoxia) that increases
intracranial pressure, causing the intracranial circulation to cease and damaging the brain stem because of herniation. Functional imaging studies have
shown an empty skull sign (i.e., only the skin surrounding the skull shows
preserved metabolic activity on functional brain scans) conrming the
absence of all neural activity (Laureys, 2005b). The frontoparietal network
linked to consciousness in sleep and anesthesia studies was deactivated in
brain death when studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging
(Boly et al., 2009).
Coma

Coma is characterized by the absence of arousal and thus also of consciousness. It is a state of unarousable unresponsiveness in which the
patient lies with the eyes closed and has no awareness of self and surroundings. The patient lacks the spontaneous periods of wakefulness
and eye-opening induced by stimulation that can be observed in the vegetative state. To be clearly distinguished from syncope, concussion, or
other states of transient unconsciousness, coma must persist for at least 1
hour. In general, comatose patients who survive begin to awaken and recover gradually within 2 to 4 weeks. Coma can result from bilateral widespread hemispheric cortical or white matter damage or from more focal
brainstem lesions, affecting the subcortical reticular arousing systems.
The prognosis depends on the etiology, the patients general medical condition, age, clinical signs, and results from complementary examinations.
Traumatic etiology is known to have a better outcome than nontraumatic, especially anoxic cases. In the latter case, as for cardiac arrest
survivors, after 3 days of observation a bad outcome is heralded by the
absence of papillary or corneal reexes, stereotyped or absent motor
response to noxious stimulation, absent cortical responses of somatosensoryevoked potentials, and biochemical markers, such as high levels of serum
neuron-specic enolase.

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Vegetative State or Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome

Following severe brain damage and coma, some patients may awaken
(that is, open the eyes) but remain unresponsive, only showing reex
movements. In Europe, this clinical syndrome was initially termed apallic
syndrome and coma vigil, but it was later redened 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 difcult to make strong claims about vegetative
patients awareness. This situation is further complicated when they have
underlying decits in verbal or nonverbal communication functions, such
as aphasia, agnosia, or apraxia (Majerus, Bruno, Schnakers, Giacino, &
Laureys, 2009). It appears that part of the healthcare, media, and lay public continues to feel some unease regarding the unintended denigrating
vegetable-like connotation seemingly intrinsic to the term VS. The European Task Force on Disorders of Consciousness therefore recently proposed an alternative name (Laureys et al., 2010). Hence, physicians have
recently offered to refer to these patients as being in unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) a more neutral and descriptive term pertaining to
patients showing a number of clinical signs (hence syndrome) of unresponsiveness (that is, without response to commands or oriented voluntary movements) in the presence of wakefulness (that is, eye opening). In
contrast to coma, which is an acute condition lasting no more than some
days or weeks, UWS can be a chronic condition lasting years or becoming
permanent. The vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome may
be a transition to further recovery or may be permanent.
Permanent vegetative state is a term that refers to patients whose chances
for recovery are close to zero. This is the case when the condition lasts
more than 1 year after traumatic or 3 months after nontraumatic (anoxic)
injury. The VS has been characterized as persistent when a patient is in this
state for more than 1 month. As both terms are abbreviated as PVS, we
suggest avoiding these terms and, instead, using unresponsive wakefulness
syndrome with the etiology and the time spent in the condition. At present,
there are no validated prognostic markers for individual patients except
that the chances for recovery depend on patients age, etiology, and time
spent in the UWS. In the vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, global metabolic activity decreases to about 50% of normal levels.
Furthermore, neuroimaging studies have identied the frontoparietal network previously presented in sleep and anesthesia as the network showing
metabolic dysfunction as compared with the conscious resting state in
healthy controls (Figure 12.2) (Laureys, 2005a).

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Minimally Conscious State

The minimally conscious state was dened in 2002 by the Aspen Neurobehavioral Conference Workgroup to subcategorize patients above the
VS/UWS but unable to functionally communicate their thoughts and feelings. Minimally conscious state patients show inconsistent but discernible
signs of behavioral activity that is more than reexive in at least one of the
following behavioral ways: (1) purposeful behavior, including movements
or affective behavior that occurs in contingent relation to relevant environment stimuli and is not caused by reexive activity, such as: pursuit eye
movement or sustained xation occurring in direct response to moving
or salient stimuli, smiling or crying in response to verbal or visual emotional but not neutral stimuli, reaching for objects, demonstrating a relationship between object location and direction of reach, touching or
holding objects in a manner that accommodates the size and shape of
the object, and vocalizations or gestures occurring in direct response
to the linguistic content of questions; (2) following simple commands;
(3) gestural or verbal yes/no response, regardless of accuracy; and
(4) intelligible verbalization.
Emergence from the minimally conscious state is dened by the ability
to exhibit functional interactive communication or functional use of
objects. Given that the criteria for the minimally conscious state have only
recently been introduced, there are few clinical studies of patients in this
condition. Similar to the vegetative state, traumatic etiology has a better
prognosis than nontraumatic anoxic brain injuries. Preliminary data show
that the overall outcome in the minimally conscious state is more favorable
than in the vegetative state. At present, no time intervals for permanent
minimally conscious state have been agreed on. Akinetic mutism (a condition
characterized by severe poverty of movement, speech, and thought without associated arousal disorder or descending motor tract impairment) is
an outdated term that should be avoided and is now considered to be a
subcategory of the minimally conscious syndrome.
Neuroimaging studies on the minimally conscious state show that
overall cerebral metabolism is decreased to values slightly higher than
but comparable to those observed in the VS/UWS (Laureys, Perrin,
Schnakers, Boly, & Majerus, 2005). Nevertheless, minimally conscious
state patients can show brain activities similar to the activity of a healthy
brain in response to sensory stimuli. Furthermore, the activity inside the
frontoparietal network and the connectivity between the different areas
of the network was found to be negatively correlated with the degree of
clinical consciousness impairment, ranging from healthy controls and

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locked-in syndrome to minimally conscious, vegetative, and then coma

patients (Vanhaudenhuyse, Noirhomme et al., 2010).
The Locked-In Syndrome

The term locked-in syndrome was introduced in 1966 to reect the

quadriplegia and anarthria (loss of the motor ability to speak) brought about
by the disruption of corticospinal and corticobulbar pathways, respectively.
It is dened by (1) the presence of sustained eye opening (bilateral ptosis
should be ruled out as a complicating factor); (2) preserved awareness of
the environment; (3) aphonia or hypophonia; (4) quadriplegia or quadriparesis; and (5) a primary mode of communication that uses vertical or lateral
eye movement or blinking of the upper eyelid to signal yes/no responses.
The locked-in syndrome describes patients who are awake and fully aware
but have no means of producing speech, limb, or facial movements, resembling patients in a VS/UWS. Locked-in syndrome most commonly results
from lesions to the brainstem. Since there is only a motor output problem,
locked-in syndrome is not a disorder of consciousness, but it is included
here as it can be misdiagnosed as one. Based on motor capacities, lockedin syndrome can be divided into three categories: (1) classic locked-in syndrome, characterized by quadriplegia and anarthria with eye-coded communication; (2) incomplete locked-in syndrome, characterized by
remnants of voluntary responsiveness other than eye movement; and
(3) total locked-in syndrome, characterized by complete immobility including all eye movements, combined with preserved consciousness. Neuroimaging studies have shown that locked-in syndrome patients have brain
activity similar to that of healthy individuals (Laureys, Pellas, et al., 2005).
Awareness in Coma and Related Conditions

Awareness during coma and disorders of consciousness has only

recently been studied. Few reports exist and they do not distinguish coma
from VS/UWS or minimally conscious states. Most patients have no
memory of their coma and stay at the intensive care setting. A few patients
reported being asleep or in a pleasant state. Some reported sensory memories (e.g., voices, sounds, visual perceptions, touch) or hallucinations that
supposedly occurred either at the time of the insult or during coma (Thonnard, Vanhaudenhuyse, & Laureys, 2009). Monti, Vanhaudenhuyse, and
collaborators (Monti et al., 2010) used functional MRI and instructed seemingly unconscious brain-damaged patients to follow simple commands.
They enrolled more than 50 patients of different etiology, asking them to
perform mental imagery tasks (e.g. imagine playing tennis [activating

Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology

motor areas] and imagine walking around your house [activating parahippocampal brain regions]). Four out of 23 clinically vegetative patients
showed fMRI signs of command following and hence of consciousness. In
addition to showing proof of consciousness, fMRI can now be used to communicate with some (very exceptional) patients. Indeed, one clinically noncommunicative patient studied in the Lie`ge University Hospital was shown
to correctly answer ve out of six simple questions regarding the names of
his family members (Monti et al., 2010). Evidently, these data should be
seen as clarications of the condition rather than as a practical means to
truly assure long-term communication.

Can We identify the Neural Correlate of Consciousness?

A rst hypothesis tested by researchers was that awareness is lost when
overall cortical activity falls below a certain threshold. Exploring states of
modulated arousal like sleep or anesthesia, investigators have shown a
drop in global brain metabolism to around half of normal values in deep
anesthesia as well as in deep sleep. However, in rapid-eye-movement sleep
(where dreaming occurs), brain metabolism returns to normal waking values. Furthermore, in the vegetative/unresponsive state, global metabolic
activity also decreases to about 50% of normal level in some patients
who subsequently recover, but global metabolic rates for glucose metabolism did not show substantial changes. Moreover, some awake healthy
volunteers have global brain metabolism values comparable to those
observed in some patients in a VS/UWS. Inversely, some well-documented
vegetative/unresponsive patients have shown close to normal global cortical
metabolism (Laureys, 2005a).
Hence, the relationship between global levels of brain function and the
presence or absence of awareness is not absolute. It seems that some areas
in the brain are more important than others for its emergence. Can these
awareness regions be identied? Several neuroimaging studies have identied not one brain region but a wide frontoparietal network encompassing
the polymodal associative cortices: lateral and medial frontal regions bilaterally, parieto-temporal and posterior parietal areas bilaterally, and posterior cingulate and precuneal cortices (Figure 12.2). Awareness seems
not to be exclusively related to activity in the frontoparietal network, but
equally important is the relation of awareness to the functional connectivity within this network and with the thalami. Functional disconnections in
long-range cortico-cortical (between latero-frontal and midline-posterior
areas) and cortico-thalamo-cortical (between nonspecic thalamic nuclei

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and lateral and medial frontal cortices) pathways have identied states of
altered consciousness.
Consciousness can be viewed as the emergent property of the collective
behavior of widespread thalamo-cortical frontoparietal network connectivity. The above-presented studies on physiological (e.g., sleep), pharmacological (e.g., general anesthesia), and pathological alterations of
consciousness (e.g., coma and related conditions) provide evidence in
favor of this hypothesis [cf. Beauregard, this volume]. Once conscious sensory content is established, it is distributed widely to a decentralized
audience of expert networks, or executive interpreters (Baars, 1988,
2005). Consequently, conscious perception involves widespread frontoparietal brain sources, and unconscious sensory processing leads to much
more limited and disconnected brain activation. Synchronized specialized
brain regions are thought to share their information into a common workspace, which is a complex network of cortico-cortical and thalamo-cortical
functional connections. Other cerebral systems would permit those
synchronized neural networks to put their own elements of the mental
content forward, in the front of the scene of consciousness. Mental content
would, therefore, be the result of converging information from lowerorder functional neural assemblies toward higher-order assemblies, a
hypothesis currently being tested in neural modeling studies (Seth,
Dienes, Cleeremans, Overgaard, & Pessoa, 2008).

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Blumenfeld, H., & Taylor, J. (2003). Why do seizures cause loss of consciousness? Neuroscientist, 9(5), 301310.
Boly, M., Tshibanda, L., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Noirhomme, Q., Schnakers, C.,
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Boveroux, P., Bonhomme, V., Boly, M., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Maquet, P., & Laureys,
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Laureys, S., Perrin, F., Schnakers, C., Boly, M., & Majerus, S. (2005). Residual
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Majerus, S., Gill-Thwaites, H., Andrews, K., & Laureys, S. (2005). Behavioral
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Serfontein, L. (2010). Awareness in cardiac anesthesia. Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology, 23(1), 103108.
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Thonnard, M., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., & Laureys, S. (2009). Les experiences de mort
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Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Demertzi, A., Schabus, M., Noirhomme, Q., Bredart, S.,
Boly, M., et al. (2010). Two distinct neuronal networks mediate the awareness
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Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Noirhomme, Q., Tshibanda, L. J., Bruno, M. A., Boveroux,
P., Schnakers, C., et al. (2010). Default network connectivity reects the level
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32(9), 11911200.

CHAPTER 13

Altered Consciousness in Emotion

and Psychopathology1
Etzel Cardena
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
Platos discussion of erotic mania, which encompassed a transcendent
form of love [see my introduction to Volume 1 and Ustinova, Volume 1].
His manias can be interpreted as divinely inspired altered states of consciousness (ASC), and the link between an intense emotion and altered
consciousness is preserved in the word ecstasy. In common parlance it
describes an overwhelming emotion and etymologically refers to coming
out of quiescence or out of ones body. In this way it has been used in
the context of ASC such as classical shamanic (Cardena, 1996; Rouget,
1985; see also Winkelman and Fachner, Volume 1) or unitive, mystical
types of experiences (Laski, 1980; see also Beauregard, this volume).
Despite variations in religious traditions (Lewis, 1989), their mystical
strands seem to share ASC associated with extreme joy or serenity and
acceptance, but also with great fear and enormous despondency, an example being what San Juan de la Cruz called la noche oscura del alma (dark
night of the soul; see below).
At the advent of psychology as a science, the pioneers of clinical psychology and some authors like William James contributed to the study of both
1

This chapter has benetted from the astute reading of Martina Belz, Ken S. Pope, and
Sophie Reijman

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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 dissenting voices that had the temerity to discuss emotions and consciousness as
fundamental aspects of sentient beings, Silvan Tomkins (e.g., 19621963)
being one of the foremost. He discussed positive and negative emotions,
how they link to the will and conscious experience, and how psychodynamic and behavioral approaches can contribute to their understanding.
Nonetheless, until recently much work within psychology and the neurosciences had failed to consider, as the consciousness pioneer Bernard Baars
(2000, p. 11) puts it, that we are conscious, and that our lives are shaped
and dened by emotions. This situation has started to change.
The traditional view of emotions posits them as heterarchical systems
consisting of cognitive appraisal, internal and external somatic responses,
behaviors and action tendencies, and a subjective, experiential component
(Frijda, 1986). A broader analysis shows that they can also be seen as
organizing interpersonal systems right from birth through the various
interactions with the primary caregivers (Trevarthen, 1994) and the ensuing forms of attachment, which have an impact throughout the lifespan
(Van IJzendoorn, 1997; see also Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardena, this volume). I have also discussed (Cardena, 2008) evidence from various sources
including controlled research suggesting that strong emotions are related
to reputed parapsychological phenomena (psi; see Luke, this volume). Of
particular importance to this chapter is the mostly anecdotal evidence of
potential psi events in so-called crisis situations involving the potential
or actual demise of a person close to the individual having the experience
(Targ, Schlitz, & Irwin, 2000), thus involving intense emotions. Also,
although not completely consistent, there is evidence that people emotionally close to each other may perform better in psi tasks than strangers (e.g.,
Sabell, Clarke, & Fenwick, 2001), and that emotional stimuli are more
likely to produce psi phenomena than neutral ones (e.g., Bem, 2011; Radin
& Schlitz, 2005).
Most emotional episodes rarely effect a sufcient qualitative change in
the organization of consciousness to qualify as ASC. Emotional episodes of
great intensity, however, may induce important alterations in consciousness, although they have not typically been researched with that focus in
mind. For instance, intense fear or panic is associated not only with psychopathology but also with dissociative alterations in consciousness (see
below). At the other extreme, intense love can bring about extreme absorption in the beloved, a sense of unboundariedness, alterations in the sense of
time, and so on (Wade, 2000; see also Maliszewki et al., this volume).

Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology

The other side of the equation, namely ASC producing notable emotional experience, has produced considerably more research. Hobson
(1994) found that, in order, the three most common emotions present in
dreams were anxiety or fear, joy-elation, and anger, with more than half
of all dreams presenting strong emotions and a bit more than two-thirds
of all dreams having an unpleasant emotional tone.
In contrast with this preponderance of negative emotions, the great
majority of reports from near-death experiences (NDEs) include a sense of
unconditional love, bliss, and joy, although some NDEs can produce distress (Greyson, 2000). Similarly, the majority of mystical experiences,
which refer to a sense of transcendence and connectedness, are described
as blissful or subsuming some type of equanimity that has a very positive
emotional valence, a peace that passeth understanding, although not every
mystical experience is interpreted positively (Wulff, 2000). In a similar vein,
a temporary lack of discursive reasoning and even of a recognizable content
of consciousness is considered highly desirable in many meditative practices (cf. Forman, 1999: see also Shear, Volume 1, and Beauregard, this volume), but an emotional state without any clear content may be distressing.
In a self-account of schizophrenia, Hyllyer (1926, in Landis, 1964, p. 321)
described an experience in which she came as close . . . as I ever have to a
state of emotion unaccompanied by thought, I simply felt . . . a feeling of
being lost . . . lost in mind and body and soul . . . there was a sickening,
acute moment, then a welding. The emotion became me.
Positive mystical experiences have been reported as well after the ingestion of psychedelic drugs, although of course toxic levels of a substance,
psychological disturbance, or negative set or setting can produce bad occurrences or trips [see the various chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume]. With a group of individuals selected for psychological balance,
Grifths, Richards, McCann, and Jesse (2006) found that ingesting psilocybin produced what the majority of volunteers rated as one of the ve 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 23% of
the population that is most responsive to hypnotic suggestions) reported
spontaneous mystical-type experience of connectedness with everything,
love, euphoria, serenity, being at home, and so on when they experienced being in a very deep state (Cardena, 2005). This is not likely to
have been the effect of the simple induction of counting from 1 to 30 in

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Altering Consciousness

a hypnotic context, without additional suggestions, because low

and medium hypnotizables do not report these experiences (Cardena,
Lehmann, Jonsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007). However, these ndings
need to be qualied insofar as there is a small subgroup of high hypnotizables who are also highly dissociative and tend to be more distressed, have
a greater trauma history than their nondissociative counterparts, and
report negative rather than positive emotions (Terhune & Cardena, 2010).
With respect to another set of techniques that engage attentional resources and that have been associated with ASC, namely meditation, there
is research reporting very similar descriptions to those obtained under
deep hypnosis (Gifford-May & Thompson, 1994, see also Holroyd,
2003), although meditation can also produce negative effects (e.g., Otis,
1984). Finally, there are also accounts of very intense emotional experiences in the shamanism literature (Halifax, 1980; see also Cardena, 1996,
and Winkelman, Volume 1).

Altered Consciousness and Psychopathology

The concept of psychopathology is conceptually as complex and equivocal as that of ASC. Besides the difculty of establishing such basic issues as
the border between normal variation and actual pathology, there are
political and ethical aspects as to who determines what is functional or dysfunctional. For instance, Sophie Scholl and her White Rose fellow students
engaged in behavior (i.e., distributing yers against the Nazi regime) that
might be considered very dysfunctional (it caused their arrest) and distressing (it caused their torture and death and distressed the law-abiding citizens
around them). Yet, we nowadays admire their courage and moral stand and
have problems understanding the normality of majority groups that
implicitly or explicitly participate in or condone massacres or, more mildly,
engage in routine behaviors that injure them or others (e.g., unhealthy
behaviors such as abuse of various substances or habits; see Bla tter,
Fachner, and Winkelman, this volume), or alienate them from their surrounding reality (e.g., the compulsive use of cell phones to remain in touch
with others while disregarding everyone else in the vicinity). Erich Fromm
in The Sane Society (1955) made a persuasive point that societies as a whole
can be diagnosed, and we could certainly add the banalization of human
experience and the disregard for other sentient beings and our environments as a form of shared pathology (Cardena, 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

(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 lm Pink
Flamingos. And although chronically hearing or seeing something that no
one else does may be an indicator of schizophrenia, about one third of individuals who experience auditory hallucinations do not evidence pathology
(Bentall, 2000).
There is consistent evidence that having unusual experiences is not by
itself an indication of psychopathology; other aspects of the experience such
as how controllable, chronic, and organized it is must be taken into consideration (Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). The putative association
between ASC or peculiar experiences with dysfunction and suffering may
be explained in a variety of ways (Berenbaum, Kerns, & Raghavan, 2000,
p. 33); thus, there is no reason to assume that unusual experiences, in the
absence of indicators of psychopathology such as unexplainable or uncontrolled dysfunction and suffering, are pathological. For instance, the majority
of shamans and other religious practitioners that experience visions or being
possessed by spirits seem to be psychologically at least as healthy as their cultural counterparts (e.g., Moreira-Almeida, Lotufo Neto, & Cardena, 2008;
Van Ommeren, Komproe, Cardena, et al., 2004), although some individuals
with severe, chronic pathology such as schizophrenia may experience
destructive types of hallucinations or of being possessed by other entities.
To help distinguish between these types of phenomena, Menezes Jr.
and Moreira-Almeida (2010) propose that the following characteristics
help us differentiate nonpathological spiritual experiences from psychotic
ones: absence of psychological suffering and of social and occupational
problems, the experience is short-lived and the person retains the capacity
to evaluate its unusualness, control over the experience, a positive personal and social outcome, and absence of psychiatric comorbidities.
Determining what differentiates a pathological from a nonpathological
ASC both at the time and longitudinally is an important question that
deserves much further attention from the eld. The list by Menezes Jr. and
Moreira-Almeida is a good rst step, but it can be challenged and qualied
in a number of ways. For instance, mystics generally mention that what happens to them is a gift rather than something they can control, ASC may
change the baseline state of consciousness of an individual rather than just
being short-lived (e.g., Wren-Lewis, 1998), and anomalous experiences
may coexist with, without being the cause of, psychiatric comorbidities
(Berenbaum, Kerns, & Raghavan, 2000; James, 1902/1961). The rst necessary step to understand better the elements of a pathological experience

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Altering Consciousness

is to conduct far more thorough phenomenological evaluations. For example, despite a considerable overlap in other dimensions, the auditory hallucinations of those who did not meet criteria for a formal diagnosis had less
negative and more controllable voices than those of individuals fullling
diagnostic criteria (Bentall, 2000). It is also important to situate an ASC longitudinally and in the context of the persons attributions, as some manifestations may emerge or become distressing particularly in the context of
ongoing stressful events or negative evaluations by the person or others
(Bentall, 2000).
In what follows, I will concentrate on alterations of consciousness as
the or a major manifestation of a psychopathological process, but it should
be borne in mind that the same content in consciousness may be found in
nonpathological and sometimes even desirable experiences, as I will also
illustrate. In Table 13.1, I list the major topics I will discuss later, providing examples from both psychiatric conditions and nonpathological processes. I also give a brief denition of the diagnostic labels used in the
table. There are neurological conditions, including seizure disorders, and
various other pathologies of the central nervous system that can produce
some of the ASC discussed below, but they are not the focus of this chapter.

Diagnostic Taxonomies
Various models to organize the vast region of human dysfunction and
suffering known as psychopathology have been offered. These models may
be considered as different, potentially valid and not mutually exclusive
perspectives on a very complex domain, with none being able to encompass all valid views on pathology. For this chapter on altered consciousness, explanatory models that emphasize hypothesized psychological or
neurological processes, such as psychodynamic, neurobiological, or
behavioral processes, are not as relevant as those that describe immediate
conscious experience (cf. Sims, 1995). A phenomenological, descriptive
approach to psychopathology favors descriptions of experience as it is
lived by an agent and was developed by the psychiatrist and philosopher
Karl Jaspers (18831969) 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 (19271989) is

Table 13.1

Presence of ASC in Pathological and Nonpathological Contexts

CONDITIONS*
PATHOLOGICAL
Dissociative dx.
PTSD
Sleep paralysis
Panic attack
Borderline p. d.
Schizotypal p. d.
Somatoform dx
Psychosis
Mood dx
NONPATHOLOGICAL
Spirit possession/
Ritual ASC
Meditation
Mystical/visionary
Hypnosis
Trauma reaction
Erotism

No- or
narrow
Cs.

