An Almost Separate Reality
I first witnessed people acting strangely—that is to say, many people acting strangely at the same time—while I was watching television at the house of a friend of mine. My friend Billy and I were both seven years old, going on eight. This must have been on a Sunday because, if there had been any children’s programs on the television that day, we would have been watching one of them instead of the televangelist sending we were actually watching. Billy had obviously seen the program before, or at least something very similar. He said: “You have to check this out. These people are really weird!”
Billy’s father, Mr. Barnes, was the pharmacist in town. He was a staunch believer in the blessings of modern medical science, and being such a person, he had no credulity left over for any purported acts of faith healing. After listening for a while from the kitchen, he came into the room in a decidedly irritable frame of mind and switched the television to a different channel. For my part, I had been very impressed when the preacher appeared to heal several disabled people from their handicaps by merely putting his hand to their foreheads. I had, however, felt very uncomfortable with the behaviour of some of the other people taking part in this strange service of worship. Although the camera never really trained on any of them specifically, I could see that some people were sobbing or muttering to themselves; others were shaking or twitching. (My parents were not really churchgoers. They only went to church if someone was to be baptised or buried. Therefore, apart from my own baptism, of which I have absolutely no recollection, I had only been to one church service in my life, a fairly recent confirmation ceremony in the Lutheran Church, but believe me, if people had started to act during that service like some were acting in this televised service, I would have asked permission to leave and wait in the car until the service was over.) But despite my embarrassment, I thought that curing people with just the laying on of hands must certainly be a good thing, and I spoke my thoughts out loud. This was something I felt that I would like to be able to do. Mr. Barnes rebuked me rather severely.
“Don’t let that guy fool you,” he said. “He and the people he pretends to heal are in cahoots. It’s an act. There is no such thing as miracle workers.”
I felt very disappointed. And what about the people in the audience who were behaving as if they were about to have a nervous breakdown?
“Those people have been hypnotised through the charisma of their leader,” he said. “The preacher has learned to press all the right buttons in order to put his followers into a hypnotic trance. Once they come back to their normal state of mind, they won’t even remember behaving weirdly. It’s just a strange psychological phenomenon that certain religious and political movements have learned to exploit to their own profit. Hitler did the same sort of thing to his people in the thirties until we managed to put a stop to it.”
I admired Mr. Barnes. Probably because of the chemistry set I had been given on my seventh birthday, I had recently decided that I wanted to become a chemist when I grew up. Mr. Barnes, who had studied chemistry at university level, had only encouragement to offer me. (Some time after my birthday, he had given me a slightly chipped volumetric flask, complete with a glass stopper, as a supplement to my chemistry set. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do with it, but I did treasure it. It was like something right out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.) I suppose that his awareness of my (somewhat superficial) interest in natural science was the reason for his disappointment in me when I allowed myself to be deceived by what he considered a very obvious subterfuge on the part of the preacher. I immediately accepted as gospel truth Mr. Barnes’ scientific assessment of the Pentecostal pastor and his pretence of being able to heal the sick and disabled by means of his and their absolute faith in God, although my concurrence did not dispel the fascination that I had suddenly developed for people who are presumed to be in a trance state of consciousness. Following this first experience, I would sneak watch televangelist programs whenever I got the chance. My mother caught me a time or two at this. Her opinion of “Holy Rollers” was more or less the same as the pharmacist’s; she didn’t understand why I wanted to watch these programs, and she invariably switched off the television on these occasions. She probably feared that I was going insane.
Now, many years later, I’m quite convinced that Mr. Barnes was right about the preacher being a charlatan, at least with respect to the man’s self-claimed ability to heal the sick or disabled by the laying on of hands. I’m sure he and his patients had been in cahoots, although how he had managed to recruit and then manipulate them for his subterfuge, but without them intuiting that his behaviour was deceitful and inexcusable, is something I still have not figured out. Maybe he had hypnotised them prior to the revival meeting, and they were being “healed” by means of post-hypnotic suggestion. I do not believe, however, that the other people in the congregation who were acting so strangely had actually been hypnotised by the preacher. I now surmise that the more suggestible in his flock had learned to work themselves into a trance state, through a sort of involuntary autohypnosis, which allowed them to behave in a manner they knew was expected of them, but without being ashamed of, or even consciously aware of, what they were doing; and, moreover, that they had become more and more adept at falling into trance for every revival meeting they attended. As Mr. Barnes had pointed out to me, the trance state is an unusual, but perfectly normal and quite predictable psychological phenomenon that can be exploited for various, and sometimes, as in the case of cult leaders and charismatic dictators, purely nefarious purposes.
Can we actually explain what it is that happens to people who fall into a trance state, for example, during an ecstatic religious ceremony, during hypnotherapy, or in the meditation hall of a Buddhist monastery? Unfortunately, the neural correlates that would appear to characterise the trance state of consciousness are poorly understood, even at the present stage of neurological research. Nevertheless, I think that even those of us who have not really experienced that specific state of consciousness generally referred to as “trance” can arrive at a reasonably good personal understanding of the phenomenon by carefully observing the behaviour of people who have. Who is in an authentic state of trance, and who is consciously or unconsciously faking it? For this particular field of inquiry, I suggest we allow ourselves to be primarily guided by our intuition while observing people who are assumed to be in a state of trance. The most convenient way to do this is through the medium of the documentary film.