Changes
in body
Delirium image
Depers. Fusion

xx
x

x
x

xx
x

No
agency

Id
Strong
changes emotions Halluc.

Trans.

xx

xx
x
?
x
x
x

x
x
?

x
x
x

x
x
xx
x
x

xx
x
x
x
x
?
x

xx
x
x
x
x

x
?
?

x
x

?
x
x
xx
x

x
xx

?
xx
x

xx
x

x
?
?

xx
x
xx
xx

x
?
x

x
x

x
x

x
xx

xx
x

?
?

xx
x
?
xx

x
xx
x
xx
?
x
xx

x
xx
?
xx
x
?

xx
xx
x
xx
?

?
?

?
(Continued)

Table 13.1 (Continued)

Key to abbreviations Cs. = consciousness, depers. = depersonalization, Id = identity, Halluc. = hallucinations, Transc. = transcendent experiences, dx = diagnosis, p.d.= personality disorder. X= present, xx= characteristic, ? = present some times
* Refers only to psychiatric, not neurological, conditions.
/ Including also the related phenomena of channeling and trance mediumship.
The pathological disorders included are:
A. Dissociative disorders (disruptions in the integrated functions of memory, identity, or perception, such as dissociative
amnesia and fugue, depersonalization, and dissociative identity disorder).
B. Posttraumatic conditions (posttraumatic and acute stress disorders, characterized by re-experiencing, avoidance, hyperarousal, and dissociative symptomatology following a severe stressor or trauma).
C. Sleep paralysis (a parasomnia characterized by inability to perform voluntary movements while psychologically awake,
anxiety, and the sense of a presence during the transitions between being awake and asleep, sometimes followed by an
OBE; see Hufford, 2005).
Panic attack (intense fear and somatic and cognitive reactions in the absence of a real danger, present as a syndrome or a
symptom in other anxiety disorders).
Borderline personality (chronic impulsivity and instability of mood, relationship, and self-image).
Schizotypal personality (chronic cognitive or perceptual distortions, odd behavior, and interpersonal decits).
Somatoform (physical symptoms suggesting but not actually explained by a medical condition, such as paralyses or
unusual sensations).
Psychosis (this label includes various diagnoses such as the various forms of acute or chronic schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder involving major dysfunction in many psychological processes such as thought and emotions, along with
failures in reality testing).
Mood (this label includes various forms of major depression and manic or bipolar conditions and recurrent mood shifts or
cyclothymic disorder, which can also sometimes impair reality testing).
(For more complete descriptions see APA, 2000; Cardena & Gleaves, 2007).

Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology

another major author who emphasized that how a particular mental content is lived by the person may be more revealing than how it may seem to
an external observer (Laing, 1967). In the following sections, I will not
discuss pathology that does not directly and importantly affect the
persons state of consciousness, such as most personality, learning, or
other disorders.

Loss or Narrowing of Consciousness

Various disorders are related to narrowing or loss of consciousness [for
neuropathologies producing problems in consciousness see Dieguez &
Blanke, Noirhomme & Laureys, this volume]. Perhaps the clearest case is
when a person becomes unconscious, losing muscle tone and becoming
unresponsive to the environment in the absence of a medical reason. An
example is a case of mass unexplained medical illness among Bhutanese
refugees, in which a number of teenagers fainted or felt they were about
to faint (Van Ommeren, Sharma, Komproe, et al., 2001). Similarly, in
cases of pseudoepileptic seizures, individuals without a neurological condition may nonetheless become unconscious or exhibit convulsions, confusion, or other alterations of consciousness such as feeling that they or
the environment are unreal or feel dreamlike, or go into a trance, dened
here as having an unusually narrow or lack of awareness of the surroundings, perhaps accompanied by unresponsiveness (Litwin & Carden a,
2000). These manifestations can be symptomatic of various psychopathologies and earlier on were described as manifestations of hysteria, that
included entering dream-like or hypnotic-like states (cf. Breuer & Freud,
18931895 on hypnoid states; Cardena & Alvarado, Volume 1).
A drastic change in the clarity of consciousness, or delirium, is characterized by severe cognitive disorganization including confusion, incoherent thought and speech, and hallucinations. It can occur in chronic or
brief reactive (to traumas or severe stressors) psychosis (also called bouffee
delirante aigue, sometimes described cross-culturally in relation to spirit
possession), or in response to psychoactive drug intoxication or deprivation (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).
However, there are also nonpathological examples for at least some of
these manifestations, including losing muscle tonus and becoming unresponsive in the middle of a ritual (e.g., Oohashi et al., 2002). Furthermore, a narrowing in the focus or range of consciousness can be
voluntarily induced in hypnosis or meditation or be a general response
to a traumatic event (Cardena & Spiegel, 1993).

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Alterations in the Sense of the Self

Many if not most of the experiences described below can occur as part of
a neurological condition such as a seizure disorder, a reaction to a traumatic
event, intense physical activity, or as part of a hypnotic, meditative or similar attempt to alter consciousness (Cardena, 2005; Cardena & Spiegel,
1993; Gabbard, Twemlow, & Jones, 1982). They are also found in psychiatric disorders, particularly psychotic, posttraumatic (i.e., posttraumatic
and acute stress disorders), dissociative, and somatoform disorders, and
sleep paralysis.
In out-of-body experiences (OBEs), individuals situate their awareness
outside of their bodies, sometimes with associated features such as autoscopy or seeing the physical body from a distance (Alvarado, 2000; see
also Dieguez & Blanke, this volume). There are also other alterations in
sensation of different parts of the body, such as sensing that a part of the body
has changed in size or become numb, tingling, or painful, as in the case of
some victims of sexual abuse who may not be able to sense a part of their
bodies or nd urinating painful (Nijenhuis, Spinhoven, Van Dyck, Van
der Hart, & Vanderlinden, 1998).
Depersonalization (derealization when it refers to others or the environment) involves experiences in which the person does not feel quite real or
authentic or as if s/he were in some way dead or living in a dream (Simeon,
Knutelska, Nelson, & Guralnik, 2003). One of the saddest examples is the
account by the extraordinary performer Spalding Gray, who wrote before
committing suicide after enduring chronic pain caused by a car accident:
All that is left of me is this horrid, lingering awareness that knows there
is no longer any solid conguration of me . . . It is a true horror. Its the
making of a haunted ghost (Duke, 2004). Incidentally, people suffering
from psychotic disorders or the neurological Cotard syndrome may experience that they are actually dead.
Depersonalization and derealization episodes are typically associated
with an altered sense of the bodily self, and sensory phenomena such as
colors seeming less vibrant and changes in the sense of time; they can
occur in reaction to various stressors (such as in panic disorder), trauma,
or to ingesting psychoactive drugs (Cardena & Gleaves, 2007; see Presti,
this volume). It bears mentioning that self-injurious behavior, characteristic of borderline personality but also present in many other conditions
such as eating, substance and dissociative disorders, posttraumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), and the psychoses, is sometimes motivated by the
attempt to feel something instead of just numbness and unreality (Osuch,
Noll, & Putnam, 1999). Of course there are also socially accepted reasons

Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology

to engage in self-injurious behavior including, decoration (e.g., wearing

very high heels for years or the epidermic damage caused by tattoos and
scarication), sexuality [see Maliszewski et al., this volume], and the
induction of ASC related to spiritual practices (cf. Cardena, 1999).
In autoscopy, heautoscopy, or doppelganger experiences, the person sees
an image or double of him/herself and may even interact with it. This
phenomenon occurs rarely among psychiatric or neurological conditions
but has inspired major writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Juan Jose
Millas, 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 conded me, her sense that an ex-boss wanted to
harm her included her notion that he could hypnotize telepathically
everyone she came in contact with, including me.
However, the blurring of identity that the baby or infant can experience with the main caregiver is a normative part of development, and
fusional experiences are prized within erotic (Wade, 2000; see also Maliszewki
et al., this volume) and mystical experiences, which are typically associated
with psychological health (Wulff, 2000). Our developmental history and perhaps the evidence for psi phenomena and possible interconnectedness among
beings may help explain some of these experiences, which are more common
among individuals who are considered to have thin mental boundaries between
themselves and others and among their states of consciousness (Hartmann,
1991).
In pathological alterations in the sense of agency, the person experiences
that s/he cannot control parts of or the whole body, in the absence of a
medical condition that could explain this experience. Consultationliaison services in hospitals include some of these cases, as one in which
a soldier was referred to me because she experienced an inability to move
her arm, despite a lack of any injury that could justify such a symptom.
During a hypnotic procedure she spontaneously moved the arm without
a problem. Uncontrolled frenetic movement is another variation of somatoform disorders. As with sensory alterations, these types of paralyses or
uncontrolled movements were richly described earlier in the context of
hysteria (e.g., Breuer & Freud, 18931895).

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In nonpathological situations, these experiences may occur as part of

hypnotic manipulations (e.g., Oakley & Halligan, 2009) or of participating in some activities such as dance and acting (Cardena, 1997; see also
St John, and Zarrilli, Volume 1).
Similarly, in alterations in the sense of attribution, the individual experiences that someone or something else controls his or her body, thoughts, and
emotions. As part of a pathological process, this experience can be very distressing, as when people during psychotic episodes believe that their limbs
are controlled by alien implants or that someone else is inserting thoughts
in their minds (Reed, 1988). Pathological cases of spirit possession and dissociative identity disorder (DID) are characterized by recurrent and dysfunctional alternations of identities and amnesia and are related to a variety of
other distressing symptoms (Cardena & Gleaves, 2007).
Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that the experience of otherattribution in ritual spirit possession and the related phenomenon of trance
mediumship and channeling are usually sought after and not dysfunctional
(e.g., Hastings, 1991; Moreira-Almeida et al., 2008). The experience of having
alternate identities or being taken over by another entity can take many forms
and has occurred throughout history. This is not too surprising considering the
fact that a sense of a unique, private, and long-term consistent identity is a developmental achievement (Gopnik, 2009), and that the Western sense of a separate,
individual identity may not be normative in communal cultures [see Sluhovsky,
and Whitehead, Volume 1], and is subject to ontological questioning.

Pathological Mood Alterations

The mood disorders can include episodes of such severe sadness or the
opposite extreme of elation (mania) that the whole state of consciousness
becomes altered and may even impair reality testing. Custance (1952, in
Landis, 1964, pp. 262, 267) provides a good example of how her severe
depression affected her state of consciousness:
My consciousness has as it were, regressed to the earliest stage of the simple
organism which, nding its environment unpleasant, wants to get away at
all costs . . . I seem shut into myself, withdrawn from real contact with the
outer worlds . . . I cannot get my mind to work; instead of associations
clicking into place everything is an inextricable jumble.

It is also pertinent to mention here the dark night of the soul experience, which can happen as a transitional stage in a mystics life. Roberts
(1933, in Hunt, 2007, p. 214) recounts:

Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology

Suddenly I was aware that all life around me had come to a complete standstill. Everywhere I looked, instead of life, I saw a hideous nothingness
invading and strangling the life out of every object . . . a world being choked
to death by an insidious void . . . a scene of death, dying, and decay.

Hunt proposes that these experiences are similar to those found in the
anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) in chronic psychosis (or, I would
add, also in major depression). According to him, as part of spiritual
development, they may lead to an enhancement of Being, whereas they
represent a decay of that sense of Being when they are a symptom of a
psychopathological process [see Lukoff, this volume]. Also relevant here is
Formans discussion (1999) of episodes of pure consciousness in the context of meditative practice where, paradoxically, experiential emptiness in
the context of an organized, purposeful practice to alter consciousness can
lead to an actual enhancement of the sense of being alive [see also Shear,
Volume 1]. Similarly, Mishara and Schwartz [this volume] propose that a
transient dissolution of the self may lead to a greater overall integration.
At the other end, extreme elation or mania, a variation of bipolar disorder, transforms the whole state of consciousness to bring about delusions
of power and grandeur (in a sense I am God. I see the future, plan the
universe), a heightened sense of reality (the outer world makes a much
more vivid and intense impression than usual), a sense of revelation
(The sense of being intimately in tune with the ultimate stuff of the universe), overwhelming emotions and loss of inhibition, and even ight of
ideas and incoherence (essential to x my exact position (y on the pipe)
in the space-time continuum, at any rate by what the sailors call D. R.
(dead reckoning)) (in Landis, 1964, pp. 285294).
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 innity
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 lms as involving dramatic visual and auditory hallucinations and far-fetched delusions, but one
should speak of different types of schizophrenia or, at least, different types
of symptoms (APA, 2000). Negative symptoms involve a diminution of

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abilities such as lack of motivation, anhedonia, poor hygiene, and so on. In

contrast, positive symptoms are intensications 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 at, or change colors. Delusions
involve beliefs that are central to the individuals psychological make-up,
are bizarre, impervious to contradictory evidence, and bring about dysfunctional behaviors (Sims, 1995); however, nonpathological beliefs can also
evidence irrationality, ego centeredness, and imperviousness to countervailing evidence, (Greenwald, 1980).
Hallucinations are generally dened as uncontrolled, percept-like
experiences in the absence of a real object. Bentall (2000) wrote that it
is advisable to see hallucinations within a continuum rather than as events
occurring only to a few disturbed individuals. Indeed, hypnotic suggestions among responsive individuals show that it is relatively easy to induce
these experiences among psychologically healthy people. Bentall also
mentions that hallucinatory experiences have been experienced by some
very inuential religious and historical gures, and they have also been
reported in the context of possible parapsychological phenomena. They
may be discrete, as in just seeing one gure that is not there, or involve
all or most psychological processes as in ashbacks in which the person
has a full experience of being somewhere else and becomes partially or
fully unresponsive to the surroundings.
Hallucinations can affect any of the senses, but auditory hallucinations
are far more frequent than visual ones. One of the most important autobiographies in the history of psychopathology, that of Daniel-Paul Schreber,
on which Freud based his theory of paranoia, provides an example
(Landis, 1964, p. 119): During several nights when I could not go to
sleep, a recurrent crackling noise in the wall of our bedroom became
noticeable . . . having heard similar noises innumerable times since then.
Polanskis 1965 lm Repulsion eerily portrays a woman having a similar
hallucination. Davidson (1912, in Landis, 1964, p. 117) describes a visual
hallucination: I rst 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 gure of a young man.
Hallucinations, or visionary experiences, may also occur in individuals
without any psychopathology, spontaneously or as part of their religious
experience [see Geels, Volume 1], or among psychologically healthy individuals grieving after the loss of an important person (APA, 2000,
p. xxxiv). Hypnotic suggestions among the highly responsive can also produce suggested positive (i.e., perceiving a stimulus that is not present) and

Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology

negative hallucinations (i.e., not perceiving a stimulus that is present),

besides spontaneously occurring intense imagery.

Pathological Transitions in States of Consciousness

Tart (1975) proposed that the transition from one state of consciousness
into another may produce a transient psychophysiological disorganization,
a hypothesis for which there is evidence from different phenomena. They
include switches between different identity states in DID (Putnam, 1988),
transitions between being awake and being asleep (Foulkes & Vogel,
1965), and between being in the normal state and being possessed by a spirit (Cardena, 1998, 1989; see also Cardena, Volume 1).
Narcolepsy is a neurological example of a disorder in which there is
an abrupt and uncontrolled transition between being awake and asleep.
Herbert Spiegel (1974) discussed a more psychological problem in which
a group of extremely highly hypnotizable people (grade 5) may transit
uncontrollably between their waking state and one involving extreme
suggestibility and hypnotic-like experiences. Another phenomenon of
pathological consciousness transition is sleep paralysis, the experience
during which the person is awake but unable to move for a period of time,
associated with a frightening sensed presence or hallucination of someone
on top of the individual or nearby, and accompanied sometimes by an
OBE (Hufford, 2005). The event is usually explained in terms of incomplete awakening from rapid-eve-movement (REM) sleep, during which
the body is immobilized, as happens during REM sleep, although the person otherwise seems to be awake. A theory for alien abduction experiences
that seems to explain many but probably not all cases is that they are
reconstructions from sleep paralysis episodes (Appelle, Lynn, & Newman,
2000). Chronic sleep paralysis probably involves both neurological and
psychological factors because it is associated with posttraumatic stress disorder and panic attacks (Hinton, Pich, Chhean, & Pollack, 2005). It bears
mentioning also that not all episodes of sleep paralysis are distressing or
pathological (Hufford, 2005).
Another pathological condition that can be analyzed as problems with
transitions among psychobiological states is PTSD in which people may
cycle between being extremely aroused even by innocuous stimuli and
becoming experientially detached or numb to themselves and the surroundings as a compensatory mechanism, which has been explained as
the under and/or overmodulation of affect and underlying brain structures
(Lanius et al., 2010). The extreme emotional shifts among people with
borderline personality disorders, who may go from feeling elation to

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despondency in a matter of moments, may be also analyzed in these terms.

As with having a coherent identity, the regulation of moods and states of
consciousness is an important developmental milestone that may go awry
when problems such as insecure attachment and trauma occur. Finally,
cyclothymic disorder, involving chronic, uctuating 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
briey mention some new approaches on how distressing, but not necessarily pathological, ASC may be dealt therapeutically when necessary.
For a number of years now (cf. Kramer, 1993), clinical professionals have
been aware that some individuals who may not evidence any pathology
may become seriously distressed after they have encountered an unexpected ASC, anomalous, or exceptional human experience (EHE). Sometimes the complaint is not about altered consciousness but an event in
the environment such as a putative haunting or psychokinetic experience. Although the evidence shows that most people who experience
ASC, whether spontaneously or in a ritual setting, are psychologically
healthy (Carden a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Moreira-Almeida et al.,
2008), it is still the case that some individuals may have problems making sense of their anomalous experiences or events, or may experience
ASC as part of their psychopathology (see above). It does not help that
in many industrialized societies the mere report of such phenomena as
telepathy may be considered to be indicative of psychopathology
(e.g., of schizotypal personality disorder or of schizophrenia; APA,
2000), despite the evidence that such beliefs do not necessarily
imply psychopathology and in fact have some empirical basis (Targ et
al., 2000; Luke, this volume). The recommendations by Targ and collaborators (2000, p. 243) concerning complaints of putative psi events
remain pertinent for complaints related to ASC and exceptional human
experiences (EHE):
a. Assess how the client interprets the experience and what may be the meaning
of the experience in his or her life, identifying recent major stressors or life
events;
b. Identify positive and negative preconceptions and educate the client about the
phenomena in general (which requires that the therapist consult the scientic
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

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 fur Grenzgebiete der Psychologie
und Psychohygiene a clinic devoted to these problems in Freiburg. This is
an area that deserves much greater attention by both clinicians and
researchers, and one of the major motivations for this chapter has been
not only to look at the various links between ASC and psychopathology
but also to point out how ASC occurring in nonpathological contexts could
be easily mistaken as indicators of dysfunction.
Putnam (2005) made a strong case that clinical psychology and psychiatry must pay far more attention to states of consciousness, both
because they are necessary to understand certain forms of pathology and
because one of the major tasks in therapy is to modify the clients consciousness, of which the current reliance on such techniques as mindfulness and mentalization are primary examples. ASC are part and parcel of
the human experience, both in pathology and in health, as the various
contributions to these two volumes attest. A clinical science of altered consciousness is fundamental to understanding what may go wrong in a persons mind but also what may bring about recovery and provide greater
existential joy and meaning.

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CHAPTER 14

Visionary Spirituality
and Mental Disorders
David Lukoff
Overlap of Mental Disorders and Visionary Spiritual Experiences
Several descriptive categories have been proposed for psychotic-like
episodes that have potential for positive outcomes: problem-solving schizophrenia (Boisen, 1962); positive disintegration (Dabrowski, 1964); creative
illness (Ellenberger, 1970); spiritual emergencies (Grof & Grof, 1989); mystical experience with psychotic features (Lukoff, 1985), metanoiac voyages
(Laing, 1972); and visionary states (Perry, 19771978). 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 individuals spiritual life. Spirituality is used to
refer to an inner experience of connection to something greater than oneself, a personal sense of the sacred and meaningful. People in the midst of
a VSE often traverse the range of the worlds religions and cultural history
in the form of spiritual content and experiences that are similar to hallucinations and delusions (explored in more depth below). When they return,

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they often view the episode as a part of their spiritual awakening and an
initiation for their spiritual journey. Jungian analyst John Perry (1998)
noted that after a VSE: What remains . . . is an ideal model and a sense
of direction which one can use to complete the transformation through
his own purposeful methods (pp. 3435).

Historical and Cross-cultural Similarities

Psychotic and religious experiences have been associated since the earliest recorded history, and undoubtedly before. The Old Testament uses
the same term, madness, to describe the behavior of prophets and to explain
a punishment for the disobedient (Rosen, 1968). Socrates declared, Our
greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is
given us by divine gift (Dodds, 1951, p. 61) [see Ustinova, Volume 1].
Based on a cross-cultural survey, anthropologist Prince (1992) concluded that,
Highly similar mental and behavioral states may be designated psychiatric
disorders in some cultural settings and religious experiences in others . . .
Within cultures that invest these unusual states with meaning and provide
the individual experiencing them with institutional support, at least a proportion of them may be contained and channeled into socially valuable roles.
(p. 289)

Anthropological accounts show that babbling confused words, displaying

curious eating habits, singing continuously, dancing wildly, and being tormented by spirits are elements in some shamanic initiatory crises. In shamanic cultures, some spiritual crises are interpreted as an indication of an
individuals destiny to become a shaman rather than a sign of mental
illness (Halifax, 1979). Although shamans seem to be psychologically
healthier than most members of their communities (Van Ommeren et al.,
2004), Walsh (1990) and Silverman (1967) have both noted that some shamans initiatory crises have involved a psychotic episode. Individuals in
Western cultures occasionally experience similar problems that lead them
into the allied health professions (Lukoff, 1991) [see Winkelman, Volume 1].
In Asian cultures, spiritual problems are distinguished from psychopathology. For example, a well-known pitfall of spiritual practice recognized
in many Asian traditions is false enlightenment, associated with delightful
or terrifying visions, especially of light (Epstein & Topgay, 1982) [see Shear,
Volume 1]. When Asian spiritual traditions are transplanted into Western
contexts, such problems still occur (Epstein, 1990). In ancient Western as

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

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 eld
(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 conning selfhood
meltdown [see Mishara & Schwartz, this volume]. The need to transcend
the limiting boundaries of the self has been postulated to be a basic neurobiological need of all living things (Newberg, DAquili, & Rause 2001).
However, in persons with psychotic disorder, the sense of embodied self
is transcended before it has been rmly 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 thingand following stage by stagethe instruction of a master, enters the waters and nds
he can swim: whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and
ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning. (p. 216)

Clarke (2001) suggests that psychosis and profound spiritual experiences

initially follow a common process, which can encompass euphoria, bewilderment, and horror. But in high states of arousal, the cognitions of
ordinary consciousness become less accessible.
In Ken Wilbers (1980) spectrum model of consciousness, psychosis is
neither prepersonal (infantile and regressive) nor transpersonal (transcendent and absolute), but is depersonalan admixture of higher and lower
elements. Wilber (1980) writes: [Psychosis] carries with it cascading fragments of higher structures that have ruinously disintegrated (p. 64).
Thus, he continues, psychotic persons often channel profound spiritual
insights (p. 108). Similarly, Jung acknowledges that fragments of archetypal spiritual themes and symbols occur frequently in the experiences of
psychotic persons but points out that the associations are unsystematic,
abrupt, grotesque, absurd and correspondingly difcult if not impossible
to understand ( Jung, 1960, pp. 262263). However, Perry (1974), who

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founded an innovative treatment facility for persons having rst psychotic

episodes, views psychosis more positively as a renewal process in which
the psyche is seeking to fundamentally reorganize itself.

Types of Visionary Spiritual Experiences

Anomalous experiences include a variety of unusual events that appear
to challenge our understanding of the world, such as mystical experiences,
near-death experiences, alien encounters, psychic experiences, lucid
dreaming, and psychedelic drug experiences. These nonordinary experiences have often been ignored or ridiculed by mainstream psychology, even
though interest in exceptional mental states dates back to William James on
Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures (Taylor, 1983). The more
recent Varieties of Anomalous Experiences: Examining the Scientic Evidence,
published by the American Psychological Association (Cardena, Lynn, &
Krippner, 2000), examined 10 types of anomalous experiences, and most
of the authors reported little relationship between anomalous experiences
and psychopathology. Indeed, many of these experiences have been associated with claims of positive life changes following the experience. However,
the relationship between psychopathology and anomalous experience is
complex and multifaceted. Berenbaum, Kerns, and Raghavan (2000) posit
that there are four reasons why anomalous experiences could be associated
with psychopathology: (a) the two overlap, (b) anomalous experience contributes to psychopathology, (c) psychopathology contributes to anomalous
experience; and (d) there, are third variables that contribute to both
anomalous experience and psychopathology (p. 32).
Even when no psychopathology is present, anomalous experiences such
as mystical, psychic, and near-death experiences that often include religious
and spiritual content can be distressing and lead to contact with mental
health professionals. Four anomalous experiences are included as spiritual
problems in the typology in this chapter: mystical, near-death, alien abduction, and psychic experiences. Meditation and spiritual practice-induced
episodes and possession are also covered.

Mystical Experience
Studies of this phenomenon date back to William James, who saw
mystical experience as being at the core of religion and maintained that
such experiences led to the founding of the worlds religions ( James,
1902/1958). Denitions used in research and clinical publications vary

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

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 dened 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 inuenced by, a presence
or a powerwhether you call it God or notwhich is different from your
everyday self? Afrmative answers have continuously increased: 27% in
1973, 42% in 1986, 54% in 1990, and 70% in 2001 (Gallup, 2002). Yet
Wulff (2000) has pointed out that the actual prevalence of mystical experiences may be considerably lower than these gures suggest. Studies that
have examined the actual content of reported experiences have found that
many of the responses were uncodable, and people often took the expression lift out simply to mean feeling uplifted in a metaphorical sense, and
they equated feeling close to a powerful, spiritual, force with the belief
that God is always near (Thomas & Cooper, 1980).
Yet, historically, psychological theory and diagnostic classication systems have tended to either ignore or pathologize such intense spiritual
experiences [see Carden a, this volume]. Some clinical literature has
described the mystical experience as symptomatic of ego regression,
borderline psychosis, a psychotic episode, or temporal lobe dysfunction
(Lukoff, 1985). Freud reduced the oceanic experience of mystics to
infantile helplessness and a regression to primary narcissism (Freud,
1927/1989). Even transpersonal psychologists such as Maslow (1973)
and Wilber (1984) have used the termed metapathologies, and William
James (1902/1958) coined the term theopathies to describe the problematic
dimensions that can be stirred up by intense spiritual/mystical experiences. F. W. H. Myers can be given credit for the initial insight that the subliminal can give rise to mystical as well as psychopathological content
(Myers, 1892). Myers postulated a limen or threshold, below which the

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subliminal self is found. In persons prone to mystical experience, the subliminal self is relatively large and active and the margin of the conscious
eld relatively leaky and permeable.
However, Wulff (2000) cites research and supports a more favorable
viewaccording 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 nds substantial support in the contemporary empirical
and transpersonal literatures. There are, rst, of all, several studies suggesting that measures of mystical experience tend not to be correlated with
measures of pathology (Wulff, 2000, p. 410).
A survey found that most clinicians do not currently view mystical experiences as pathological (Allman, De La Roche, Elkins, & Weathers, 1992).
To some degree, this may reect a change that is partly attributable to
Abraham Maslow. His studies of peak experiences, which he considered religious experiences for many individuals, validated their importance and nonpathological nature. In addition, studies have found that people reporting
mystical experiences scored lower on psychopathology scales and higher
on measures of psychological well-being than controls (Wulff, 2000).
Mystical experiences can be overwhelming for individuals who do not
have a strong sense of ego. In addition, another risk observed following an
ecstatic mystical experience is ego ination, in which the individual develops highly grandiose beliefs or even delusions about his or her own spiritual stature and attainment (Rosenthal, 1990). Individuals in the midst of
intense mystical experiences have been hospitalized and medicated when
less restrictive interventions could have been utilized (Chapman & Lukoff,
1996; Lukoff & Everest, 1985).
The DSM-IV-TR highlights the need for cultural sensitivity when clinicians assess for schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations different from their own (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 306):
Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory
hallucinations with a religious content may be a normal part of religious
experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing Gods 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 rst focused public attention on the NDE in his book Life After Life, the NDE has been the
focus of considerable scientic research (Greyson, 1993, 1997; Ring, 1990).

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

The NDE typically follows a characteristic temporal sequence of stages

including:

peace and contentment

entering a transitional region of darkness
seeing a brilliant light
passing through the light into another realm of existence
strong positive affect
dissociation from the physical body
transcendental or mystical elements

The person often feels unconditionally accepted and forgiven by a loving source. Life review is also common, and the person returns with a mission or vision, believing that there is still more to be done in this life.
Greyson (2000) has pointed out the many similarities to the prototypical
features of shamanic soul ight, OBE, and deep hypnotic experiences.
Modern medical technology has resulted in many persons experiencing NDEs. Near-death experiences are reported by 35% of individuals
who come close to death. Gallup Polls estimated that about 5% of the
adult American population, approximately 13 million American adults,
have had a NDE with at least some of the features described above, making
it a clinically signicant and pervasive phenomenon (Gallup, 2002).
The nonpathological nature of the NDE is documented by the growing
literature on its aftereffectsin 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, signicant intrapsychic and interpersonal difculties frequently arise in the wake of an NDE. Intrapsychic
problems associated with NDE include:
anger or depression related to losing the near-death state
difculty reconciling the NDE with previous religious beliefs, values, or lifestyle
the fear that the NDE might indicate a mental disorder

Interpersonal problems associated with NDE include:

difculty reconciling attitudinal changes with the expectations of family,
friends, and colleagues at work
a sense of isolation from those who have not had a similar experience
a fear of ridicule or rejection from others

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difculty communicating the meaning and impact of the NDE

(Greyson, 1997)

The many published scientic articles and rst-person accounts of

NDEs have resulted in greater sensitivity to these experiences. NDEs are
recognized as fairly common occurrences in modern intensive care units
(ICUs), as is the need to differentiate between NDEs and ICU psychoses
(which do occur often as a side effect of medical treatments). With this
increased awareness of NDEs, ICU staff are less likely to misdiagnose
and inappropriately treat NDEs with antipsychotic medication.
The inclusion of a new diagnostic category (Religious or Spiritual Problem) in the DSM-IV permits differentiation of NDEs and similar experiences from mental disorders and may lead to research into more effective
treatment strategies (Greyson, 1997, p. 327). Some NDEs become very
distressing and meet the criteria for DSM-IV Adjustment Disorder (Greyson & Bush, 1992). But often the level of distress warrants the diagnosis
of a V Code rather than of a mental disorder.

Psychic Experiences
Psychic experiences are a hypothetical construct relating to the presumed
transfer of information or energy for which there is arguably objective evidential support (Targ, Schlitz, & Irwin, 2000) [see Luke, this volume]. Thus
most denitions dene 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 scientic research for

more than 100 years and continues to the present (Krippner, 1991;
Ullman, Krippner, & Vaughan, 2003). Although the scientic status of
psychic experiences has been the subject of much debate, there is no question that most people have such experiences. Gallup polls show that a
majority of American adults have extrasensory experiences, and the

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

percentage is increasing (from 58% in 1973 to 67% in 1986; Gallup,

2002). Unfortunately, both sensationalism in tabloid media and commercialism (e.g., fee-based psychic hotlines) are associated with this topic.
A study of 212 adults and 91 high school students found that reports
of psychic experiences were correlated with reports of transcendental
spiritual experiences, and more than 90% of the respondents with transcendent experiences considered them valuable (Kennedy & Kanthamani,
1995). Psychic experiences are considered to be genuine abilities by
many, including the inuential 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 Im going crazy are common reactions to
spontaneous psychic experiences (Tart, 1995). Some people report feeling
isolated from others because they are afraid to talk about these experiences
with their friends and family. Most people who have psychic experiences
are able to integrate them without any professional help, but some do seek
assistance from a therapist in understanding such events and coping with
their reactions to them (E. Targ et al., 2000). Hastings (1983) suggested
that The focus of this counseling, given therapeutic purposes, rather than
research purposes only, should be to assist the person to a [sic] experience
of balance, integration, and judgment relating to apparent or genuine
parapsychological experience (p. 143).
He described seven steps for working with someone who has had a disturbing psychic experience:
1. Ask the person to describe the experience or events.
2. Listen fully and carefully, without judging.
3. Reassure the person that he or she is not crazy or insane (if this is appropriate).
4. Identify or label the type of event.
5. Give information about what is known about this type of event.
6. Where possible, develop reality tests to discover if the event is genuine or if
there are nonpsychic alternative explanations.
7. Address the psychological reactions that result from the experience.

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Alien Abduction Experiences

The chapter on alien abduction experiences in Varieties of Anomalous
Experience included this denition: Alien abduction experiences (AAEs)
are characterized by subjectively real memories of being taken secretly
and/or against ones will by apparently non-human entities, usually to a
location interpreted as an alien spacecraft (i.e., a UFO) (Appelle, Lynn, &
Newman, 2000, p. 254). In addition to reports from the United States,
accounts from England, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Australia show the same
content themes: capture, examination, communication with aliens, otherworldly journey, theophany (receipt of spiritual messages), and return to
earth (Mack, 1999).
Gallup Polls reveal how widespread beliefs are in UFO-related phenomena. Fifty percent of a representative sample of the U.S. population
taken in 1999 reported that they believe there is life on other planets,
which is up from 34% in 1966. UFO sightings are also reported by millions of people in the United States. When the Gallup Poll asked a
representative national sample: Have you, yourself, ever seen anything
you thought was a UFO? 12% answered Yes (Gallup & Jones, 2000). In
1997, a Time/CNN poll found that 22% of Americans believe that the
earth has been visited by space aliens (cited in Appelle, Lynn, & Newman,
2000). There are now thousands of cases of alien encounter published,
and researchers have studied more than 1,700 cases. Based on an extrapolation from a group of students, another researcher suggested that 15 million Americans may have had such experiences. But after citing these
statistics, Appelle and coauthors (2000) concluded, Even if the numbers
are much lower than some of these estimates, it is clear that many thousands of Americans believe they have been adducted by aliens (p. 256).
Both positive and problematic effects have been reported by alien
abduction experiencers, including a range of physical and psychological
after-effects such as injuries, eye problems, skin burns, gastrointestinal
distress, and equilibrium and balance problems. Anxiety and recurring
nightmares have also been frequently reported. Other symptoms and
potential problems following AAEs include irritability, intrusive thoughts
about aliens and abduction, labile mood, disorientation, derealization,
and depersonalization (Bullard, 1989b).
Although psychopathology is present in some people who report alien
abduction experiences (Lukoff, 1988), assessment by both clinical examination and standardized tests has found that, as a group, abduction experiencers are not different from the general population in terms of
prevalence of psychopathology. Many report that their lives have been

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

radically altered on a deep spiritual level by their encounters with aliens.

They have developed a heightened reverence for nature and human life
and transformed their lives in ways similar to what happens after an
NDE (Ring, 1990; Spanos, Cross, Dickson, & Dubreuil, 1993). However,
it should be noted that one study (Stone-Carmen, experients 1994) found
a high level of suicide attempts (57%) among AAE experients.
Some individuals who have had AAEs seek therapy to help them integrate their anomalous experiences. Hypnotizing patients to obtain a fuller
account of the experience is controversial, and aggressive use of suggestive
memory recovery procedures can increase distress and feelings of helplessness (Bullard, 1989a).
The risk of providing therapy can be minimized and positive outcomes
best assured when the focus of treatment deals with educating clients
about possible explanations for the AAE, encouraging them to understand
the AAE in terms of its meaning in their lives, and otherwise working on
coping strategies that transcend the inevitable inconclusiveness about the
AAEs objective reality (Appelle et al., 2000, p. 271).

Meditation and Spiritual Practice-related Experiences

Beginning in the 1960s, interest in Asian spiritual practices such as
yoga, meditation, qigong, and Tai Chi increased. Intensive meditation
practices can involve meditating for 12 or more hours a day over a period
of weeks or months. Asian traditions recognize a number of pitfalls associated with intensive meditation practice, such as altered perceptions that
can be frightening and false enlightenment associated with delightful
or terrifying visions (Korneld, 1993). Teachers of these practices are
aware of the risk of problems associated with them:
Whereas spiritual masters have been warning their disciples for thousands
of years about the dangers of playing with mystical states, the contemporary
spiritual scene is like a candy store where any casual spiritual tourist can
sample the goodies that promise a variety of mystical highs. (Caplan,
1999, p. 17)

People can and do make use of books and audiovisual material to practice
on their own without the supervision of a knowledgeable teacher. Anxiety,
dissociation, depersonalization, agitation, and muscular tension have been
reported in western meditation practitioners (Walsh & Roche, 1979).
Transient psychotic-like episodes associated with qigong practice are
well-documented as a culture-bound syndrome that is similar to

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conditions associated with intensive practice of yoga and meditation

(Shan, 2000).
The DSM-IV-TR emphasizes the need to distinguish between psychopathology and meditation-related experiences: Voluntarily induced experiences of depersonalization or derealization form part of meditative and
trance practices that are prevalent in many religions and cultures and
should not be confused with depersonalization disorder (American
Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 488).
Stanislav and Christina Grof founded the Spiritual Emergency Network
in 1980 to identify individuals experiencing psychological distress associated with spiritual practices and spontaneous spiritual experiences (Grof &
Grof, 1989). Treatment typically involves discontinuation of the spiritual
practice, at least temporarily, and engaging in alternative grounding activities such as taking walks in nature, hot baths, and working in a garden
(Korneld, 1993).
Another concern in this area was documented by Oliver Sacks (1995)
in The Last Hippie, where he describes the case of a man suffering from
the effects of a growing brain tumor with anterograde amnesia that prevented him from remembering anything that has happened since the late
1960s, yet he was treated by fellow members of Hare Krishna as having
achieved a state of enlightenment as evidenced by his losing worldly concern and his freedom from desire.

Possession
In possession states, a person enters an altered state of consciousness and
feels taken over by a spirit, power, deity, or other person who assumes control over his or her mind and body. Generally, the person has no recall of
these experiences in the waking state. The deliberate induction of possession
states has been part of valued religious rituals in many cultures (Behrend &
Luig, 2000), and research has found that people who experience possession
in the midst of a ritual do not have more pathology (actually may be
healthier) than the people at large. In a comparison of Brazilian Spiritistic
mediums and North American dissociative identity disorder, (DID) patients,
The mediums differed in having better social adjustment, lower prevalence of
mental disorders, lower use of mental health services, no use of antipsychotics,
and lower prevalence of histories of physical or sexual childhood abuse, sleepwalking, secondary features of DID, and, symptoms of borderline personality.
(Moreira-Almeida, Neto, & Cardena, 2008, p. 420)

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

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 specic deities are invited to
ride the bodies of the worshipers during ceremonies. Possession also
appears in early Christianity in a positive light, particularly in the form
of speaking in tongues. Many contemporary forms of evangelical Christianity consider it desirable to be possessed by the Holy Spirit, with physical manifestations that include shaking and speaking in tongues. Bizarre
behavior such as choking, projectile vomiting, frantic motor behavior,
wild spasms, and contortions along with grotesque vocalizations can be
a frightening experience both for the person possessed and for others
witnessing it.
The oldest theories about the etiology of mental disorders identify spirit possession as the causal agent, and many religions offer rituals and
healings to protect participants from unwanted possession. One of the
signs of Christs 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 Specied:
Possession trance, a single or episodic alteration in the state of consciousness characterized by the replacement of customary sense of personal
identity by a new identity. This is attributed to the inuence 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 patients report of possession experiences can lead to
an inappropriate diagnosis of a dissociative or psychotic disorder, particularly among members of immigrant groups (Cardena et al., 1994). Treatment should include social integration of the experience within their
community. If the individual is connected with a group whose practices
include possession, then collaboration with leaders of that religious community should be part of the treatment plan.

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Emerging Patterns in Contemporary Spiritual Experience and Crises

The connection between spiritual development and psychological
problems was rst noted by Roberto Assagioli (1989), who described
how persons may become inated and grandiose as a result of intense
experiences associated with spiritual practices: Instances of such confusion are not uncommon among people who become dazzled by contact
with truths too great or energies too powerful for their mental capacities
to grasp and their personality to assimilate (p. 36).
Transpersonal psychologists, which represent only a minority of the
mental health eld, 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 persons efforts to break out of the standard ego-bounded identity:
Trials of the soul on its spiritual journey (House, 2001, pp. 124125).
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 difcult stages of a
profound psychological transformation that involves ones entire being.
They take the form of nonordinary states of consciousness and involve
intense emotions, visions and other sensory changes, and unusual
thoughts, as well as various physical manifestations. These episodes often
revolve around spiritual themes; they include sequences of psychological
death and rebirth, experiences that seem to be memories from previous life
times, feelings of oneness with the universe, encounters with various
mythological beings, and other similar motifs. (back cover)

Differences Between VSEs and Psychotic Symptoms

Hallucinations

Auditory and visual hallucinations have played an essential role in religion for thousands of years. Accounts range from Biblical prophets and
saints to shamans, as well as Socratess 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) specically notes that clinicians
assessing for schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations different from their own must take cultural differences into account: In some
cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a religious content may

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or

hearing Gods voice (p. 281). In a study of visual hallucinations among
Hispanic clinic patients, Lata (2005) found that psychotic phenomena
may occur in connection with spiritual experiences. Visions of loved ones
of saints, angels, Jesus, and Mary occur often.
Several surveys have shown that more than half of the normal population has some experience with voice hallucinations (Posey & Losch,
1983), and approximately 10% of the general population have the experience of hearing a comforting or advising voice that is not perceived as
being ones own thoughts (Barret & Etheridge, 1992). Voices and visions
frequently occur in people during bereavement, life-threatening situations, and stressful traumatic situations such as sensory deprivation, sleep
deprivation, illness, and solitary connement (Forrer, 1960).
Inner voices have played a signicant 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 conrmed the overlap between psychotic and spiritual experiences. Peters,
Joseph, and Garety (1999) assessed the incidence of delusions using a
standard interview and rating criteria among members of new religious
movements (NRMs, such as Moonies), nonreligious people, Christians,
and patients hospitalized for psychotic disorders. They found that those
in the NRM group could not be distinguished from the inpatients by their
beliefs but could by their mood, adjustment, and higher level of distress.
Detailed cases show that psychotic symptoms can occur in the context of
spiritual experiences (Lukoff, 1988; Lukoff & Everest, 1985). Greenberg,
Witzum, and Buchbinder (1992) described four young men who explored
Jewish mysticism and became psychotic. Their hallucinations, grandiose
and paranoid delusions, and social withdrawal were indistinguishable
from those of many mystics. They concluded that a diagnosis of psychosis
rests on factors such as duration of the state, ability to control entry into
the state, and deterioration of habits, rather than on the phenomenology
of the state itself. Thus empirical studies comparing individuals who are

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both religious and deluded call into question diagnostic criteria for delusions that emphasize the content (i.e., bizarreness or falsity) of beliefs to
classify them as pathological (Brett, 2002). Delusions and spiritual experiences cannot be distinguished by form and content but need to be
assessed in the light of the cultural values and beliefs of the individual.
In addition, holding a delusion with absolute conviction is not a sign of
pathology in itself because all beliefs that are personally signicant tend to
be held with absolute conviction (Maher, 1988). A feature of normal cognition is a conrmation bias that allows us to be impervious to contradictory evidence and only notice information that conrms 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 ones life, and
their emotional impact (Peters et al., 1999). Greenberg and associates
(Greenberg et al., 1992) conclude that a diagnosis of psychotic disorder
rests on factors such as duration of the state, ability to control entry into
the state, and deterioration of habits, rather than on the phenomenology
of the state itself. VSEs are usually transient and resolve completely, without leaving residual social difculties or isolation; in contrast, psychotic
disorders generally persist for a long period and involve ongoing impairment and social withdrawal (Jackson & Fulford, 1997; Peters, 2001; Saver
& Rabin, 1997).
Similarly, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism provide
conceptualizations of mystical states of mind that could permit psychotic
experiences to be distinguished not only by emotional and behavioral consequences but also by real differences in the states themselves, such as:
loss of subject/object boundaries; less ability to control attention; less ability to maintain equanimity; an inability to return to the ontological framework of consensus reality; psychological isolation; preoccupation with the
mental realm; and neglect of self-care (Brett, 2002).

Implications for Clinical Practice

Differential Diagnosis between Psychotic Disorders and VSEs
The most likely DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000)
diagnoses that would be considered in presentations of VSE encountered
in mainstream healthcare settings are Brief Psychotic Disorder and Schizophreniform Disorder, which are psychotic disorders of less than 1 month

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

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 denition reads:
This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious
or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve
loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a
new faith, or questioning of other spiritual values that may not necessarily
be related to an organized church or religious institution. (American
Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 685; also DSM-IV-Text Revision, 2000,
p. 1393)

The proposal for this new category evolved from the transpersonal psychology literature on spiritual emergency (Lukoff, Lu, & Turner, 1998).
Although this category includes problems that often involve less distress,
such as converting to a new faith and questioning ones faith, the authors
(Lukoff, 2007; Lukoff & Lu, 2005) have argued in previous publications
that VSEs warrant the DSM-IV diagnosis of Religious or Spiritual Problem
even when there may be psychotic symptoms present, including hallucinations and delusions. In this way, Religious or Spiritual Problem is comparable to the category Bereavement, for which the DSM-IV notes that
even when a persons reaction to a death meets the diagnostic criteria for
Major Depressive Episode, the diagnosis of a mental disorder is not given
because the symptoms result from a normal reaction to the death of a
loved one. Similarly, in VSEs, transient hallucinations, delusions, disorientation, and interpersonal difculties occur so frequently that they
should be considered normal and expectable reactions.
Iatrogenic problems may occur if VSEs are misdiagnosed and mistreated as psychotic disorders. The clinicians initial assessment can signicantly inuence whether the experience is integrated and used as a
stimulus for personal growth or repressed as a sign of mental disorder,
thereby intensifying an individuals 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 persons circle of being, they are routinely psychopathologized and pharmaceutically suppressed. In an interview study,
the most subjectively frightening aspect of their experience was psychiatric hospitalization itself ( Jackson, 2001, p. 189). The pathologizing and
stigmatizing medical approach may account for the surprising nding that
the cure rate and level of dysfunction of persons with psychotic disorders

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is considerably lower in nonindustrial societies (Kirkness, 1997, p. 41).

This warning notwithstanding, there is also a high degree of agreement
on recognition of severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia across
different cultures (Murphy, 1978).
Wilber (1993) warned of the pre/trans fallacy wherein regressive prepersonal experiences are mistaken by the individual or by others as transpersonal experiences. According to Wilber, this has been perpetuated since
both prepersonal and transpersonal are, in their own ways, nonpersonal,
then prepersonal and transpersonal tend to appear similar, even identical,
to the untutored eye (p. 125). He reports that while some have reduced
the transpersonal to the prepersonal (e.g., Freud), transpersonal therapists
have an opposing tendency to elevate prepersonal experiences to the transpersonal level (e.g., Jung). Similarly, William James warned, That region
contains every kind of matter: seraph and snake abide there side by side
(1902/1958, p. 419). Moreover, it is possible that spiritual states may transmute into psychotic disorders depending on the response by the individual.
Barnhouse (1986) has pointed out that the pathological signicance 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 gures.
Tibetan and Zen Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism provide conceptualizations of mystical states of mind that could permit psychotic experiences
to be distinguished not only by emotional and behavioral consequences
but also by real differences in the states themselves, such as: loss of subject/object boundaries; less ability to control attention; less ability to maintain equanimity; an inability to return to the ontological framework of
consensus reality; psychological isolation; preoccupation with the mental
realm; and neglect of self-care (Brett, 2002).
Hunt (2007) notes that there are areas of overlap that make differential
diagnosis based on cross-sectional data such as an admission evaluation
unreliable:
The spiritual path of direct mystical/numinous, experience can at some
point entail a metapathological crisis of loss of meaning, nihilistic despair,

Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders

and death of feeling that are also part of the inner dynamics of the deletion
of presence extending from the early onset phases of schizophrenia to its
chronic terminus in anhedonia and social withdrawal. (p. 227)

Thus altered states that are at the heart of many intense spiritual experiences need to be carefully evaluated so they arent confused or confounded
with psychopathology, which can include acknowledging areas of
overlap.

Treatment of VSEs
Some residential treatment approaches have addressed spiritual dimensions of psychosis. Perry (1974) founded Diabysis, a Jungian-based group
treatment home for people experiencing a rst psychotic episode. He
encouraged clients to express and explore the symbolic aspects of their psychotic experiences. Therapy, conducted thrice weekly, consisted of listening to clients and helping them interpret the powerful and spiritual
symbols within their hallucinations and delusions. Medications were rarely
used. Perry reported that severely psychotic clients became coherent within
2 to 6 days without medication. The outcomes appeared better for those
who had had fewer than three previous psychotic episodes. Diabysis closed
down in 1980 because of budget cutbacks in the mental health system.
A similar program, Soteria House, located in San Jose, California,
provided more empirical support for this model. Soteria House ran from
19711983 and roomed six clients, with three to four staff on premises at
one time. The staff was trained to view psychotic experiences as a developmental stage that can lead to growth and often contains a spiritual component
of mystical experiences and beliefs. Medication was typically not prescribed
unless a client showed no improvement after 6 weeks (only 10% of clients
used medication at Soteria), because it was believed to stunt the possible
growth-enhancing process of the psychotic episode (Mosher & Menn, 1979).
Outcomes from Soteria were compared to a traditional program, a community mental health center inpatient service consisting of daily pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, occupational therapy, and group therapy.
Clients length of stay was longer at Soteria than in the comparison program (mean of 166 days versus 28 days). But most patients recovered in
6 to 8 weeks without medication (Mosher, Hendrix, & Fort, 2004). A
recent meta-analysis of data from two carefully controlled studies of Soteria
programs found better 2-year outcomes for Soteria patients in the domains
of psychopathology, work, and social functioning compared to similar clients treated in a psychiatric hospital (Bola & Mosher, 2003). Soteria

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or Soteria-based houses are currently operating in Sweden, Germany,

Switzerland, Hungary, and some other countries (Mosher et al., 2004).
Treatments that address the altered state experiences of many intense
spiritual experiences, here called VSEs, have been developed and can
serve as the foundation of a sensitive approach to working with individuals who have, by choice or accident, entered into these states.

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CHAPTER 15

Altered States of Consciousness

as Paradoxically Healing: An
Embodied Social Neuroscience
Perspective
Aaron L. Mishara and
Michael A. Schwartz
Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) as Healing?
Despite the vast literature on complementary approaches to medicine and
some compelling, though still modest, empirical evidence for the implicated
healing mechanisms (e.g., Ospina et al., 2007), little is known as to why
healers in very diverse communities in the world deliberately induce altered
states of consciousness (ASC) in themselves and/or their patients and what
might be the mechanisms invoked in such efforts. It is presently believed
that humans for at least 5,000 years have deliberately altered their state of
consciousness, presumably to heal medical complaints and mental distress
(Ospina et al., 2007). The methods and procedures for inducing ASC
include meditation, mindfulness, shamanistic ritual practices, narrative
and narrative therapies, and psychoactive substances. We propose that
these deliberately manipulated ASC are paradoxically healing and that the
mechanisms involve networks in the brain that have been recently identied as subserving social cognition and the feelings of belonging to a community (Fiske, 2010). By relating hypnosis, which may induce ASC, and
other consciousness alterations to the social brain, we are not reverting to
the socio-cognitive-social inuence theories of hypnosis (as reviewed by
Lynn, Kirsch, & Hallquist, 2008; Spiegel, 2008). Such theories do not

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require the presence of an ASC and therefore do not address the question of
why many practictioners, both previously and currently, hold the view that
deliberately inducing ASC is healing.
Altered states of consciousness comprise a wealth of diverse, loosely
related experiences. In their recent review, Vaitl and coworkers (2005)
include the following experiences as ASC: states of drowsiness, daydreaming, hypnagogic states, sleep and dreaming, near death experiences,
extreme environmental conditions (pressure, temperature), starvation
and diet, sexual activity and orgasm, respiratory maneuvers, sensory deprivation, sensory homogenization and overload, rhythm-induced states
(drumming and dancing), relaxation, meditation, hypnosis, biofeedback,
psychotic disorders, epilepsy, coma and vegetative state, and pharmacologically induced states. Moreover, one could easily argue for the inclusion
of spiritual transcendent experiences, social and sleep deprivation (see
Mishara, 2010a), and dissociative states. That is, ASC comprise a diverse
range of human experiences that have been viewed as both pathological
and healing [see Cardena, this volume].
Given the scope and heterogeneity of such experiences, they are difcult to dene conceptually (Revonsuo, Kallio, & Sikka, 2005; Rock &
Krippner, 2007) [see Cardena, Volume 1]. Classic denitions 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 redenition
of ASC as an alteration in the informational or representational relationships between consciousness and the world, we nevertheless add the following caveat. Denitions of altered states as deviations from normal
baseline consciousness, presumed to more or less accurately represent
the world, are problematic when trying to ascertain the healing properties
of ASC that may occur in meditation, hypnosis, shamanistic practices, narrative, and related therapies.
Denitions 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 denition: ASC involve the suspension, disruption, or bracketing
of the natural attitude, our usual commonsense ways of constructing reality. In the everyday natural attitude, we assume reality is obviously given
to us. Recent ndings 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

accurate and is rather based on a host of human commonsense assumptions

about accessing a consensual reality [see Windt, Volume 1].
Phenomenological approaches to the study of consciousness as subjectively constituting (i.e., constructing) its own reality allow for systematic
distortions of accuracy in our experience as an adaptive function of keeping
the person meaningfully embedded in selfworld interactions (Mishara &
Corlett, 2009; von Weizsa cker 1950). That is, perceptual illusions
(Bridgeman & Hoover, 2008) and cognitive distortions (cognitive heuristics) are systematically integrated into our everyday experience of reality
as if they were a kind of glue that holds it together. Na ve realism
(Ramsperger, 1940), the bias that ones own perspective on reality is objective, resembles what Husserl, the phenomenological philosopher, described
as the natural attitude, the attitude we naturally assume in our everyday
experience. The latter is shaped or informed by common sense as our
default, everyday approach to experiencing the world. Common sense has
a protective function in maintaining an unquestioned, natural relationship
between internal experience and external reality. Our mental health is preserved by a certain resistance to losing common sense (Blankenburg, 2001;
Mishara, 2001). An ASC deviates from the everyday nave natural attitude of
constructed-consensual reality not by misrepresenting the self-world relationship but by transforming or suspending it in its usual sense, what we
later describe as a metaphoric journey. As noted, the very term common
sense comprises a social factor (often supporting the status quo or habitually
accepted consensus [see Whitehead, Volume 1]. As Fiske (2010) indicates,
individuals tend to endorse meanings that are consensual or held by the
group in order to enhance the experience of belonging in that group, and
the sense of belonging is powerfully rewarded by the neurocircuitry underlying social experience in the human brain. Recent ndings in the rapidly
developing eld 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
denitions 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 selfworld
relationship (and the preservation of its coherence) is mediated by the
dynamic Gestalt meaning of the perception, which is experienced as an
ongoing living connectedness between embodied self and environment (von

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Weizsacker, 1950). Husserl had demonstrated that our everyday default

attitude is a habitual, relatively limited awareness of what comprises the
reality of this selfworld relationship, the nave realism of the natural
attitude. The effectiveness of shamanic and other healing practices may
be precisely to introduce ASC as a group or shared experience in a manner
that runs counter to what we, as Western contemporaries, tenaciously
hold onto as common sense. Furthermore, understanding the therapeutic effects derived from healing ritual practices that alter consciousness
(whether these involve meditation, hypnosis, shamanism, or narrative
therapies) requires a model that recognizes how the variety of procedures
for alteration of consciousness may engage similar or overlapping neural
mechanisms or networks.
The research concerning the healing practices that deliberately induce
ASC, however, is burdened by methodological problems. Krippner and
Achterberg (2000) caution that terms such as healer and healing are
extremely subjective, and their demonstrated effectiveness depends on the
criteria used for ones restoration to health, yet another elusive concept
(p. 360). The claim that ASC-induction (in healers and/or patients) is a primary means of healing in numerous societies relies on a denition of healing
that differs from the biomedical view of being cured of disease. Some cultures regard healing to take place if that person has been spiritually
restored before death (Krippner & Achterberg, pp. 359360). This denition 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
clients 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 dene whether the outcome measures
amount to what may be regarded a cure, an abatement of medical conditions, or, rather, a reduction of emotional distress. That is, ASC may enhance
different types of healing. However, there are limitations to such
approaches, especially with regard to claims of cure. For example, many of
the studies of shamanistic healing indicate that it is effective for somatizing
patients with low energy, anxiety, and depression but less effective for infections and tumors. Krippner and Achterberg (2000) remark, however, that
cases of so-called spontaneous remission (ORegan, & Hirshberg, 1993)
resulting from such practices simply index healing processes whose mechanisms are still not understood: When the term spontaneous remission is

Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing

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 efcacy of meditation and hypnosis are better studied than shamanism. Because
the role of the social brain in the healing effects of ASC is particularly evident
in shamanistic rituals, we will examine shamanism after discussing
the research concerning meditation, mindfulness, and hypnosis [see Shear,
Volume 1].

Meditation, Mindfulness, and Hypnosis: Healing Effects and Mechanisms

It is generally believed that meditation is a spiritual and healing practice that has been prevalent in some parts of the world for more than
5,000 years (Ospina et al., 2007). As a complementary mindbody therapeutic strategy for a variety of health-related problems, its popularity is
dramatically increasing in Western countries (Horowitz, 2010). Although
quite heterogeneous in methods and techniques, a common feature is a
rootedness in the silence and stillness of compassionate, nonjudgmental
present-moment awareness (Fortney & Taylor, 2010). Mindfulness meditation is the mental ability to focus on the monitoring of the present
moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness.
Apart from hypnosis, meditation is the most widely studied alternative
treatment (Dakwar & Levin, 2009). In a meta-analysis commissioned by
the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
(NCCAM/NIH), Ospina et al. (2007) identied ve broad categories of
meditation practices (mantra meditation, mindfulness meditation, yoga,
Tai Chi, and qigong). Nevertheless, the reviewers point out that it is difcult to nd common components (and thus underlying healing mechanisms) among these different approaches. Awareness and control of
breathing is universal, yet there is no single common approach to breathing. Although the control of attention is universal, how it is controlled and
which components of attention are targeted varies:
Concentrative techniques involve focusing on a specic sensory or mental
stimulus to the exclusion of anything else: breath, for example, or an
object in space. Diffuse practices, by contrast, involve allowing thoughts,
feelings, and sensations to arise while maintaining a nonjudgmental,
detached, and accepting attitude to them, as well as a heightened perceptual stance attentive to the entire eld of perception. (Dakwar & Levin,
2009, p. 255)

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Most meditation practices are both concentrative and diffuse.

Interestingly, Ospina and coworkers (2007) observe that it is not
known to what extent spirituality or belief play a role in meditations healing effects. That is, its healing effects may be independent from spiritual
belief or so-called placebo effects. However, other authors maintain that
its spiritual components may be one of the vital mechanisms of action
(Dakwar & Levin, 2009). Ospina et al. (2007) conclude that most of the
studies are compromised by poor methodological quality (e.g., naturalistic, nonrandomized, without control groups, interventions and outcomes
not well operationalized).
In her qualitative review, Horowitz (2010) observes that since Ospina
et al.s (2007) sobering meta-analysis, several more recent randomizedcontrol trials have been implemented. She reports a large (n 201) 5-year
prospective randomized controlled trial (Schneider et al., 2009) that found
that meditation is associated with meaningful reductions in blood pressure,
myocardial infarction, stroke, and all-cause mortality. She also provides
evidence for the association of breathing meditation with improvements
in type 2 diabetes. Moreover, a study that compared the effects of
mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) in women breast cancer
patients to an assessment-only control group found that MBSR was associated with reduced plasma cortisol levels, improved quality of life/coping
ability, more enduring natural-killer (NK) cell activity, and increased cytokine production levels in breast cancer patients (Witek-Janusek, Albuquerque, Chroniak, Durazo-Arvizu, & Mathews, 2008). MBSR has also been
found to reduce chronic pain in patients with arthritis, back/neck pain,
and various comorbid conditions but to be less effective with patients with
headache/migraine and bromyalgia. 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

may be effective by targeting the possibly related mechanisms in these

disorders. Nonjudgmentally, mindfully accepting intrusive thoughts
or imagery from a putative observer position (Brewin et al., 2010)
may have healing consequences in diverse disorders characterized by
intrusive symptoms (see our own account of the healing effects of narrative below).
Still, even when the evidence for meditations 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 ones own mental state discussed in this contribution, has direct effects on the physiology/
neurophysiology of the practicant, there is confusion about whether the
healing effects are secondary to the physiologic changes rather than the individuals beliefs about the practice. For example, the analgesic effects of mindful states in experienced Zen meditators suggest that pain modulation is in
part explained by changes in respiratory rates (Grant & Rainville, 2009).
This recalls Krippner and Achterbergs (2000) discussion of the dual
approach to healing outcomes vs. subjective beliefs about the healing and
whether there is some ill-dened interaction between mental and physical
healing in which the patients beliefs may optimize already-triggered physiologic processes. This lack of clarity, however, may be an artifact of the mind
body dualism presupposed by Western biomedical approaches to healing
(Mishara & Schwartz, 1997; Schwartz & Wiggins, 2010).
Furthermore, as Horowitz (2010) observes,
Practicing meditation was formerly thought to induce passive relaxation
states primarily by producing changes in the autonomic nervous system.
However, recent ndings from electroencephalogram (EEG) and neuroimaging studies suggest that meditation is associated with active states of
consciousness that involve cognitive restructuring, learning, and changes
in the structure of the brain itself. (p. 264)

Moreover, by attending to phenomena in a nonevaluative way, Zen and

mindfulness-based meditation effectively dampen the automatic cascade
of cognitive and emotional associations (Dakwar & Levin, 2009, p. 264).
Some functional neuroimaging studies of mindfulness meditation (MM)
and beginning phases of Zen meditation show activation of the prefrontal
cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), while other studies show
increased activation in the more rostral ACC and the proximal medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC; Chisea et al., 2010). However, Farb and coworkers
(2007) observed a decrease rather than an increase of the activity of the
mPFC during MM. Interestingly, similarly mixed functional neuroimaging

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ndings are also associated with hypnosis induction, including both

increased and reduced ACC activity (McGeown et al., 1999). Although
ASC are heterogeneous in nature and presumably in terms of their underlying mechanisms, we believe that the mixed functional neuroimaging ndings point to a fundamental but overlooked paradox of the healing effects
of the induced ASC of meditation, mindfulness, and hypnosis.
Chisea and colleagues (2010) claim that the mechanisms underlying
MM share similarities with other treatments, including psychotherapy
and the placebo effect. They argue that all three recruit top-down processes dependent on frontal cortical areas that generate and maintain cognitive expectancies (p. 112). Moreover, the increased PFC activation may
indicate a higher ability to detach from negative states by engaging frontal
cortical structures to dampen automatic amygdala activation (p. 113). We
believe, however, that such accounts are incomplete precisely because
they do not take into account what we identify here as the paradoxically
healing effects of deliberately induced ASC for the purpose of healing.
Let us examine a possible role of ACC activation during MM (Chisea
et al., 2010) and hypnosis (Rainville et al., 1999). The ACC is often active
in an early search phase for task-appropriate responses or when the task
is novel and more difcult (Holroyd & Coles, 2002). ACC involvement
appears to diminish when a task has become learned or automated or an
effective strategy has been adopted (Mishara et al., 2006). In their computational model, Reynolds, Zacks, and Braver (2007) propose that our current context of goals and representations is largely impervious to updating
until a prediction error signals the need for updating. Updating of PFC
representations may be gated by phasic dopamine signals from midbrain
dopamine neurons triggered by encountering unexpected rewards, or
unexpected lack of reward, which may terminate in the ACC. The latter
is rich in projections from the midbrain dopamine system (Paus,
2001), which putatively generates the prediction error signal (Holroyd &
Coles, 2002) [see Previc, this volume]. Interestingly, Spiegel (2008)
reviews evidence that trait hypnotizability in individuals robustly correlates with levels of homovanillic acid, a dopamine metabolite, in the cerebrospinal uid. Although the precise role of the activation of ACC and
PFC structures during MM, hypnosis, and related methods of ASC induction is not known, we propose that it reects 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) denes hypnosis as highly focused attention with suspension of peripheral

Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing

awareness. It involves the deactivation of vigilance characteristic of posterior antentional systems, mediated by parietal/occipital areas. However,
it is interesting to note that the neural correlates for attentional networks
overlap with those frontal parietal networks recruited for eye movement
(reviewed by Mishara, 2010a). Therefore, the reduction of peripheral
awareness and reduced orienting to external environment subserved by
the posterior attentional system described by Spiegel (2008) may involve
the disabling of what has been described in the neurologic tradition as
the body schema of possible movements. As elaborated below, the body
schema underlies the experience of a voluntary motoric-agentic self,
which includes eye movements associated with executive attention and
inhibiting saccades to distracting stimuli (Mishara, in press a). In hypnosis
and related ASC, the body schema then becomes detached from its preattentive binding with body image, the conscious experience of a
perceptual-social self (see below; Mishara, 2007a).
We therefore propose a second phase in the induction of ASC in hypnosis and related states almost antithetical to the initial phase of effortfully
directing attention back on task. This is symbolized by the imagery of the
death and rebirth of self, the mythological inner heros journey often
invoked in shamanic narratives and related healing traditions. By examining
the neural processes underlying hypnosis and their putative role in shamanistic healing, we nd support for this hypothesis below. Moreover, this paradox reects the fundamental, existential structure of self as a self experienced
in time, a dialectical self that only becomes itself by giving itself up, that
continually transcends itself and its current perspective (Mishara, 2007a).

Hypnosis in the Ritual Enactment of Reciprocal-Mimetic ASC Contribute

to the Healing Effects of Shamanism
Shamanism is a practice in which a person deliberately alters her consciousness for the purpose of interacting with spirits in order to serve the
community in which she nds herself (Baruss, 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 Cardena & Alvarado, Winkelman, Volume 1].
Because a self-induced ASC is central to shamanic practices, the ndings
concerning the neural correlates or neural activity implicated in hypnosis as
an ASC, as we will see, are directly relevant to shamanistic healing. Operationally, hypnosis refers to a change in baseline mental activity after an
induction procedure and is typically experienced at the subjective level as
an increase in absorption, focused attention, disattention to extraneous

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stimuli, and a reduction in spontaneous thought (Oakley, 2008). There is a

becoming absorbed and allowing suggestions or spontaneous subjective
phenomena to affect experience (Cardena, 2008, p. 252).
Benham and Younger (2008) caution with regard to the empirical ndings of the healing effects of hypnosis:
For while hypnosis has been examined in relation to immune, cardiovascular, integumentary, digestive, nervous and endocrine systems, the scope of
questions asked and the array of methodologies used to investigate them
have resulted in an assortment of studies that fail to advance the eld systematically (p. 422)

In demonstrating the role of the social brain in the hypnotic ACS of

healing, we propose a theory of narrative enactment or dramatic performance: Narrative, that is, any act of narration (e.g., storytelling), may
be characterized as the ability to frame imaginary time within real time
(Mishara, 1995, 2010a). In this model, the narrator actually induces an
ASC by focusing and narrowing the audiences as well as the narrators
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 ones own body. In fact, narrative
framing, or entrancement (i.e., absorption, or attentional captivation,
in what is portrayed or presented) is common to the arts, even when
language is not the primary experience [see Zarrilli, Volume 1]. Performance and visual arts also require a framing that involves a suspending
or bracketing of the current actual environment (Mishara, 2010a).
Notably, responsiveness to proprioceptive stimulation and ability to
shift reference frames is greater in high responders to hypnosis (Carli,
Manzoni, & Santarcangelo, 2008), a point to which we will return when
giving an account of shamanistic healing as an expression of the social
brain.
Regarding this capacity for ASC absorption in narrative framing, Donald (1991) had conjectured that a capacity for using the whole body as a
communication device had emerged prelinguistically during the period
of homo erectus by means of what he calls mimetic culture, the ability to tell
stories through gesture and dance. Whether the details of Donalds account
of cognitive evolution turn out to be correct is not critical to the current
argument. We wish only to emphasize the human bodys ability to double
itself in mimetic narrative as both the current body expressing and the symbolic (pantomimed) content it refers to (e.g., ones own body crawling like
the snake or the panther). Furthermore, this occurs in the context of the

Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing

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 reects the structure of human self
as socially embodied.
The anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1963) describes the shamans practice of placing a tuft of down into his mouth, biting his own tongue and
then spitting out the bloody feather as if it were the pathological foreign
body extracted from the patient. To cure the patient, he must somehow
believe his own performance to be convincing. Cardena and Cousins
(2010) observe that the sleight of hand or trickery often found in shamanic healing is nevertheless an illusion that becomes real for the self
and the audience. It is one component of a triad that includes the acting
body of the shaman (as if in a theatrical performance) and the importance
of the presence of other people.
One example of such mutual hypnotic-trance induction between the
shaman and audience is found among the nomadic Rabaris in western
India. The shaman (bhopa or bhopi) acts as a means of communication
between the Rabaris and the Mataji or mother goddess. After a period of
listening to intense drumming, the shaman starts to shake, and, as a result,
falls over (sometimes fainting), and is caught by members of the audience,
indicating a possessed state [see Fachner, Sluhovsky, St John, Volume 1].
Another indication of such transformed mental state is when the shaman
starts to unravel (in a distracted manner) his brightly red turban or chiri.
Not only is the shaman the only member of the community permitted to
wear such a red turban, but also removal of the turban is considered to
break the modesty code. It is here tolerated to indicate the exceptionality
of the shamans state as it is displayed to the community. The unraveled
chiri may function as a physical link between the everyday, mundane
world and the realm of the goddess that the bhopa thereby accesses, perhaps in a temporary form of axis mundi. To further facilitate the ASC,
the bhopa may use the chiri as a sort of ail to whip himself and ingest
opium water quaffed from the palm of the hand of an attendant Rabari
(Dr. Eiluned Edwards, Nottingham Trent University, personal communication). We interpret such practices to indicate the shamans use of a mimetic, hypnotic state induction in self and audience as a means of
optimizing the brains healing powers. That is, the mimetic performative
function is central to the healing mechanisms of the human brain as it
has evolved to become a social brain.

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Cardenas (2008) proposal that emotions are transpersonal systems

whereby hypnosis involves emotional contagion processes lends support
to this view. Cardena, Terhune, Loof, and Buratti (2009) found signicant
correlations between emotional contagion (the propensity to automatically
imitate the emotional expressions of others) and hypnotizability. These
ndings support the view that the hypnotic ASC employed in shamanic ritual performance may in part have its healing effects by appealing to the
powerful feelings of belonging to a community during ritual enactment.
This whole process triggers the neural circuitry of reward in the human
social brain. As Abram (2005) observes, however, the feeling of solidarity
in shamanic ritual is not merely a connectedness with the surrounding
human community but also with the more than human earth (p. 172),
that is, a deep connectedness between ones 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 (Cardena, 2008).
These observations resonate with psychotomimetic drug studies that
attempt to model the phenomenology of schizophrenic psychosis in healthy
individuals by establishing common denominators between drug-induced
ASC and the endogenous psychotic experiences of patients with schizophrenia (Vollenweider & Geyer, 2000). Psychoactive drugs (e.g., indoleamine hallucinogens, such as LSD or psilocybin, and dissociative
anesthetics, such as ketamine) are administered to healthy individuals in
acute challenge studies. The following dimensions are found to be present
in the ASC of the drug-challenged healthy individuals and acutely psychotic
patients: (1) feelings of oceanic boundlessness whereby the boundaries
between self and universe are experienced to dissolve, an experience that
is associated with positive emotions; (2) dread of ego dissolution,
whereby, in contrast to oceanic boundlessness, the loss of selfboundaries is associated with arousal, anxiety, and paranoid feelings of
being endangered; (3) visionary restructuralization, which refers to
auditory and visual illusions, hallucinations, synaesthesias, and changes
in the meaning of various percepts. Moreover, these dimensions have been
validated cross-culturally. Neuroimaging experiments using FDG-PET
during the psychotomimetic challenge vs. placebo control in healthy individuals indicate that the rst dimension is associated with changes in metabolic activity in the frontal-parietal areas, occipital cortex, and striatum. The
second is associated with changes in the thalamus and the third with
changes as in oceanic boundlessness, but with additional activity in temporal cortex (Vollenweider & Geyer, 2001; Vollenweider, Leenders, ye,
Hell, & Angst, 1997) [see Beauregard, Presti, this volume]. These ndings

Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing

parallel similar metabolic activity in acutely psychotic schizophrenic

patients and are particularly interesting for the present analysis because these
dimensions are associated with ASC in the shamanic initiation and ritual healing. As we will discover, the dissolution of self (i.e., oceanic boundlessness
coupled with visionary restructuralization) paradoxically leads to greater
integration as expressed by the rebirth imagery as a symbol of transformation, often invoked during the shamanic rituals. Moreover, this transformation engages the deepest levels of self-processing ( Jung, 1969).
Our claim is that the ASC involved in shamanic healing effects do not
merely involve hypnosis but rather that the hypnotic induction involves
a group experience in which symbolic meanings well-known to the community (i.e., both healer and patient) are invoked and engaged.
The healer attaches the patients emotions to the transactional symbols particularized from the general myth and then manipulates these symbols to
emotionally transform the patient. More specically, patients subjective
states including emotions and bodily sensations become symbolically
objectivized and are incorporated into pre-existing cultural patterns.
(Lee, Kirmayer, & Groleau, 2010, p. 59)

Furthermore, this symbolic meaning is embodied in the community

ritual performance.
To the extent to which the symbols employed invoke shared mythical
narratives (Dow, 1986; Lee et al., 2010; Levi-Strauss, 1963), they mobilize
unconscious processes of healing, which are comparable to more contemporary healing processes found in Depth Psychological and experiential
individual and group psychotherapies (Safran & Muran, 2000).
It is the ritual performance itself as a communal act that allows its suggestive healing power to enter the individual and the other audience participants precisely as a group experience. By casting this complex
phenomenology and implicated neural processes under the simplifying
placebo effect, both a service and disservice are accomplished. This terminology should not deect from the careful phenomenology of the subjective experience of the implicated ASC as a transformative experience
of embodied self in terms of the spatial, temporal, agentic, and intersubjective dimensions of experience during the healing process (Mishara &
Schwartz, 1997) [see Dieguez and Blanke, this volume].
Cardena (2005) conducted a phenomenological study of depth of
hypnosis in very high hypnotizables. Depth correlated with experiences
of changes in embodiment (e.g., oating out of the body, ying), time
sense (time becoming still or slowing down), and agency (diminished

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self-awareness in motor activity). In the last case, the nding that repetitive activity does not have to be attended . . . once the whole organism
becomes attuned to the specic rhythm and then maintains residual unreective awareness (pp. 47, 52) has direct relevance for ritual shamanic
mimetic healing. We believe that a similar phenomenological investigation
of the experience of ASC of the healer and audience would help elucidate
the cognitive and neural mechanisms of shamanic healing.
In summary, we claim that the healing mechanisms of the shamanic ASC
as mimetically induced hypnotic state involve a collective group experience.
These mechanisms cannot be reduced to any one single factor (e.g., parasympathetic relaxation, symbolic meaning, or group processes), but rather,
all these factors contribute in concert to healing. This is so precisely because
the human brain has evolved both in its cognitive architecture and its
underlying neural circuitry to be an embodied social brain.

Brain Connectivity, Hypnosis, and the Healing Effects of Shamanic ASC

Using EEG measurements with a hypnotic virtuoso volunteer, Fingelkurts,
Fingelkurts, Kallio, and Revonsuo (2007) found alterations in local and remote
functional connectivity between brain areas. That is, the number of remote
functional connections among different cortical areas was signicantly lower
during hypnosis than during the baseline [which] . . . is consistent with transient hypofrontality and left-hemisphere inhibition (p. 1460).
Interestingly, the authors comment, a similar picture of disrupted functional connectivity (estimated by the same method of EEG structural synchrony) has been found in subjects with schizophrenic disorders
(p. 1460). In the previous section, we described Vollenweider and Geyers
(2001) ndings that (1) feelings of dissolution of the selfs 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 ndings to mean that separate
cognitive modules and subsystems may be temporarily incapable of communicating with each other normally (p. 1452). This recalls cognitive definitions of dreaming. Dreaming has been characterized as single-minded
(Rechtschaffen, 1978). In waking consciousness, we usually are able to
reect 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

excluded during dreaminga 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 nds a similar inability
to transcend ones current perspective, to reect on, monitor, or consider
alternative views during the acute psychosis of schizophrenia. As in dreaming, one is trapped in the now (Mishara, 1995; 2007b; 2010b; 2010).
Moreover, recent evidence of functional and structural abnormalities and
reductions in large-scale cortical connectivity in schizophrenia may be
reected 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 nd 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 heros journey. (Randal et al., 2008, pp. 338339)

Just as there is apparent similarity to psychosis, there is a close relationship between dream experiences and shamanistic practices (Law &
Kirmayer, 2005).
In sleep and anesthetics, there is a reduction of consciousness associated
with a breakdown of cortical connectivity and thus of integration of information (Alkire, Hudetz, & Tononi, 2008). Tononi (2008) denes this
breakdown as a reduction in the ability of different cortical regions to interact effectively (p. 232). Presumably, such reduced cortical connectivity also
occurs in hypnosis, as suggested by Fingelkurts and coworkers (2007) and,
as we propose here, in the ASC of shamanic healing. The Rabari shamanic
ritual fainting reported above, for example, supports this view.

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In describing their integrated information theory of consciousness,

Tononi and Laureys (2008) write:
. . . you lie in bed with eyes open and experience pure darkness and
silence . . . the informativeness of what you just experienced lies in not
how complicated it is to describe but in how many alternatives you have
ruled out . . . whether you think or not of what was ruled out (and you
typically dont) you actually gained access to a large amount of information. This point is so simple that its importance has been overlooked.
(pp. 402403)

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 (Aperspektivitat).
Wyss connects inner experience with a boundless loss of perspectivity in
which the possible overwhelms the actual:
The inner appears to wakeful awareness as the inter-weaving of thoughts,
volition, moods, images, feelings which penetrate one another and are
experienced as lacking independence, but somehow, everything is interconnected with everything elseon the basis of the aperspectival structure
of interweaving of what is possible. (p. 188, our translation)

Nir and Tononi (2010) observe: The most obvious difference between
dreaming and waking consciousness is the profound disconnection of the
dreamer from their current environment (p. 100). However, this disconnection, the aperspectival, the overwhelming of the actual by the inner
(Wyss, 1973) with an attendant confusion between experiential modalities
(e.g., perceiving, remembering, imagining) are also found during acute
drug intoxication, psychosis, hypnotic narrative framing (Mishara,
1995), andas we argue herein shamanic healing. The shamanic metaphoric heros journey during initiation (Randal et al., 2008) is a temporary suspending of current reality to undertake a confrontation with the
inner world. Here there is an overwhelming of the actual by the boundless

Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing

possibilities of inner experience, where perceiving, imagining, remembering, and thinking no longer remain separate experiential modalities. The
discovery of the inner as boundless and dangerous is also reected in
Jungs (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 Kafkas stories (Mishara, 2010a).
In our account of the healing factors of ACS in shamanism, we nd
ourselves confronted with the following paradox. How can what
appears as a loss of cortical large-scale integration in hypnosis (Fingelkurts et al., 2007), which we propose to be also central to shamanic
healing, lead to psychological integration, that is, the incorporation of
new symbolic material and positive suggestions, that contribute to both
mind and body healing? How can a reduction in cortical neural integration lead to the increased integration of symbolic mental and physical
healing?

Self and Narratives in ASC

In shamanic ritual, the self and its attendant feelings of control and
agency as understood in our Western commonsensical views are temporarily suspended, given up in a process of healing, symbolized by the
heros journey as confronting the inner realm of the possible (Wyss loss
of loss of perspective (Aperspektivitat)) in a rebirth of self. Jungs (1969)
observations about the symbolism of self as a process of rebirth overlap
with the phenomenologic-existential view of self as ongoing selftranscendence or self-displacement of ones current perspective. Jungs
contemporary, Viktor von Weizsacker, neurologist, phenomenologist,
sense physiologist, and celebrated founder of psychosomatic medicine in
Germany, writes that we only come to awareness of self not as a prereective given but reectively:
We only rst really notice our own subjectivity when it is threatened to dissolve in crisis. . . . The subject is not a rm possession but must be acquired
anew at each moment to possess it. . . . The unity of the subject is only
rst constituted in its ongoing incessant reestablishing itself in crisis and
its own inrmity. (von Weizsacker, 1950, p. 173, our translation)

Mishara (2010a) describes a similar symbolism of rebirth as metaphoric inner journey in Kafkas writings: The self, which comes to expression

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in symbolic hypnagogic or dream images, is at once a self-transcendent and a

self-regenerating process. The evolving structure of human self (Mishara,
2010 a) is reected in the rebirth symbolism.1 During the narration,
The self simultaneously takes on the roles of the narrator and the narrated
self of the traumatic event. The process of separating these selves, letting
go, and sense of completion is still under way. . . .Straus, a phenomenological psychiatrist, wrote that we experience distance not in terms of objective
space but in terms of our own momentary ability for movement. It is for this
reason that we have no distance in the dream because the dream landscape
moves with us and encloses us within its horizon. We are always in the
present in the dream, enveloped within the immanence of our own bodies,
in a private universe. (Mishara, 1995, p. 188)

The ability to seamlessly shift frames between a narrating subject who

somehow stands outside the narrative, shaping its course, and one that is
embedded within the development of unfolding scenes may have its neural basis in the opposition body schema/body image, that is, being a body
subject and having a body experienced by others.2 To narrate about oneself

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 Kafkas 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 oclock from your perspective. Ask him what time it is. He may respond either 3 or 9
oclock 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 oclock from his perspective) and perceptual, are organized in terms of two different reference frames or coordinate systems. The rst, body schema, is egocentric, or body
centered, and the second, body image, is computed from an allocentric or object-centered
frame of reference. These two attitudes correspond roughly to being a body self, a body
schema, or I, and having a body, a body image or social self as me (discovering that my
body has an outside perceived by others precisely by empathizing with their perspective).
The duality of both being/having a body-self is required for social roles. The fact that we
are able to take both an internal-vital (i.e., proprioceptive-vestibular-interoceptive) and external (exteroceptive, social-objectifying) relationship to our own bodies is the precondition for
any vulnerability to the disruption of self-experience in neuropsychiatric disorders and
anomalous conscious states (Mishara, 2010b, p. 621).

Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing

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 reects 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 Weizsacker, 1950).
The act of narrating requires an ongoing shifting between internal and external perspectives or reference frames with regard to ones own body. The narrating I is egocentric in that, like movement, the next steps in a narrative are
computed in egocentric coordinates, like considering chess moves or an
anticipated route in advance. However, the narrator narrates a self already
embedded in scene-based allocentric coordinates and becomes entranced like
his audience in the unfolding of these scenes from the standpoint of the protagonist. The narrator must shift back and forth from being absorbed in the
narrative unfolding of his/her own story to quick decision processes of
where to go next, which narrative path to take. The latter process occurs
in terms of what we have been referring to as the egocentric reference
frame of an on line body schema.
Recently, the rst-person perspective has gained considerable attention in neuroscience without its advocates being able to state exactly how
rst-person awareness is supported by the complex circuitry underlying
the social brain, or if it has components that can be fractionated and
mapped onto the brain in functional neuroimaging studies (Mishara,
2007b). What is often missing from these discussions is the role of narrative autobiographic remembering. Such remembering is not a direct
awareness of an already rst-person engaged or embedded perspective
(an initial viewpoint dependency rst computed in an egocentric coordinate system), but rather the ability to shift perspectives to empathically
imagine how others experience the self, a shifting away from the default,
viewpoint-dependent egocentric frame of reference (Byrne, Becker, &
Burgess, 2007). Similarly, Decety (2007) writes, people are fundamentally egocentric and have difculty going beyond their own perspective
when anticipating what others are thinking or feeling (p. 258; recall the
denition of nave realism as our default reality, above). Remembering
requires a shifting to an allocentric, viewpoint-independent frame of reference that situates ones 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
rst-person perspective, a hypothetical prereective self-awareness somehow present (to itself) in engaged agency (a body schema, that, as we
know, contra claims of reective access to prereective self-awareness
[see Mishara, 2010a] occurs largely unconsciously) but rather the ability

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to reect on ourselves, to narrate our experience to others and thus transcend our temporary current online perspective. It is also this ability
that, we contend, leads to shamanic use of ASC during ritual enactment
as healing.
Hence, what is uniquely human may not be, as many assume, the ability to say I, but the ability to reectively access a me, an external relationship to my own bodily self as the precondition of a social
relationship to others. What is generally neglected in the literature is that
any claims about self must be made from a reective 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 Plessners (1965; 19801985) 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 ones bodily self from outside, as others might experience it, the foundations of uniquely human
social cognition (Mishara, 2009). It is also this ability to consider oneself
from an observers perspective that enables conscious episodic memory,
the ability to narrate ones experience, the time travel of autonoetic episodic remembering, the ability to have explicit retrospective and prospective episodic memories (Tulving, 2002). The neuroscience that supports
being able to be both a centered self and the ability to envision oneself
from an ec-centric (allocentric) perspective is complex and implicates
ongoing transformation of reference frames between a motoric body
schema and a perceptually based body image.
While online egocentric representations are continuously updated by
self-motion, allocentric representations play a role in spatial memory even
over very short delays and distances (Burgess, Becker, King, & OKeefe,
2001). It is not possible to reect on, narrate, or impart an experience
(even if it be through nonverbal performance in a prelinguistic mimetic
culture as in Donalds [1991] theory of cognitive evolution) without displacing our initially centric experience, by taking up a position that situates the embodied self in a shared community experience, which implies
many viewpoints different from my own. That is, an initially egocentric, viewpoint orientation (Brewin et al., 2010; Byrne et al., 2007; Decety, 2007)
must be translated into an allocentric frame of reference. Although the
hippocampus is specically involved in storing allocentric (or
viewpoint-independent) representations, an imageable egocentric representation is then produced in the precuneus via translation in the posterior cortex, making use of current head direction (Burgess et al.,

Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing

2001, p. 1499). That is, the body-centered or egocentric coordinates of an

online, short-lived body schema, mediated by the parietal cortex (the
intraparietal sulcus subserving the translation between reference
frames), may update head direction cells providing point of view to
recollected scenes otherwise mapped in allocentric coordinates (Byrne
et al., 2007; Mishara, in press b). Speculatively, out-of-body experiences
may involve the lack of coordination between vestibular sensations (presumably mediated by the putative vestibular cortex in humans), head
direction cells, and their spatial mapping in the allocentric space of
remembered or constructed scenes (Mishara, 2010b).

Narrative as Model for the ASC in Shamanistic Healing

But how can reduced cortico-cortical connectivity heal through experiences of body-self symbolized by death-rebirth journey symbolism, a journey between worlds populated by spirits? We have already indicated that
responsiveness to proprioceptive stimulation and ability to shift reference
frames is greater in high responders to hypnosis (Carli et al., 2008). As in
narrative or other kinds of mimetic performance in social contexts, the
deliberate employment of ASC in shamanic healing requires a shift of
embodied perspectives in both the shaman-healer and the patient. Such
experiences involve disengaging the motoric self from the perceptual self,
the body schema from the body image (Mishara, 2010a, 2010b). That is,
shamanism heals paradoxically or in terms of a dialectic of three stages:
(1) effortful, mindful directing attention back on task; (2) a temporary loss
or reduction of consciousness, an interrupting of the human ability to
transcend-integrate current experience, only to (3) optimize this same
ability in subsequent reective awareness. This process is symbolized in
the shamanic death and rebirth of the socially embodied self. The mutual
ASC induction between shaman and patient (not unlike the much weaker
form of the joint absorption of the storyteller and audience) requires not
only a shift in embodied perspectives but also utilization of the networks
of the brain that enable social cognition, the ability to empathize and
exchange perspectives with others fundamental to healthy functioning
(Blankenburg, 2001). The shamanic narrative of the self as an inner journey of rebirth is the healing movement of self-transcendence.
Although the analogy may at rst not seem obvious, giving into a narrative absorption as an ASC resembles the lapse of embodied control
during laughter as Plessner describes it: Paradoxically, we are brought
closer to our physical-body, and yet severed from internal connection or

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control, as if a bystander who must endure while the bodily automatism

compulsively runs its opaque (undurchsichtig) course (Plessner, 1970,
p. 25). By giving way, the person at once forfeits the relation to his body
and reestablishes it (Plessner, 1970, p. 66). Here, the regaining of control
with regard to ones bodily self precisely through giving it up resembles
the dialectical-paradoxical movement of ASC in medical and psychological healing.

Conclusions
We have described diverse ways that healing and ASC are associated
and have examined healing and shamanic practices, meditation, mindfulness, hypnosis, acute psychosis and its psychomimetic drug models, narratives, community rituals through the lens of the social brain, and social
neuroscience. One achieves integration in mental and physical healing
paradoxically through rst yielding to its loss in a temporary dissolution
of embodied self and the feeling of being in control in the ASC. The phemenological psychiatrist, Wyss (1973) connects inner experience, especially when controlled processing decreases as in ASC, with a boundless
and sometimes dangerous loss of perspectivity in which the possible overwhelms the actual. The shamanic metaphors of inner journey and rebirth
refer to the paradoxical healing power of the ASC and may help elucidate
the structure of the human self and how the self may play a role in its own
healing in meditation, mindfulness, hypnosis, and narrative.

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CHAPTER 16

Anomalous Phenomena, Psi,

and Altered Consciousness
David Luke
Introduction
Even before 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research was created,
formalizing the eld, parapsychological research has been intimately associated with altered states of consciousness (ASC), such as those associated
with mesmerism and mediumistic trance (Alvarado, 1998), and this relationship has continued to the present day. Some of the earliest psychical
researchers posited models to account for the importance of ASC in the
production of such extraordinary phenomena. Frederick Myers (1903)
indicated how changes of state induced what he called automatisms, such
as telepathy, whereby material from subliminal consciousness moved to
the supraliminal part, an idea inuential on the thinking of many scholars
of consciousness from William James onward (Kelly et al., 2007). Psychical research paved the way for parapsychology, or the study of anomalous
psychology, which is the scientic investigation of psi and related anomalous phenomena. Psi, as dened 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 dened as paranormal cognition; the acquisition of information about an external event,
object, or inuence (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 specically called clairvoyance, telepathy,
and precognition, though in practice it may be difcult to discern the difference between them. A basic concern is how to distinguish clairvoyance,
as knowledge about an objective feature of the world, from telepathy, a
representation of that information from someone elses mind.
PK is dened simply as paranormal action; the inuence of the mind on
a physical system that cannot be entirely accounted for by the mediation of

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any known physical source (p. 208). Such physical systems may include
living organisms, and so PK incorporates psi-mediated healing and hexing
as well. Parapsychologists also study other ostensibly paranormal or anomalous phenomena, some of which may have a psi component, and these
include near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, supposed pastlife recall, apparitions, hauntings, poltergeists (often considered to be a type
of PK), and mediumship (putative communication with the dead). The
region of overlap between anomalous phenomena, including psi, and ASC
falls within the remit of other aligned elds of research too, such as transpersonal psychology, which tends to focus more on subjective experience
than objective measurement and so is a healthy hermeneutic and normative
complement to parapsychologys positivist approach to this area of study.
This chapter considers a number of different ASC and their relationship to spontaneous or actively induced anomalous events, such as with
the attempted production of psi under laboratory conditions. Often, the
specic states themselves have not been clearly dened either phenomenonologically or physiologically, but rather only the induction procedure is
known, such as with those states possibly arising following meditation,
the ingestion of psychoactive substances, or hypnosis, if they do produce
ASC [see Cardena, Volume 1]. In some cases, however, the anomalous
experience is the state because the experience is dened by the phenomenological characteristics of the experience, such as with sleep paralysis
or near-death experiences, the latter of which, arguably, may occur even
in the absence of life-threatening circumstances (Greyson, 2000). Following the trend in the greater part of the extant experimental literature, and
because of the limitations of space, the present chapter focuses on the
induction procedures that have been attempted, (e.g., hypnosis) rather
than spontaneous states (e.g., near-death experiences).
One consideration is that those anomalous experiences occurring under
nonexperimental conditions cannot conclusively be considered to be genuinely as they seem. There may be any number of cognitive errors occurring
that cause the individual to misinterpret the event, be they caused by individual knowledge, beliefs, misjudgements of probability, misperception,
misremembering, confabulation, or the context of the situation (Pekala &
Cardena, 2000). Nevertheless, researchers should be wary of simply labelling as hallucination those perceptions in altered states that they do not
understand (Shanon, 2003). Further, those experiences occurring under
nonexperimental conditions offer an insight into the conditions under
which, for instance, genuine psi may occur. Studying nonexperimental
experiences also provides a naturalistic context in which to understand
these experiences and the inuence that altered states may have on them.

Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness

Such research has led to the development of laboratory studies designed to

maximise the detection of psi by mimicking these naturalistic circumstances
(Tart, 1977), thereby increasing the ecological validity of such research
(Roe, 2010). The following review considers the occurrence of anomalous
experiences and psi under both experimental and nonexperimental conditions and in various ASC, although the focus in parapsychology, at least,
has been primarily on the induction procedure, not the state. Indeed,
researchers often have dened the states, operationally, as the state of mind
that results from a specic procedure, and therefore somewhat
circularly (Roe, 2010).

Origins of ASC and Anomalous Experience

That anomalous experiences may be evolutionarily benecial 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 ssures or possibly via ingestion of psychoactive
plants of the Solanaceae family (Devereux, 2008). Certain psychoactive
plants have long been taken by indigenous peoples in a ritual context for
the express purpose of accessing altered states conducive to clairvoyance,
precognition, telepathy, out-of-body travel, psychic diagnosis, psychic
healing, and spirit communication. Archaeological evidence suggests that
such practices have existed the world over for millennia, incorporating
numerous plants and virtually every living culture ever studied anthropologically (Luke & Friedman, 2010) [see Winkelman, Volume 1]

Psychedelically Induced States

A psychedelic substance, as opposed to other psychoactive substances,
has been dened as that which, without causing physical addiction, craving, major physiological disturbances, delirium, disorientation, or amnesia,

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more or less reliably produces thought, mood, and perceptual changes

(Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1998, p. 9). The recent rediscovery and use of psychedelic substances in the developed world during the last century has generated numerous accounts in the literature of the spontaneous occurrence of
anomalous or ostensibly paranormal phenomena with the recreational,
clinical, and experimental use of these substances (Luke, 2008) [see various
chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume]. Most of the clinical observations come from psychedelic-assisted psychotherapeutic sessions rather
than from research designs, and at one time it was estimated that ESP occurs
with good supporting evidence in about 2% of such therapy sessions, which
is a considerably higher incidence than that reported from nonpsychedelic
psychotherapy (Luke & Friedman, 2010). A consistent trend in the literature indicates that anomalous experiences tend to occur far more with psychedelics than with other psychoactive substances. This nding also
appears to be rooted in the traditional divinatory and shamanic use of psychedelic plants reported in the historical, anthropological, and ethnobotanical record and is further echoed by several surveys, mostly conducted with
modern urbanites (Luke, 2008; Luke & Kittenis, 2005).
The surveys consistently indicate that those reporting anomalous experiences are signicantly more likely to have used psychedelic substances,
with more frequent use associated with a greater likelihood of an experience. Of those reporting the use of psychedelics, percentages for reported
psi experiences actually occurring under the inuence ranged from 18%
(psi experiences on mind-expanding drugs in India; Usha & Pasricha,
1989a, 1989b) up to 83% (telepathy experiences on cannabis in California;
Tart, 1993). The most common experiences were telepathy but also often
precognition. Perhaps surprisingly, only rarely were psychedelics found
to be related to the occurrence of psychokinesis, but they were cited as a
fairly common cause in out-of-body experiences, a phenomenon that
seems to occur with most every substance of this type, but particularly with
dissociative drugs such as the NMDA-antagonist ketamine. Other reported
experiences include entity encounters, apparitions, mediumship, seeing
auras, NDEs, interspecies communication, alien abductions, early life, past
life, genetic, ancestral, and phylogenic experiences, and most every other
type of anomalous experience (Grof, 2009; Luke & Kittenis, 2005).
Furthermore, a weak but consistent relationship was also found
between the reported use of psychedelics, paranormal experiences, and
kundalini experiences, possibly indicating that endogenous psychedelics
such as N,N-dimethyltryptmine (DMT) have a role to play in the spontaneous occurrence of both types of experience (Luke, 2008).

Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness

Consistent, albeit weak, correlations between the use of psychedelics

and both the belief in the paranormal and the inverse fear of the paranormal
were also found. The relationship with paranormal experiences, belief, and
fearlessness tended to be either greatly reduced or reversed with respect to
the nonpsychedelic substances of cocaine, heroin, and alcohol, supporting
the same trend in individual reports. That there is virtually no recorded
folkloric use of these nonpsychedelic substances for psychic purposes compared to the widespread shamanic use of psychedelic substances is further
testament to the unique power of this class of drugs for inducing subjective
paranormal experiences at the very least (Luke & Kittenis, 2005).
Regrettably, very little of the survey research has considered the seemingly paranormal phenomenology of differing drugs but instead has just
lumped together psychedelic drugs as a whole, obscuring large differences
in neurobiological action. Subsequently, a taxonomic approach would be
a welcome advance (Cardena, 2009) in that it would classify how different
substances have a tendency to give rise to particular types of anomalous
experience. For instance, in one study (Luke & Kittenis, 2005) psilocybinand/or psilocin-containing mushrooms were shown to primarily give rise
to plant entity encounter experiences whereas ketamine gave rise to OBEs,
though such differences may be due to psychocultural as well as neurobiological inuences. However, this nomothetic method covers only a fraction
of the phenomenological terrain required to map the states and experiences
that these substances can induce. With such a limited amount of research
actually having been conducted here, the lack of phenomenological mapping of the individual states in relation to the particular anomalous experiences is clearly a major limitation, both with psychedelics and with other
induction procedures, and this is a necessary direction for future research
(Cardena, 2009).
Although it is recognized that subjective reports are not scientically
rigorous in establishing the veridical nature of these experiences, they
enhance our understanding and offer a rich phenomenological spectrum
of evidence around which to orient further research. Furthermore, the
similarity in reports between those occurring spontaneously in exploratory, therapeutic, and accidental contexts and those induced intentionally
in the traditional ritual context gives further credence to the shamanic use
of these substances for paranormal purposes.
With regard to controlled research on the efcacy of psychedelics to
induce ESP, there have been only 17 separately published experimental
projects that have been conducted, primarily with LSD or psilocybin, but
also with mescaline, marijuana, Amanita muscaria, and, recently, ayahuasca.

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The results of these experiments, which began in the 1950s, varied in their
degree of success, most likely in relation to the methodology involved (for a
review, see Luke, 2008). The most successful experiments tended to utilize
participants experienced with the use of psychedelics and also utilized freeresponse testing procedures with open-ended mentation regarding their
internal state rather than forced-choice guessing scenarios that tend to be
repetitive and thus rather boring under the inuence. In retrospect, it is
easy to see how the more navely 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 rst trip.
Overall, few conclusions can be drawn concerning the induction of
genuine psi with psychedelics because of the lack of systematically controlled experiments, although, at best, the results suggest a promising line
of enquiry. Furthermore, this approach is useful for understanding the
neurobiological processes that may be at work during anomalous experiences, whether they are genuinely paranormal or not. Indeed, there exist
some well-evidenced and -reasoned conjectures about the role of psychedelic tryptamines, beta-carbolines, and NMDA-antagonists in the function
of OBEs, NDEs, and apparent psi experiences (Luke & Friedman, 2010).
Nevertheless, the neurochemical changes need to be mapped to the phenomenology of the experience (the state) and the personality traits of the
individual before any real headway can be made, though this may be premature given the dearth of research in recent years.

Sleep States
Although psychedelically induced states in humans vary considerably
and have been neglected as an area of study since the late 1960s, the
psychophysiology of sleep states has been more thoroughly explored and
these states are seemingly more predictable in form . Furthermore, the differing states produced, often relating to the different stages of sleep, are
more clearly identied 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

specically ESP, apparitions, mediumship, OBEs, past life visions, and entity
encounters (Sherwood, 2002). Sleep paralysis, a fairly common sleep disorder whereby people believe themselves to be awake but unable to move, also
tends to occur during hypnagogia at least once in the life of 40 to 50% of normal people. In addition to the usual anomalous experiences occurring during
hypnagogia, sleep paralysis has been associated with psychokinetic and neardeath experiences (Sherwood, 2002).
Evaluating the occurrence of psi phenomena, Sherwood (2002) considers that hypnagogia may be both conducive to anomalous experiences
and misinterpreted as involving paranormal processes or agencies. There
have been only a handful of experiments exploring the production of psi
in these states, yet the results were positive and possibly better than dream
states for inducing psi in the laboratory (Sherwood, 2002). Nevertheless,
much further research in this area is required.
Moving into the less ambiguous middle sleep stages, much has been
done to identify their characteristics. Although it was once considered that
dreams almost only occur in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, it is now
known from naturalistic studies that non-REM sleep also produces dreams
almost as often as during REM, although the dreams tend to be qualitatively different (e.g., Stickgold, Pace-Schott, & Hobson, 1994). In a review
of case collections of independently veried 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 signicantly 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 ltered so that only those cases that have independent
verication have been included. Nevertheless, corroboration does not negate the possibility that the dreams are just unlikely chance occurrences.
However, Van de Castle (1977) notes that psychic dreams are frequently

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unusually vivid and intense, though clearly this does not make them unarguably genuine. Fortunately, there have been a host of experimental
approaches to researching psychic dreaming since Wesermans (1819)
apparently partially successful attempt to induce specic dream images
in people nave 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 percipients
sleep stages. Once the percipient was asleep, a target image was selected
using a randomized process in a distant room from the percipient, and a
sender would concentrate on psychically transmitting the image to the
percipient in the sound-proof room. Percipients were woken during each
REM sleep period and then, under the free-response design, described
their dreams in as much detail as possible, each of which was recorded.
In the morning, the percipients would typically judge 8 or 12 art prints,
one of which was a duplicate of the target, and they would select the one
that most resembled their dreams of the previous night. Several independent judges would also be sent the dream transcripts and images and
would rank them for correspondence. Rank scores were reduced to binary
hits or misses (Van de Castle, 1977).
The Maimonides program produced more than 50 research articles,
condensed for a popular book (Ullman, Kripnner, & Vaughan, 2002),
and the entire research output has been independently reviewed by several
researchers (Radin, 1997; Sherwood & Roe, 2003; Van de Castle, 1977)
with positive conclusions. Overall, the 15 studies returned a combined
hit rate of 63% compared to the chance rate of 50%, which, with more
than 300 trials, was highly signicant (r .33, p .13 107; Radin,
1997). Despite some contentions from critics, which were successfully
rebutted, no plausible counterexplanations exist for the results (Roe,
2010; Sherwood & Roe, 2003). However, few exact replications have been
attempted because of a lack among later researchers of the resources that
were available to the Maimonides team. Alternatively, a number of controlled but simplied conceptual replications have been conducted without EEG monitoring by having percipients dream at home. These later
studies also incorporate clairvoyance designs, without a sender, and precognition designs, where the target is selected after the judging procedure.
In a review of 21 studies since 1977, the combined results of more than 400
trials were positive overall but with a smaller effect size (r .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

successful than the later studies. Aside from waking up percipients during
REM, participants in the Maimonides experiments had been previously
screened for ability, whereas those in later studies were unselected. The
laboratory environment was also suspected to provide a stronger motivational factor for success (Roe, 2010). Overall, however, the Maimonides
and post-Maimonides dream ESP research has demonstrated the weak
but consistent ability of individuals to demonstrate psi during dreaming.

Hypnotically Induced States

Even though Mesmers methods differed considerably from those used
in hypnosis currently (Cardena, 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
Cardena & Alvarado, Volume 1]. Early reports included clairvoyance, distant
medical diagnoses, and mediumistic communication with the dead; indeed,
psi phenomena were once regarded as criteria of deep trance (Honorton,
1974). More recent surveys typically indicate that reported anomalous experience correlates with hypnotizability (Stokes, 1997), although dissociative
ability appears to be more important (Pekala, Kumar & Mercano, 1995).
Highly hypnotizable participants in a deep hypnotic state report, without
any suggestions, spontaneous experiences similar in nature to aspects of the
NDE and OBE, such as experiencing a bright light, a sense of pervading
well-being, and oating out of the body (Cardena, 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 awed 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 signicant (z 8.77), whereas the comparison condition was not
(z .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 awed
and that a couple of experimenters who conducted multiple studies were
responsible for most of the successful results. Furthermore, much of the
difference in performance was caused by the comparison condition exhibiting psi missingthe selection of the correct target image at signicantly

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below-chance expectationpossibly indicating that factors other than

hypnosis were causing the psi effect (Stanford & Stein, 1994). One explanation of the psi-missing effect and the differences across experimenters is that
of an experimenter psi effect, as occurs in other areas of psi research,
although this hypothesis needs formal testing (Cardena, 2010). Further, if
the experimental difference is assumed to be caused by the hypnotic induction, questions still remain as to whether the apparent ESP performance
increase is caused by general induction factors (e.g., relaxation) or to statetrait interactions, such as the hypnotic context and hypnotizability (Cardena,
2010).

Meditation
Reaching back before Mesmer to antiquity, Patanjalis Yoga Sutras
describe how psychic powers, called Siddhis, are a common side effect of
yoga but a distraction on the path to liberation. Such practices therefore
drew the attention of parapsychologists during the early 1970s (e.g., Honorton, 1974). Somewhat supporting Patanjalis claims, a random survey found
that the practice of meditation was signicantly associated with reports of
OBEs, apparitions, and aura vision (Palmer, 1979). As discussed, surveys
have also produced consistent correlations between the report of anomalous
phenomena generally and kundalini-type experiences, which constitute a
syndrome of anomalous phenomena that may occur through the practice
of yoga or spontaneously (Luke, 2008). Theorizing why psi might be associated with meditation and other ASC, Honorton (1974) proposed the process of relaxation, the passive state of mind, the inward turning of
attention, and an openness to others as psi-conducive. Consequently,
some researchers turned their attention toward meditation of all varieties
and conducted controlled psi experiments.
Honorton (1977) reviewed 16 studies testing either ESP or PK published during the period between 1970 and 1976 and found 9 of these
to be independently signicant, with all studies combined being highly
signicant also (p 6 10 12). Honortons ndings in support of the
psi-conducive nature of meditation were later conrmed with a review of
six ESP studies conducted between 1978 and 1992, four of which were
signicantly positive (Schmeidler, 1994). Reviewing the eight studies published between 1971 and 1988 investigating PKwhereby psi is indicated
by signicantly improbable deviations in random event generator (REG)
output during test periods7 of the studies produced positive effects,
typically signicantly different than control conditions (Braud, 1990).
This trend of a positive relationship between meditation, sometimes tested

Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness

in groups, and signicant RNG deviations has continued in recent experiments (e.g., Ivtzan, 2008; Nelson et al., 1996, 1998; Radin, Rebman, &
Cross, 1996; Radin et al., 2008; Rowe, 1998). However, Braud (1990)
notes that the earlier methodologies did not allow for the ultimate discernment of the appropriate psi-conducive factor, whether it was prior meditation history, the immediate effects of the meditation session, the
meditators personality and reasons for meditating in the rst place, or a
combination of these factors.
Addressing these limitations to some degree, during the early 1990s, a
new test paradigm termed the attention focusing facilitation experiment
(AFFE) received repeated independent investigation in a series of 12 conceptually identical studies conducted between 1993 and 2006. The protocol
assesses the ability of one meditator to assist a distant meditator in focusing
attention on a candle by monitoring the periods in which the distant meditators indicated with a button press their awareness of being distracted. A
meta-analysis of the 12 studies revealed a small but highly signicant distant
facilitation effect (d .11, p .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 ndings, whether either the helper or helpee meditators were actually in an altered state is unknown, and the ndings might
be at best considered as the result of having meditated, rather than as a consequence of being in a meditative state (Roe, 2010). Further, the actual term
meditation was used in its loosest denition in the AFFE studies, as it
merely involved maintaining ones 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 signicant effect overall, however, is that years of
meditation correlates positively with psi performance (Roney-Dougal &
Solfvin, 2006; Roney-Dougal, Solfvin, & Fox, 2008), with an apparent

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shift in scores occurring after about 15 to 20 years of concerted meditation

(Luke, 2009).

Ganzfeld Induction
Growing out of observations that ASC and perhaps even just relaxation
are conducive to psi, a new methodology was adopted in the early 1970s
to reduce the percipients sensory input so that attention could be turned
inward to mental content and imagery. The technique, called ganzfeld
(meaning whole eld), involves covering the eyes of the percipients with
half ping-pong balls to diffuse the red light being used. White or pink
noise is played through headphones and the percipients rest in a comfortable chair and describe their imagery into a microphone, often after a
period of systematic relaxation. The reduced and homogenized sensory
input was thought to induce sensory hunger and be conducive to the
ow of spontaneous creative ideation and imagery (Roe, 2010). Typically,
while the percipients mentation was being recorded, a sender in a remote
location would be attempting to psychically transmit a particular image or
lm clip to them, and after the session, the mentation would be blind
judged on its similarity to the target and three decoys.
Between 1974 and 2003, there were more than 100 formal ganzfeld
experiments performed at numerous laboratories, and various metaanalyses of those have been conducted, though few methodologies in parapsychology have caused as much controversy (Palmer, 2003). The ongoing
debate concerning the outcome of the ganzfeld studies is complex and will
be only very briey summarized here. The original meta-analysis controversy centered on the methodology being used up until the mid-1980s,
the outcome of which greatly improved the research protocol and resulted
in the development of an artifact-free automated technique termed the
auto-ganzfeld (Hyman & Honorton, 1986). The following auto-ganzfeld
meta-analysis a few years later produced positive and highly signicant
results overall (Bem & Honorton, 1994), which satised 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 signicant 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

explored the use of auditory targets instead of the standard visual ones.
Indeed, some of the studies included in the Milton and Wiseman metaanalysis were specically designed to destroy test the ganzfeld protocol
and had predicted impoverished results through the negative manipulation of salient variables, and so arguably these should not have been
included in the meta-analysis (Roe, 2010). In response to this, a number
of independent judges were asked to rate the Milton and Wiseman metaanalysis studies for standardness as ganzfeld studies, revealing a signicant positive correlation between study standardness and degree of success (Bem, Palmer, & Broughton, 2001). Further, when those studies
rated below the mean on standardness were excluded, the meta-analysis
once again became highly signicant. In addition, a further 10 studies
have been published during the period between 2000 and 2004 that provide a combined positive hit rate that is marginally signicant (Roe, 2010).
Clearly, although the ganzfeld effect is detectable and arguably replicable,
it is barely large enough to consistently deect critical accusations of nonrepeatability, and so the debate continues.
The latest addition to this debate sheds some light on the utility of the
ganzfeld procedure in comparison to other ASC induction procedures.
Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio (2010) conducted a meta-analysis comparing homogenous free-response ESP studies published between 1992 and
2008, nding that the combined effect of the 29 ganzfeld studies from that
period was indeed signicant (Stouffer Z 5.48, p 2.13 108) 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 3.35, p 2.08 104). However,
the difference between the ganzfeld and other ASC induction procedure
studies was not signicant. Nevertheless, compared to the combination
of 14 standard non-ASC free response studies (Stouffer Z 2.29,
p .989), the ganzfeld database was signicantly more effective in eliciting psi, although the ASC database was not, indicating that the ganzfeld
process at least is more psi conducive than normal waking consciousness.
Further, Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio (2010) report a highly signicant
meta-analysis statistic for all the108 published ganzfeld studies up to
2008 (Stouffer Z 8.31, p < 1016), perhaps afrming the effectiveness
of ganzfeld psi for the time being.
One concern salient to the current chapter is that few of the ganzfeld
studies have investigated the actual state of the percipient following induction, and it was generally assumed that the procedure generated a state
comparable to the dreamlike hypnagogia (Roe, 2010). However, when
the brain state of the ganzfeld was explored using EEG, it was found that

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it most resembled a relaxed waking state, equivalent to an increase in

internal absorption (Wackermann et al., 2002). There were also wide
differences among individuals, indicating that no one homogenous state
was achieved with the technique. Nevertheless, the ganzfeld procedures
in these EEG studies were not identical to typical sessions, lacking the initial systematic relaxation exercise and possibly not allowing enough time
for habituation to the discomfort of wearing EEG electrodes (Parker,
2005).
Fortunately, a few ganzfeld studies have investigated the specic phenomenological characteristics associated with ESP scoring, nding signicant positive relationships with the loss of body awareness and the
spontaneity of imagery in particular. A positive relationship with ESP
was also found with the level of relaxation, prevalence of disconnected
thought, amount of regressive imagery, dream likeness of the mentation,
bizarreness of mental activity, and the abundance and clarity of the visual
imagery (Alvarado, 1998). These features certainly share some of the same
phenomenological topography as hypnagogia and other altered states;
however, oppositely, the perception of slowed time and changes in body
image were negatively related to ESP scores (Alvarado, 1998). This line
of investigation, pursuing the phenomenological correlates of ESP, provides the basis for a richer understanding of altered states and psi, though
the greatest advances are likely to come through the additional consideration of traits, as well as states, and how they interact as potentially psiconducive factors (Cardena, 2009).

States and Traits

Positive relationships have been found between the report of spontaneous anomalous experiences and several trait variables, such as openness to
experience, schizotypy, and transliminality (Alvarado, 1998; Thalbourne
& Maltby, 2008), and hypnotizability, dissociation, and perhaps the trait
of self-transcendence (Cardena & Terhune, 2008). Similarly, certain personality types have been demonstrated to fare better in the ganzfeld, such
as those who are high in creativity, extraversion, and positive schizotypy
(Simmonds-Moore & Holt, 2007). The notion of boundary thinness,
dened as an increased connectivity within neural and cognitive systems,
has been proposed as an umbrella term for the anomaly-prone personality trait cluster of transliminality, temporal lobe lability, boundary thinness, and positive schizotypy (Simmonds-Moore, in press). Furthermore,
under this rubric, boundary thinness might as also be considered as a state

Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness

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 (Cardena, 2009; SimmondsMoore, in press; Simmonds-Moore & Holt, 2007). Indeed, one of the
explanations offered for the different outcomes in many psi studies is the
possible variety in optimal psi-conducive interactions between states and
traits, and so interactionism provides a more sophisticated avenue of
enquiry than simply considering either states or traits alone. However,
exploratory research looking at the interaction between ganzfeld/nonganzfeld and schizotypy subtypes in terms of psi performance (SimmondsMoore & Holt, 2007), for instance, has not been successful in discerning
differences. This approach may be become more illuminating in the
future, but such complex approaches to phenomena with as small an
effect size as laboratory ESP may be too ambitious at the present time without larger-scale studies.

Summary and Conclusion

Clearly there are a number of states and induction methods that have
not been considered here that also deserve attention, though they are
beyond the scope of this brief review. A longer list would, of course,
include phenomena such as nonpsychedelic shamanic inductions (Krippner, 2005; Luke, 2010), mediumistic states (Gauld, 1982), spirit possession states (Stevenson, 1995), near-death states (Greyson, 2000), out-ofbody experiences (Alvarado, 2000), sleep-deprived or fatigued states,
and a variety of other nonordinary experiences (Kelly & Locke, 2009).
However, while such states may be conducive to anomalous experiences, there has been a very limited consideration of their capacity to demonstrate testable phenomena, such as psi, under controlled conditions.
In consideration of the techniques that are covered in this chapter, it
would appear that such induction methods are conducive, at the very
least, to a variety of anomalous experiences. Furthermore, most of these
induction methods, with the exception of the poorly studied psychedelic
substances, have been demonstrated to produce psi under controlled laboratory conditions beyond chance expectation. Nevertheless, only the
hypnosis research has considered the induction procedure in relationship
to an ordinary state control condition in sufcient quantity to yield a metaanalysis, the results of which indicate the apparent advantage of hypnosis,
but there is a concern that this nding is partly caused by below-chance
scoring in the control condition, which may be attributable to the effect

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of the experimenters own psi on the data. Similarly, comparing the results
of a meta-analysis of ordinary-state free-response ESP studies with the signicant auto-ganzfeld meta-analysis, the ganzfeld effect size was superior
to that of the non-ASC studies, but both signicantly (Storm et al., 2010)
and not signicantly so (Milton, 1997; but see Storm et al., 2010). Such
ndings may be explainable by the small scale of the results being
compared, but they are still somewhat discouraging for the hypothesis
that ASC, other than the ganzfeld, are more conducive to psi, at least in
the laboratory.
Nevertheless, some researchers remain optimistic about the relationship of ASC to ESP and indicate that such research would benet hugely
from procedures that assess the degree to which the percipient is actually
in an altered state (Cardena, 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 conation of states with induction procedures, illdened terminology, and the overlooking of individual differences and
the mutability of altered states (Carden a, 2009). Potentially, however,
the study of psi and altered states can bear much fruit in helping us to
better understand the nature of both anomalous phenomena and ASC,
and therefore consciousness itself. Indeed, a good deal of the research on
ASC thus far has addressed ostensible anomalous events and/or has been
conducted by parapsychologists. The implications of this research for consciousness studies per se are potentially enormous, as the ndings frequently challenge the materialist assumptions regarding the fundamental
nature of the relationship between brain and mind. It is here, in the
research at the limits of consciousness, that the most profound questions
concerning ontology are being asked.

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About the Editors

ETZEL CARDENA, 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 Scientic Evidence, to
which Science News dedicated a cover story. His webpage is at http://
cercaplund.blogspot.com/2010/01/about-cercap.html.
MICHAEL WINKELMAN, M.P.H., Ph.D., received his doctorate from the
School of Social Sciences, University of California Irvine, in 1985. Among
his publications are Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness
and Healing (2010), Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Approach to Religion (with John Baker, 2008), and Psychedelic Medicine (edited with Tom
Roberts, 2007). He retired from the School of Human Evolution and
Social Change, Arizona State University, in 2009 and currently lives in
the central highlands of Brazil, where he is developing permaculturebased intentional communities.

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 Associations Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology as well as the Award
of Distinguished Contributions for Professional Hypnosis from the Society
of Psychological Hypnosis. In 2010, three of his co-edited books were published: Perchance to Dream: The Frontiers of Dream Psychology; Mysterious
Minds: The Neurobiology of Mediums, Mystics, and Other Remarkable People;
and Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion. In
2010, an updated edition of his co-authored book Haunted by Combat:
Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, was published. Dr. Krippner is a past
president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (from
which he received its Lifetime Achievement award) and the Parapsychological Association (which gave him its Outstanding Career Award).
Robert Turner worked on MRI with Peter Manseld at the University of
Nottingham, 19841988. Between 1988 and 1993, at the NIH he developed
the neuroscience techniques of diffusion weighted MRI and BOLD functional
MRI. In 1994 he moved to London as cofounder of the Functional Imaging
Laboratory. In 2006 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive
and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, as Director of Neurophysics.
Max Velmans is currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths,
University of London and has been involved in consciousness studies for
around 30 years. His main research focus is integrating work on the philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology of consciousness,
and he has around 100 publications in this area. His book Understanding

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 20042006, Chair of
the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British
Psychological Society.

About the Contributors

Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., is currently associate researcher at the Universite

de Montreal (Departments of Psychology and Radiology, Neuroscience
Research Center). He is the author of more than 100 publications in
neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. His groundbreaking work on
the neurobiology of mystical experience has received international media
coverage.
Professor Olaf Blanke is director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Ecole Polytechnique Federade de Lausanne.
Andrea E. Blatter, 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 fur 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 rst clinical
study of ayahuasca. He also identied yuremamine, a novel DMT substrate, in Mimosa bark (2005).
Benjamin R. Chemel, Ph.D., is a botanist with a doctorate in medicinal
chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Purdue University. His doctoral research employed LSD and other ergolines to explore the structural
requirements of D1 dopamine receptor ligands in order to guide the
design of novel therapeutics.
Sebastian Dieguez has studied psychology at the University of Geneva,
Switzerland. He specialized in cognitive neuroscience and worked as a

380

About the Contributors

clinical neuropsychologist before joining the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute of the Lausanne Technological Institute
(EPFL), where he is currently completing his Ph.D. in neuroscience.
Jorg C. Fachner, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the Finnish Centre of
Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at University of Jyvaskyla,
Finland. Dr. Fachner has authored a doctoral thesis (2001) on cannabis,
EEG, and music perception, and various publications on music and
altered states, music therapy, addictions, drug culture, and the social
pharmacology of music.
Cheryl Fracasso, M.S., is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology
at Saybrook University. She serves as faculty member at the University of
Phoenix, research assistant at Saybrook University for Stanley Krippner,
and associate managing editor with the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies.
Pehr Granqvist got his Ph.D. from Uppsala University, 2002, and is an
associate professor in developmental psychology at Stockholm University,
Sweden. His research has applied attachment theory to the psychology of
religion. For example, he has suggested that a propensity for experiencing
absorption mediates a relation between disorganized attachment and
certain spiritual experiences.
Gregory Holler, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in psychology from Saybrook
University in 2005. His background and research interests are in human
sexuality. He was trained as a marriage and family therapist. Dr. Holler
works as a senior clinician and behavior consultant in San Francisco, CA.
Andrzej Kokoszka, M.D., Ph.D., is professor of psychiatry, Head of the II
Department of Psychiatry, Medical University of Warsaw, Poland, CBT
therapist, group analyst, psychologist, and professor at the Warsaw School
of Social Sciences and Humanities. He wrote a series of articles on consciousness, reformulated in the book States of Consciousness: Models for
Psychology and Psychotherapy.
Steven Laureys, M.D., Ph.D., heads the Coma Science Group, www
.comascience.org, Department of Neurology and Cyclotron Research
Center of the University and University Hospital of Lie`ge, Belgium. He is
a senior research associate at the Belgian National Fund of Scientic
Research and invited professor at the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences.

About the Contributors

David Luke, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of

Greenwich, London, and currently also the president of the Parapsychological Association. He has studied ostensibly paranormal phenomena
and techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India,
from the perspective of scientists, shamans, and Shivaites.
David Lukoff, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and a licensed psychologist in California. He is author
of 80 articles and chapters on spiritual issues and mental health and helped
develop the DSM-IV category of Religious or Spiritual Problem.
Dennis J. McKenna is currently an assistant professor in the Center for
Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. His research has
focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology
and plant hallucinogens. He has recently completed a 4-year project investigating Amazonian ethnomedicines as potential treatments for cognitive
disorders.
Michael Maliszewski, Ph.D., received his degree from the University of
Chicago. He is currently afliated with Massachusetts General Hospital
and Harvard Medical School. He developed and directed the worlds largest behavioral medicine program in Chicago for nearly a decade and has
been involved in consciousness research for more than 40 years.
Aaron L. Mishara serves as clinical faculty at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. He researches and publishes on altered states of consciousness in both hypnagogic hallucinations and neuropsychiatric
disorders, including schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. At
the Yale Whitney Humanities Center, he codirects working groups on the
interdisciplinary study of literature, embodied cognition, and neuroscience.
Webpage: http://www.thechicagoschool.edu/content.cfm/faculty_prole
_page_details?facultyID=480.
Zevic Mishor grew up in both Australia and Israel, completing an undergraduate degree (physiology and psychology) and two masters degrees
(neuroscience and social anthropology) at the University of Oxford. In
2011 he will begin an anthropology Ph.D. at Sydney University, researching shamanism amongst the Shipibo peoples of northern Peru.
David E. Nichols, Ph.D., is the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology and a Distinguished Professor of

381

382

About the Contributors

Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Purdue University.

He is a prolic researcher of psychoactive chemicals and is considered
one of the worlds top authorities on the medicinal chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelics.
Quentin Noirhomme is a researcher at the Coma Science Group, Cyclotron Research Centre and Neurology department, University and University Hospital of Lie`ge. His work focus is on developing new diagnosis
and prognosis tools for patients in altered states of consciousness.
Kenneth S. Pope, Ph.D., ABPP, is a licensed psychologist. A Fellow of the
Association for Scientic Psychology, he provides free psychology
resources at kspope.com, free disability resources at kpope.com, and
information on special-needs dogs and cats at kenpope.com. His most
recent book is Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Practical Guide,
4th Edition (with Melba Vasquez).
David E. Presti is a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, where he has taught in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
for 20 years. He also teaches neuroscience to Tibetan monks in India in a
program of study inspired by the Dalai Lama.
Fred Previc, Ph.D., is a lecturer at Texas A&M San Antonio and a consultant for Wyle, Inc. For more than 25 years, he performed research with
the Air Force Research Laboratory and various contractors in San Antonio.
His Ph.D. is in experimental psychology and his expertise is primarily in
cognitive neuroscience, human factors, and aviation psychology.
Sophie Reijman is doing a research master in developmental psychopathology at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, after earlier studies
at the University of Valencia, Spain. She has collaborated in several investigations on attachment in early childhood as well as adult attachment representations, a topic on which she continues to work, and is co-author of
several publications and presentations.
Stacy B. Schaefer, professor of anthropology at California State University,
Chico, has conducted ethnographic research among Huichol Indians in
Mexico since 1977. She co-edited, with Dr. Peter Furst, People of the
Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion and Survival (University of New
Mexico Press, 1996), and is author of To Think With a Good Heart: Wixarika,
Women, Weavers and Shamans (University of Utah Press, 2002).

About the Contributors

Michael A. Schwartz, M.D., is clinical professor, Texas A&M Health

Science Center, College of Medicine, staff psychiatrist at Austin State Hospital, Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association,
Founding President of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy
and Psychiatry, and a recipient of the Dr. Margrit Egner 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.

383

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Index

(findicates a gure; n indicates a note;

t indicates a table)
AA/NAC (Alcoholics Anonymous/Native
American Church), addiction
program, 173
Abram, D., 338
Absence seizures, 264f, 269
Acetylcholine, 30; and nicotine, 32
Achterberg, J. 330, 333
Activation, AIM model of consciousness, 7
Addiction, 33, 170; AA model, 173;
constructions of, 16971; contracted
state of consciousness, 176, 183; and
drug consumption, 16869;
endogenous reward system, 18081;
medical model, 17071; psychedelics
treatment, 11415, 153, 176, 177;
sensitization neurochemistry, 18182;
socio-cultural learning, 182
Adjustment Disorder (DSM-IV),
NDEs, 308
Adolescent cognitive development,
22326
Adulthood cognitive development, 226
Advanced sleep phase syndrome
(ASPS), 16
Aghajanian, G. K., 132
AIM (activation/information/modulation)
model of consciousness, sleep/wake
cycle, 67
Akinetic mutism, 273

Alcohol, sedative-hypnotic, 31
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), alteration of
consciousness approach, 173
Alcorta, C. S., 225
Alibi (Morante), 279
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, 245
Alien abduction experiences (AAEs), 293,
31011
Allocentric perspective, 346
Alloesthesia, 244
a1-adrenergic receptor sites, 135
Alterations in mood, 29091
Alterations in sense of agency, 289
Alterations in sense of attribution, 290
Alterations in sense of self, 28890
Altered states of consciousness (ASC):
adolescent risky behavior, 223;
biological rhythm impact, 8; and bodily
self, 23740; and development,
21112; denition, 328; dissociation,
21819; and drug consumption,
16768; and emotions, 27982; and
ESP, 355, 370; experiences of, 328;
genetic predisposition, 212; and
healing, 32731; late adulthood, 228;
and LSD, 121, 123; nonpathological,
28384, 285t86t; orgasm as, 19495;
pathological, 26975, 285t86t; and
peyote, 147, 149; pharmacological,
26768; physiological, 26567; and
psychopathology, 28294, 285t86t;
range, 43; reward system, 17779; in

386

Index
sexual activity, 19192; stability, 34;
subjective reections, 128; therapeutic
recommendations, 294, 295; timelimited, 174; young adults, 226
Altered states of consciousness with
distorted reality (ASCDRs): differences,
4647; and dopamine, 45, 46, 48;
range, 4344
Altered structure of experience,
in VSEs, 316
Alternations in perception, 29193
Alvarado, C. S., 361, 363, 368
Amaritia muscaria, 51
American Psychiatric Association, on
possession trance, 313
Amygdala, glutamate, 137; and olfactory
information, 152
Anadenanthera: leaves, 86, 87t, 88t, 93,
109, 111; snuff, 33, 10910
Anesthetics, and bodily
consciousness, 253
Anhedonia, 291
Anomalous experiences, 35657; history,
357; and sleep, 36063; trait variables,
36869. See also Extrasensory
perception, Parapsychology, Psi
phenomena
Anosognosia, 241, 245, 246
Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), in
meditation, 333, 334
Anticholinergic drugs, in shamanistic
practice, 51
Anticipation of reward, and
dopamine, 180
Apallic syndrome, 272
Aperspektivitat, loss of perspective, 342, 343
Areca nut, 32
Asomatoscopy, 245
Aspen Neurobehavioral Conference
Workgroup, 273
Assagioli, Roberto, 314
Atropine: in shamanistic practice, 51; in
South American Solanaceae, 112
Attachment: development infancy, 215;
disorganized, 218
Attention control, in meditation, 331
Attention focusing facilitation experiment
(AFFE), psi effects, 365

Attention shifting, infancy, 215

Auto-ganzfeld, 366
Autogenic training, information inow
limitation, 14
Autoscopy, 249, 288, 289
Avadhuti, 199
Awareness: consciousness content, 264f;
internal self/external sensory, 264,
267f; regions, neuroimaging studies,
267f, 275
Axelrod, Julius, 90t
Ayahuasca, 88t, 92, 103, 108; in alcohol
and drug addiction treatment, 11314;
brew preparation, 11012; current
applications and uses, 11112;
experience, 96; healing use, 112;
modern analogues, 114; syncretic sects,
11213
Ayahuasca tourism, 90t, 113
Ayahuasqueros, 110
Azari, N. P., 69, 70
Baars, Bernard, 280
Banisteriopsis caapi, 88t, 91, 101; harmala
alkaloids, 103
Barbiturates, sedative-hypnotic, 31
Barnhouse, R. T., 318
Barquinha, Ayahuasca sect, 88t, 112
Barrel cactus, 155 n.4
Basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC):
consciousness, 1112; protective
mechanisms, 1215
Beique, J. C., 133
Belonging, sense of, 329, 338
Belz, M., 295
Benham, G., 336
Bentall, R. P., 292
Bereavement (DSM-IV), normal
reaction, 317
Bergson, Henri, 77
Beta state, typical waking in mammals, 43
Betel nut (Areca seed), 32
Bharati, A., 198
Bigwood, Jeremy, 90t, 102
Biological rhythms, 4; disturbances,
1516
Bodily consciousness: and ASC, 23740,
288; and drugs, 25253; experimental

387

Index
procedures, 25354; in hypnosis,
25152; in mystical states, 251;
near-death-experiences, 250;
neurological disorders, 24049;
out-of-body experience, 24950;
and parietal lobe, 74
Body armoring, Reich, 193
Body schema; in hypnosis and meditation,
335; vs. body image, 344 n.2, 34445
BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent)
signal changes, 71, 72, 74
Borderline personality disorders,
emotional shifts, 29394
Boundary thinness, 36869
Bowlby, J., 218
Brain: complexity, 25; signaling structure,
25, 26f
Brain death, 27071
Brain imaging studies: conscious
awareness of emotion, 7374; future
directions, 7779; positive emotions,
7273; religious experience, 6972
Brain-mind connection, chemical nature,
25, 36
Brain waves, sleep cycles, 6f
Braver, T. S., 334
Breathing control, in meditation, 331
Breuer, J., 219
Brief Psychotic Disorder (DSM-IV-TR),
VSEs, 316
Buchbinder, J., 315, 316
Bufotenine (5-hydroxy-DMT): chemical
structure, 99t; endogenous, 85,
90t, 94, 101
Burroughs, William, 169 n.1
Caffeine, stimulant, 3031
Cakras, 198
Calabrese, Joseph, 176, 177
Campbell, Joseph, 303
Cannabinoids, 32; and dopamine, 48
Caplan, M., 311
Cardena, Etzel, 149, 312, 337,
338, 33940
Caregiver, source of childs stress, 219
Carlson, E. A., 218
Carmelite nuns, brain imaging
participation, 7172, 74

Cave paintings, shamanistic themes, 56

Cerebral cortex, body schema, 241
Changa, smoking, 113
Channeling, 290
Charles Bonnet syndrome, visual loss, 47
Chemical synapses, 25, 26f
Chemical synapses, signaling activity,
2728
Chisea, A., 334
Christians in a Charismatic/Pentecostal
tradition, brain imaging
participation, 71
Chronobiology, 4
Circadian biological rhythm, 4, 5;
deregulation disturbances, 1516
Clapton, Eric, 169 n.1
Clarke, I., 303
Classic anesthetic agents, 26768
Coca plant, stimulant, 31
Cognitive abilities, and dopamine, 44
Cohoba snuff, 86, 108
Coles, R., 220
Collective ingestion, 176
Coma, 264, 271; awareness in, 27475
Coma vigil, 272
Common sense, 329, 330
Compartmentalization, 218
Complex partial seizures, 270
Compulsive repetition, 175
Conrmation bias, normal cognition, 316
Conscious hemiasomatognosia, 245
Consciousness: biologically produced vs.
induced states, 1011; dened, 21;
infant and toddler, 213; levels of, 264f;
neuropharmacology of, 13338;
subjective rst-person experience,
263; subjectivity, 3738; and
thalamocortical system, 127;
thalamo-cortical frontoparietal
network, 267f, 276
Context-independent drugs, and
addiction, 181
Contextual bonding and assessment, and
addiction, 181
Cortical connectivity, 34041
Cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC)
feedback loops, 127
Cortisol, circadian rhythm inuence, 5

388

Index
Cotard syndrome, 288
Coulson, Sheila, 55 n.1
Cousins, W. E., 337
Craving, 171
Creativity-related states, young
adulthood, 226
CRED (cAMP response element binding),
and addiction, 18182
Culture, and drug use, 171, 172
Cyclothymic disorder, 294
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and I. S., 14
Dakwar, E., 331
Daoist yoga, 19697
Dark night of the soul, 29091
Davidson, Julian, 194
Davy, Humphrey, 23
De la Cruz, San Juan, 279
de Lima, Goncalves, 88t, 92
de Quincey, Thomas, 169 n.1
Decety, J., 345
Deep sedation, 265, 268
Deep sleep, unconscious state,
264f, 265
Delayed sleep phase syndrome
(DSPS), 16
Delirium tremens, hallucinations and
GABA, 4748
Delirium, 287
Delphi oracle, 313, 358
DeltaFoS-B, and addiction, 182
Delusional parasitosis, 243
Delusional reduplication of body parts,
24243, 248
Delusions, 292, 31516; cultural
impact, 315
Dementia, late adulthood, 227
Dependence: contracted state of
consciousness, 174, 176; medical
denitions, 17071
Depersonalization, 218, 288; and
vestibular disturbances, 248
Depression, 290
Derealization, 218, 288
Descartes, Rene, 22, 248
Designs, peyote ASC, 150, 156
Di Risio, L., 367
Diabysis, treatment home, 310

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (DSM-IV), drug dependence,
170
Diet, epigenic intelligence factor, 55
Dietrich, A., 78, 133
Difcult temperament, self-regulation
failure, 216
Discourse on the Method (Descartes), 248
Disorganized attachment, 21819
Dissociation: in adolescence, 225; as
defense, 219; dened, 218;
developmental line, 22122
Dissociative anesthetic agents, 268
Dissociative identity disorder (DID),
290, 312
Divine light, 250, 253
DMT (dimethyltryptamine), 30, 33, 34,
8586, 129, 358; administration,
1012; chemical structure, 97f, 98t,
130F; dosage and duration of effects,
1034; endogenous, 94, 1067;
experience, 9596; history, 86, 9192;
mechanisms of action, 1056; and
monoamine oxidase (MAO), 102, 103;
occurrence in nature, 100; oral
consumption, 1012; scientic
investigations, 9294; and serotonin
receptor site, 85, 104; timeline, 87t 91t;
traditional indigenous usage, 1078
Donald, M., 336
Dopamine, 29, 150; adolescent brain,
224; brainstem source, 45; elevation in
ASCDRs, 48, 49; and extrapersonal
space, 45, 53; in dreaming, 47; in
human brain processes, 44;
parasympathetic action, 44, 49; and
pleasure, 17980
Dopaminergic system: and consciousness,
44; expansion in humans, 5356;
meditation studies, 334
Doppelganger experience, 249, 289
Dramatic performance, in shamanism,
336, 337
Dreaming, 266, 340, 341; and
DMT, 1078
Dreams: neurochemistry, 47; REM and
NREM sleep, 361; and strong
emotion, 281

389

Index
Drugs: and addiction, 16869; bodily
consciousness impact, 25253;
dysfunction effects/adaptive
advantages, 168
DWSC (differentiated waking state of
consciousness), 9
Early childhood cognitive development,
21922
Ecstasy, emotion, 279; in sexual activity,
191
Ecstasy, drug. See MDMA
Edwards, Eiluned, 337
EEG (electroencephalography), mystical
condition measurement, 74
Ego integrity, late adulthood, 22728
Egocentric representations, 346
Ekboms syndrome, 243
Ekstasis, dened, 46
Electrical synapses, 25
Eliade, M., 198
Ellis, Havelock, 252
Emotional contagion, 338;
infancy, 21617
Emotions: and ASC, 28082; and ecstasy,
279; traditional view, 280
Endocannabinoids, 33; receptor system,
17879
Endogenous DMT, 85, 94, 101;
biosynthesis, 107; function, 1078. See
also Bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT
Endogenous reward system, 178
Endorphins, 30, 178
Entheogens, 33, 121
Entrancement, 336
Environment, and drug use, 171
Ephedrine, stimulant, 31
Epigentic factors, human evolution, 44, 58
Epilepsy, 26970
Ergolines, tetracyclic compounds, 12930
Ergot alkaloids, 124
Ergot fungus, 34
Erikson, Erik, 227
Euphoria, and opioid receptors,
48, 49
European Task Force on Disorders of
Consciousness, 272
Evangelical Christian possession, 313

Exceptional human experience (EHE),

294; therapeutic recommendations,
294, 295
Excitement phase, sexual response
cycle, 200
Executive intelligence, 44
Exogenous agents use, 14
Exosomia, 244
Expanded awareness, psychedelic, 178
Expectations, and drug use, 171, 172
Experience, temporolimbic markers, 67
Experimental procedures, bodily
consciousness, 25354
Experimental sexuality study: data
analyses, 2023; design, 202;
results, 2035
Extrapersonal space, human cognitive
skills, 45
Extrasensory perception (ESP),
355, 3089. See also Psi phenomena
Fake hand illusion, 253254
False enlightenment, meditation
practice, 311
Farb, N. A. S., 333
Fasting, 51
Fear: and depersonalization, 291; and
dissociation, 280
Fetal peyote exposure, 15960
Fingelkurts, A. A., 340, 341
First-person perspective, neuroscience, 345
Fiske, S. T., 329
5-HT2a serotonin receptor sites, 13132,
135, 137; and hallucinogens, 138
5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-DMT), chemical
structure, 99t; endogenous, 85, 94, 100
Fixed rituals, in addictive behavior, 175
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
imaging): awareness in vegetative state,
275; hypnosis, 334; mindfulness
meditation (MM), 333; mystical
experience, 7172
Forman, R. K. C., 291
Frederiks, J. A. M., 245
Free Evangelical Fundamentalist
Community, brain imaging
participation, 69
Freedman, Daniel X., 12223

390

Index
Freud, Sigmund: on hysteria, 219;
paranoia theory, 292; pre/transpersonal
fallacy, 318; on sexual repression,
19293
Fromm, Erich, 282
Frontal lobe: 5-HT2a receptor sites, 132;
and portentousness, 129
Furst, P. T., 148 n.1
Fusional experiences, 289
Gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA): and
hallucinations, 4748; inhibitory
effects, 29; interneurons, 135, 137;
receptors, 30; and sedative-hypnotics,
3132
Ganzfeld induction, 36668
Geekie, J., 341
General anesthesia, unconscious state,
264f, 265, 268
Generalized tonic-clonic seizures, 269
Gerotranscendence, 228
Gerstmann, Joseph, 246
Geschwind syndrome, 66
Gesture and dance, in shamanism,
336, 337
Geyer, M. A., 127, 338, 340
Gilman, A. G., 122
Global brain metabolism, and awareness,
275
Glossolalia, 71
Glutamic acid (glutamate): excitatory
signaling, 29; and hallucinogens, 132;
receptors, 30
Goldberg, L. R., 201, 202
Goodman, T. W., 122
Gopnik, Alison, 213
GPCR (G-protein coupled receptor),
2528, 29, 30; and opioids, 32; and
psychedelics, 3435; and THC, 3233;
transduction, 27f
Granqvist, P., 68
Gray, Spalding, 288
Greeley, Andrew M., 191
Greenberg, D., 315, 316, 318
Grey, Alex, 113
Greyson, B., 307
Grief and mourning, late adulthood, 227
Grifths, R., 126, 252

Grob, Charles S., 126

Grof, Christina, 312, 314
Grof, Stanislav, 126, 161, 196, 312, 314
Haitian Vodou, 313
Hallucinations, 292, 293; cultural impact,
31415; neurochemistry, 47
Hallucinogens, 33, 12122; and
consciousness, 12629; and dopamine,
4849; dying patient application, 126;
indigenous use, 12324; mechanism
summary, 13839; negative effects,
5253; neuropharmacology,
12933; and religious experience,
123; in shamanistic practice,
5152
Handsome Lake, Iroquois leader, 301
Harmala alkaloids, 110, 111; and
serotonin, 1023
Hastings, A., 309
Haunting, 294
Healey, F., 67
Healing, and shared symbols, 339
Heautoscopy, 242, 248, 249, 289
Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 23
Heggenhougen, C., 177
Helman, C., 172
Hemiasomatognosia, 245
Hemi-depersonalization, 245
Hess, E., 219
High-altitude mountaineers, and mystical
states, 251
Higher power, AA, 173
Hindu tantra, 198, 318
Hippocampus, in allocentric
representations, 346
Histamine, 29
Hoasca Project, 91t
Hobson, J. A., 281
Hofmann, Albert, 34, 124
Holbrook, Lisbeth Jane, 192
Holmstedt, Bo, 90t, 102
Homo habilis, tool making, 54
Homo neanderthalis, ritualistic burials, 55
Honorton, C., 364
Horowitz, C. B., 332, 333
Huichol culture: ASC meaning, 149;
peyote use in pregnancy, 15862;

392

Index
Ketamine: dissociative anesthetic, 36, 268;
out-of-body experiences, 358, 359
Kleitman, Nathan, 11, 12
Knowing medium, ASC, 128
Known object, focal awareness, 128
Kokoszka, A., 13
Krippner, S. 330, 333
Kundalini, 198, 358
Lambe, E. K., 132
Lambrecht, I., 341
Landis, C., 290, 291, 292
Lantern consciousness, infancy, 213
Laski, Marghanita, 191
Lata, J., 315
Late adulthood cognitive development,
22628
Laureys, Steven, 342
L-dopa, 47, 49
Left hemisphere: dopaminergic
transmission, 54; dreams, 47;
emotional regulation, 49
Levine, F. R., 331
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 337
Lhermitte, Jean, 245, 252
Life After Life (Moody), 306
Ligand-gated ion-channel receptor, 25
Limb ownership denial, 24647
Limbic-marker hypothesis, TEs, 6667
Liotti, G. 219
Locked-in syndrome, 264f, 26465, 274
Locus coeruleus (LC), 133, 135
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), 34; and
bodily consciousness, 25253;
chemical structure, 130f; discovery,
123, 124; ergot alkaloid product, 130
Lucid dreaming, 264f, 266, 341
Macro and micro context effects, 172
Magic consciousness, 2 to 5 years, 212
Maimonides Medical Centre, psi research,
362, 363
Main, M., 219
Maithuna, 198
Maliszewski, M., 196
Malpighiaceaous woody liana, 92f, 100
Mammals, typical waking EEG, 43
Manske, Richard, 89t, 91

Marglin, F. A., 198

Marijuana: and bodily consciousness, 252;
in shamanistic practice, 56
Marlow-Crowne Social Desirability Scale
(MC), 201, 203
Maslow, Abraham H., 189
Masochism, psychoanalytic
perspective, 193
Massimini, M., 127
Masters and Johnson, sexual response
cycle, 200
McCready, William C., 191
McKenna, Dennis, 90t, 112
McKenna, Terrance, 90t, 9495,
96, 114
MDMA
(methylenedioxymethamphetamine;
Ecstasy), 35; prolactin increase, 196;
tactile and emotional sensations, 49
Medical models of addiction, 170
Meditation: and emotion, 282; ESP
experience, 36466; healing effects,
33135; information inow limitation,
14; practices, 31112, 331;
psi-conducive nature, 364; and
sexuality, 196; spiritual
component, 332
Mediumship, 290, 356
Membrane conductance, 13637
Memory, in peyote ASC, 152
Menezes, Jr., A., 283
Mescaline, 34, 51; chemical structure,
130f, 150; in peyote, 149;
phenethylamine, 130; pregnancy
studies, 15859
Mesmer, Franz A., 363, 364
Mesolimbic system, emotion, 178;
endorphins, 180
Metabolism of information model, 1213;
protective mechanisms, 14
Metabotropic receptor, 25
Metzner, R., 173, 178
Michaux, Henri, 252
Micro-and macro-somatognosia, 245
Middle childhood cognitive
development, 222
Milton, J., 367
Mimetic culture, 336, 337

393

Index
Mind-body problem, 22; and
neuroscience, 37; and transcendent
experiences, 7577
Mindfulness-based stress reduction
(MBSR), 332
Mindfulness meditation (MM), fMRI
studies, 333
Miner, L. A., 132
Minimally conscious state, 27374
Minimally sedative agents, 268
Mirror neuron system, 216
Mishara, Aaron L., 291, 343, 344 n.1
Mislocalizations, tactile, 243, 244, 248
Misoplegia, 247
MMPI, Goldberg modications, 201,
202, 203
Modulation, AIM model of
consciousness, 7
Monoamine oxidase (MAO), 103
Monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI),
103, 104, 112; and peyote, 150
Monoamines (-NH2), 2930
Montgomery, Gary, 160 n.6
Monthly biological rhythms, 5
Monti, M. M., 274
Mood alteration, hallucinogens, 52
Mood disorders, 29091
Moody, Raymond, 306
Moral indignation, childhood, 220
Morante, Elsa, 279
Moreira-Almeida, A., 283, 312
Motor neglect, bodily consciousness, 246
Mullin, G. H., 198
Muscarinic drugs, in shamanistic
practice, 51
Muzet, A., 174
Myers, Frederick, 355
Mystical experiences: bodily
consciousness in, 251; characteristics,
6364; and emotion, 281; and fusion,
289; in sexual activity, 191
Mysticism Scale, 72
Mythic consciousness, 6 to 11 years, 212
Nave realism, 329, 345
Narcolepsy, 293
Narrative autobiographic
remembering, 345

Narrative enactment, in shamanism, 336

Narrowing awareness, addictive drugs,
178
Narrowing of consciousness, 287
National Center for Complementary and
Alternative Medicine (NCCAM/NIH),
331
Native American Church, 147, 14849;
addiction program, 173, 176
Natural opiates, and dopamine, 48
Natural rhythmicity, suppressed in
wakefulness, 12
Near-death-experiences (NDEs), 126,
228, 3068; and emotion, 281;
interpersonal problems, 3089; and
mystical states, 251; temporal
sequence, 307
Neomammalian brain, neocortex, 154
Neonate, arousal states, 21315
Neuroimaging experiments,
psychotomimetic drugs, 338
Neuroimaging studies, TEs, 6975, 78
Neuromatrix,241
Neuromuscular blockers, anesthesia, 268
Neuropeptides, 30
Neuroplasticity, 29
Neurotheology, shamanism as, 50
Neurotransmitters, 2930; circadian
rhythm inuence, 5; and DMT, 106;
and exogenous analogues, 167;
receptors, 30; synapse, 25, 26f
New religious movements, belief
assessment, 315
Newberg, A., 71, 75, 78
Nicotine: nicotinic acetylcholine agonist,
32; in peyote ceremonies, 15253; in
South American Solanaceae, 112
Nir, Y., 342
Nitrous oxide, 268; NMDA-glutamate
receptors, 36; psychoactive
properties, 23
NMDA-glutamate receptors, and
ketamine, 36
Nocjar, C., 136
Non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome, 16
Nonconscious hemiasomatognosia,
24546
Nonexperimental experiences, 35657

394

Index
Nonhuman primates, hallucinogen
avoidance, 52
Nonpathological ASC, characteristics,
283, 285t86t
Noradrenaline, 45; in dreaming, 47
Norepinephrine, 29; and mescaline, 150
NREM (non-REM) sleep, 9, 266; cycle,
56
Oceanic boundlessness, 338, 339, 340
Oceanic sex, 196
Ololiuqui, 124
Opiates, endogenous receptors, 178
Opioids, analgesia/sedation, 32
Ordinary waking consciousness, external
adaptive state, 128
Orgasm: as ASC, 194195; sexual
response cycle phase, 200
Orgasmic reex, Reich, 193
Ospina, M. B., 332
Ott, Jonathan, 114
Otto, Rudolph, 129
Out-of-body experience, 24950, 288;
under hypothermic cardiac arrest, 76;
and mystical states, 251
Out-of-body journeying, 50
Out-of-body sensations: in ASCRs, 47;
and dopamine, 45, 46
OWSC (ordinary waking state of
consciousness), 9
Oxytocin, 30
Pahnke, Walter N., 125, 252
Pain modulation, meditation, 333
Paleomammalian brain, limbic system,
154, 178
Pane, Ramon, 86, 88t
Panic, and depersonalization, 291
Paradoxically healing, ASC as, 327
Parapsychology, 355356. See also Psi
phenomena
Parasympathetic dominance, dopamine,
45, 46, 4950
Paresthesias, 24344
Parkinsons disease, 45, 47; tactile
hallucinations, 243
Passie, Torsten, 195, 196
Passive state of mind, 14

Past life recall, 356

Patanjalis Yoga Sutras, psi side
effects, 364
Pathologically altered consciousness,
26975
Peak experiences, young adulthood, 226
Perception of self, and parietal lobe, 74
Peripersonal space, 45
Permanent minimally conscious state, 273
Permanent vegetative state (PVS), 272
Perry, John, 302, 304, 319
Persinger, M. A., 67, 68
Personal neglect, bodily
consciousness, 246
PET (positron emission tomography)
images: cerebral metabolic rate of
glucose (CMRglu), 133; religious
experience, 70
Peyote: and alcohol and drug abuse
treatment, 153, 176; antibiotic
qualities, 153; auditory, olfactory and
gustatory sensations, 15152; Huichol
Indians use, 14749; pharmacology
and neurochemistry, 14952;
preparation, 15556; pregnancy use,
15862; Spanish clerical reaction to,
148; visual imagery, 15051
Phantom limb phenomenon, 241
Pharmacological altered consciousness,
26768
Pharmakon (Greek medicine and
poison), 30
Phenethylamines, 129, 130; peyote
alkaloids, 149
Phosphenes, ASC images, 150
Physicalism, mind-body problem,
75, 76
Physiological states of consciousness, 174
Physiologically altered consciousness,
26567
Pink Flamingos, lm, 283
Plateau phase, sexual response cycle, 200
Plato, erotic mania, 279
Pleasure and desire, neurochemistry,
17980, 181
Plessner, H., 346, 34748
Portentousness, and frontal lobe
activity, 129

395

Index
Positive emotions, and brain structures,
7273
Possession, 31213
Postictal period, temporal lobe epileptic
seizure, 64, 65
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD):
depersonalization, 288; emotional
shifts, 293
Prana, 199
Precognition: and dreaming, 361;
psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy,
358
Prefrontal cortex (PFC): adolescent
remodeling, 223; awareness of
emotions, 73; in meditation, 348
Prenatal experience, 16162
Prepersonal experiences, 318
Presence experience, 249
Previc, Fred, 167
Priestly, Joseph, 23
Prince, R. H., 302
Principles of Psychology, The (James), 22
Protective mechanisms: cultural practices,
14; exogenous agents use, 14;
information inow balance, 1314;
meditation, 14; natural rhythmicity,
1213; physiological, 13
Psi, dened, 355
Psi phenomena, 35556; in crisis
situations, 280; ganzfeld induction,
36668; and hypnosis, 36364; and
meditation, 36466; psychedelically
induced, 35760; and sleep,
36063; states and traits, 36869;
therapeutic recommendations,
294, 309
Psilocin (4-hydroxy-DMT), 47, 51, 100;
chemical structure, 100t; U.S. studies,
53
Psilocybe mushrooms, 33, 101
Psilocybin, 124, 126; and bodily
consciousness, 252; chemical structure,
130f; entity encounter experiences, 359
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, ESP
occurrence, 358
Psychedelic experience, facets, 95
Psychedelics, 33, 34, 12122; addiction
treatment, 11314, 153, 176; and ESP,

35860; positive and negative impacts,

36; scientic study, 12426
Psychic experiences, 308; therapeutic
recommendations, 294, 309
Psychoactive drugs, 24; and neuronal
reward system, 179
Psychobiological systems, neonate, 214
Psychointegrative plants, 154
Psychokinesis (PK), 294, 35556; and
hypnosis, 363
Psychological Dimensions of Sexual
Experience Inventory (PDOSEI),
199200, 202; ecstatic states, 201
Psychopathology: ASC presence,
285t86t; diagnostic taxonomies, 284,
287; mood alterations, 29091;
narrowing of consciousness, 287; sense
of self alterations, 28890;
sociocultural context, 283
Psychopharmacology, 3637
Psychosexual stages of development,
Freud, 193
Psychotherapy, and addiction treatment,
176
Psychotic-like episodes, positive
outcomes, 301
Psychotic/mystical/religious experience,
3023; differences between, 31416,
318; phenomenology, 3034; spiritual
emergencies, 314
Psychotomimetic drugs, 33; experience
dimensions, 338
Psychotria viridis, 100, 101f
Putnam, F. W., 295
Pyramidal cells: cortex, 133; 5-HT2a
receptor sites, 134; and
hallucinogens, 138
Qi, circulation in daoist yoga, 197
Qigong, 311
Rabaris, shamanism, 337, 341
Randal, P, 341
Raphe nuclei, 133, 135; and
hallucinogens, 138; REM sleep, 130;
tryptamine hallucinogens, 131
Rational consciousness, 11 years +, 212
Reactive psychosis, 287

396

Index
Reality, visionary state, 129
Reich, Wilhelm, orgasmic reex, 193
Religion, adolescent appeal, 224, 225
Religious attributions/experience, brain
imaging experiment, 70
Religious experience, and TLE, 64, 65
Religious or Spiritual Problem (DSM-IV),
NDEs, 308, 317
REM (rapid eye movements) sleep, 264f,
266, 293; cycle, 5; and DMT, 1067;
newborns, 160, 213, 214; and raphe
cell rhythmic rate, 130; state of
consciousness, 9
Reptilian brain, behavior and habit, 154
Repulsion (lm), 292
Resolution phase, sexual response
cycle, 200
Retrograde signaling, synapse, 28, 33
Retrospective perspective, 346
Reuptake transport, 26f, 27
Revonsuo, A., 340, 341
Reward-reinforcement pathways, 33
Reynolds, J., 334
Reynolds, Pam, 75, 76, 77
Rhino Cave, Botswana, 5556, 56 n.1
Rhythmic drumming, 50
Richards, Keith, 169 n.1
Right hemisphere, and TEs, 67
Ring, K., 307
Risky behavior: dopamine and serotonin,
224; prefrontal cortex, 223
Ritualistic ingestion, 175
Rock art, shamanistic themes, 5556
Roney-Dougal, S., 365
Rossi, E. 13, 14
Rubber-hand illusion, 253
Running, and mystical state, 251
Sabina, Mara, 53
Sabom, Michael, 75
Sacks, Oliver, 312
Sadism, psychoanalytic perspective, 193
Sakti, female deities, 198
Salvia divinorum, 35, 51
San people, ASC practices, 51
Sanchez-Vives, M. V., 136
Sane Society, The (Fromm), 282
Santo Daime, Ayahuasca sect, 86t, 113

Schizophrenia, 45, 49, 291292; cortical

connectivity, 341; experience
dimensions, 338; metabolic activity,
339
Schizophreniform Disorder (DSM-IV-TR),
VSEs, 316
Schizotoxins,107
Schizotypy, 368, 369
Scholl, Sophie, 282
Schreber, Daniel-Paul, 292
Schultes, Richard Evans, 124
Schwartz, Michael A., 291
Scopolamine: in shamanistic practice, 51;
in South American Solanaceae, 111
Seasonal biological rhythms, 4
Self: alterations in sense of, 28890;
rebirth of, 343, 344
Self-awareness, development in
toddler, 217
Self-injurious behavior, 288, 289
Self-Rating Behavior Inventory (SRBI), 202
Self-regulatory skills, infancy, 215, 216
Self-transcendence, 212
Self-world relationship, and reality, 330
Sensation of absence, 24445
Sense of self across time, 213
Sensed presence, in temporal lobe,
stimulation experiments, 68, 69
Sensitization, pleasure experiences,
18182
Sensory acuity, late adulthood, 226, 227
Sensory deprivation experiments, 13;
bodily consciousness, 253
Sensory isolation, 50
Serotonergic psychedelics, cerebral cortex
sites, 105
Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5HT),
29, 150; adolescent brain, 224;
chemical structure, 98t, 130f; and
DMT, 85, 101, 104; dopamine
inhibition, 48; in dreaming and
hallucinations, 47; 5-HT2a receptor
sites, 13132; and LSD, 34; and raphe
nuclei, 29, 47, 105, 130, 134
Set, of user, 122, 168, 172, 182
Setting, of user, 122, 168, 172, 182
Sex Perfection and Marital Happiness (Van
Urban), 190

397

Index
Sexuality: and ASC, 19195; experimental
study, 2025; phenomenological
dimensions, 199202; and social
desirability, 2012; studies of, 18990;
transpersonal experiences, 19699
Shamanism: and dream experiences, 341;
genetic component, 212; healing
effects, 33540; Huichol culture,
15456; mutual hypnotic-trance, 337;
narrative in, 347; neurochemical
contributions, 50; nondrug practices,
50; transactional symbols, 339
Sherwood, S., 361
Shift work variation, 16
Shiva, pure consciousness, 198
Shulgin, A., 100
Shumala Caves, 148 n.1
Siddhis, yoga psychic powers, 364
Sigma-1 receptor, 105
Simmonds-Moore, C., 368, 369
Simple partial seizures, 270
Sleep, 26566; deprivation, 51; and psi
phenomena, 36063. See also
Dreaming, REM sleep
Sleep paralysis, 293; OBE-like
experiences, 249; and
psychokinesis, 361
Sleep/wake cycle, 5; AIM model, 67;
disturbances, 1516
Smith, E. O., 168
Smith, Huston, 123
Snuff products, 1089
Social brain, 329, 331, 336, 345
Social neuroscience, 329
Social science models of addition,
17172
Society for Psychical Research, 355
Sociocultural context,
psychopathology, 283
Socrates: Daemon voice guide, 314; on
madness, 302
Solanaceae plants, 35, 357
Somatoform disorders, 289
Somatoparaphrenia, 24647
Somnambulism, 266
Sosis, R. 225
Soteria House, 31920
Soul ight, 50

Soul vine, South American

hallucinogens, 51
Speaking in tongues, 313
SPECT (single-photon emission
tomography) images, religious
practice, 70
Spetzler, Robert, 76
Spiegel, D., 334, 335
Spiegel, Herbert, 293
Spiritual emergencies, dened, 314
Spiritual Emergency Network, 312
Spiritual experiences, visionary, 3012
Spiritual practices, 311312; and
sexuality, 19699
Spirituality: dened, 301; and parietal
cortex, 7071
Spotlight consciousness, childhood, 213
Spousal bereavement, late adulthood, 227
Spruce, Richard, 88t, 91, 111
Stace, W. T., 63
State-dependent recall, 182
Stern, Daniel, 213, 217
Storm, L, 367
Strassman, Rick, 90t
Strategic focus, 4445
Subjectivity, and reality, 75
Suicide, seasonal rhythm, 45
Sullivan, J. R., 168
Supernumerary phantom limb
phenomenon, 242, 248
Suyominen, K., 5
Symbolic thinking, childhood, 220
Sympathetic exhaustion, dancing, 51
Syncretic sects, Ayahuasca, 11314
Szara, Sephen, 89t, 92, 93, 103
Tactile hallucinations, 243
Tai Chi, 311
Taitimu, M., 341
Takiwasi Center for the Treatment of Drug
and Alcohol Addiction, 114
Tantra, spiritual practice, 198
Tantric sex, 196
Targ, E., 294
Tart, Charles T., 194, 200, 252, 293
Tassi, P., 174
Telepathy: and dreaming, 361;
psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, 358

398

Index
Temperament and Character
Inventory, 71
Temporal lobe: stimulation experiments,
6769; TEs, 72
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), 6465; and
religiosity, 66
Temporal lobe seizures, 26970
Teonanacatl, 124, 125
Tetrahydroisoquinolines, peyote alkaloids,
149
Thalamo-cortical frontoparietal network,
consciousness, 267f, 276
Thalamo-cortical interconnectivity, 5, 77,
128, 133
Thalamus: 5-HT2a receptor sites, 137; and
hallucinogens, 139; reticular nucleus
dysfunction, 13738
Thalbourne, M., 355, 368
THC (delta-9-tetrahydorcannabinol), 32
Therapeutic recommendations, psychic
experiences, 294, 309
Thoughtless phenomenon, 13
Tibetan Buddhism, 19899, 318
Time perception, 22
Tobacco: and peyote interaction, 15254,
q56; use in Alzheimers and
Parkinsons, 153
Tolerance, 171; opiates, 180
Tomkins, Silvan, 280
Tononi, G., 127, 128, 342
Torda, C., 131
Total drug effects, 172
Tourettes syndrome, 244
Trace amines (TA), 30; receptors and
DMT activity, 1045
Trance, 287; possession, 313
Transactional symbols, shamanistic
ritual, 339
Transcendent experiences (TEs), 6364;
brain imaging studies, 6975, 78;
clinical observations, 6465; with at
EEG, 77; future neuroimaging studies,
7980; limbic-marker hypothesis,
6566; and mind-brain problem,
7577; temporal lobe stimulation
experiments, 6769; triggers, 64, 78
Transcendent self, and brain damage, 251
Transcendental spiritual experiences, 309

Transcendental state, reality of, 129

Transition states, pathological, 29395
Transliminality, 368
Transpersonal emotions, 338
Transpersonal experiences, 318; and
sexuality, 196
Transpersonal psychology, 314, 317, 356
Trauma, and dissociation, 219, 222
Tressoldi, P. E., 367
Tryptamines, 85, 93, 97, 129;
endogenous, 94
Tukano peoples, Brazil, 92
Tunnel passage, 250
UFO-related phenomena, prevalence, 310
Ullman, Montague, 362
Ultradian biological rhythm, 4, 58;
imagery, 7, 8, 1112
Ultradian healing response, 14
Unconscious state, 264
Uniao do Vegetal, Ayahuasca sect, 88t, 112
Unity (oneness), in mystical
experiences, 63
Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome
(UWS), 264, 272
Upper visual eld, and dopamine, 45, 46
Urgesi, C., 70
U.S. Schedule 1 Controlled Substances,
hallucinogens, 93, 124
Uxa plant, and peyote ingestion, 155, 156
Vaitl, D., 328
Valonen, H. M., 5
Van de Castle, R. I., 361, 362
Van Urban, Rudolph, 190
Vanhaudenhuyse, A., 274
Varieties of Anomalous Experience (Appelle,
Lynn & Newman), 304, 310
Vaughn, B., 196
Vegetalistas, medicinal Ayahuasca, 112
Vegetative state (VS), 264, 272
Ventral tegmental area (VTA), 133, 136
Vestibular disturbances, and
depersonalization, 248, 249
Villavicencio, Manuel, 88t, 92
Virola (Psycotria viridis), 33, 51,
91t, 100; pellets, 109; snuff,
1089

399

Index
Vision logic consciousness,
adulthood, 212
Visionary restructuralization, 338, 339, 340
Visionary spiritual experience (VSE), 301;
clinical practice implications, 31619;
cross-cultural, 3023; difference from
psychotic, 31416; mystical, 304;
near-death experience, 3068;
phenomenology, 315; psychic,
30814; treatment, 31920
Visual imagery vividness, ultradian cycle,
8, 11
Vollenweider, Franz, X., 78, 127, 133,
338, 340
Volume conduction, neurotransmitters,
30, 34
Von Weizsacker, Viktor, 343, 345
Wade, Jenny, 192
Wakefulness, 263, 264f, 266, 272; and
suppressed information, 342
Wake/sleep cycles, regulation, 133
Water lily, Mayan in shamanistic practice, 52

Waters, John, 283

Weserman, H. M., 362
Whitley, B. E., 2012
Whole body amputation, 24748
Wiederman, M. W., 2012
Wilber, Ken, 212, 303, 318
Winkelman, Michael, 154
Wirikuta, sacred Huichol desert region,
151, 157, 161, 162
Wisdom, late adulthood, 226
Wiseman, R., 366, 367
Withdrawal, 171, 180
Witzum, E., 315, 316, 318
Wolff, P. A., 214
Wyss, D., 342
Yoga, 311
Younger, J., 336
Zacks, J. M., 334
Zeitgeber (time giver), 4, 5
Zen Buddhism, 318
Zona incerta, 4