The first film on my agenda will have to be The Holy Ghost People, directed by Peter Adair, and released in 1967. I had the good fortune of viewing this documentary, projected onto a roller cinema screen in a darkened classroom, in 1972. (https://archive.org/details/HolyGhostPeople_201403)
The film documents an evening church service at the Church of All Nations in Scrabble Creek, Fayette County, West Virginia. The introduction to the documentary makes it clear to the viewer that the service in this little rural church will be conducted more or less in accordance with the traditions of the Charismatic Christian movement; however, the congregation at Scrabble Creek, like some of the other Holiness congregations in the Appalachia region of the United States, practiced Christian worship at this time (1960s) according to a strictly literal interpretation of certain bible passages in the New Testament:
Luke 10:19—Behold, I shall give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
Mark 16:17-18—And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not harm them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
Thus, the film makers were able to document some very unusual and rather inexplicable ecstatic behaviour, namely, the handling of venomous snakes by some of the participants during the service.
While watching this film, it is important to keep in mind that the rattlesnakes and copperhead snakes that are so carelessly handled—for example, tossed back and forth between members of the congregation during the church service—are very dangerous and, considering the likelihood that anyone who is bitten will not seek medical attention, potentially deadly. It’s true, the snakes have been held in captivity for a certain length of time before they are first brought to a church service, and they have probably grown accustomed to being carefully “handled” by means of snake hooks and tongs—hands are seldom used while handling snakes outside of the church service. Moreover, snakes initially refuse to be fed while in captivity, and therefore, because the snakes that are brought to the service are more or less lethargic due to their starved condition, they are much less apt to strike the handler than they would be in the wild, or when newly captured and relatively healthy; and if they should, against all odds, strike, they are less likely to release the entire venom content of their alveoli. After all, there would hardly be any point in “taking up serpents” if the handlers knew they would be bitten and seriously envenomated every time they did so, which would probably be the case if the snakes brought to the service were always freshly caught. Nevertheless, I contend that the snake handlers documented in this film are all aware of the danger they are putting themselves in by demonstrating their absolute belief in the word of God in such a bizarre manner—at least, we may assume that they are aware of this danger when they are in their everyday state of consciousness. (The Rev. Elza Preast, who appears to officiate during the service that is documented in this film, is bitten on the hand by a copperhead towards the end of the service, and his hand is very noticeably swollen by the end of the service. The film leaves us with no clue concerning the subsequent fate of the envenomated pastor. Records show, however, that he lived for thirty-five more years following the 1967 envenomation, during which time he was bitten eight more times. He died in 2002, at the age of 85, following a short period of illness that was not caused by snake bite.)
Unfortunately, for the academically inclined viewer, the film leaves some important questions unanswered: In exactly what manner did those members of the congregation, who exhibited unmistakeable trance behaviour during the service, acquire this strange and rather rare ability? What sort of advantages or disadvantages in their lives did these individuals incur because of their ability to enter into a trance state of consciousness? And, of course, how is it possible that the snake handlers could overcome a perfectly natural trepidation about getting within striking distance of a rattlesnake or a copperhead?
Serpent handlers use the term “anointing” to denote the communication of power from God to man. The essential concept of anointing is the belief that the Holy Ghost “moves” upon the believer and takes possession of his faculties, imparting to him supernatural gifts, which qualify him for service to the Lord. The existence of the person is temporarily dominated by the Holy Ghost, and his words and actions are considered to be impelled by the indwelling spirit.
A worshiper believed to be possessed by the Holy Ghost experiences an altered state of consciousness commonly designated “trance” in the literature. Trance may be defined in psychiatric terms as a complete or partial dissociation, characterized by (apparent) loss of voluntary control over motor functions, body-image changes, perceptual distortions, diminution of inhibitions, sudden and unexpected outbursts of emotion, and impairment of reality testing to various degrees. [Stephen M. Kane, Ritual Possession in a Southern Appalachian Religious Sect, Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 87, No. 346 (Oct. – Dec. 1974), p. 296.]
With respect to the specific case of the Holiness serpent handlers, one can only reject the hypothesis that dissociation is invariably indicative of psychological abnormality. The sociocultural and psychological data I have collected in the course of two years’ fieldwork simply will not admit of such an interpretation.
It must be emphasized that dissociation among serpent handlers is not a random, haphazard affair but a learned and culturally patterned response that occurs according to more or less well-defined “rules” within the specific and rather highly structured context of religious ceremony. Indeed, as has been indicated, dissociation is confined almost exclusively to musical portions of the ceremony. Thus, what might appear to the casual or untrained outside observer to be unrestrained, unpredictable, and purely individual behavior can actually be shown to be stylized, controlled, and conventionalized activity. Briefly, it can be said that there is a culturally standardized and socially recognized “right way” to become possessed.
We are dealing here not with the privately constructed, idiosyncratic fantasy and action systems of neurotics and self-insulated psychotics, but on the contrary with a vigorous and perduring institutionalized system of ritual and belief whose symbols are public, socially shared and sanctioned (at least within the practising group), and transmitted across generational lines. This system is consistent with, rather than an obstacle to, effective social and cultural functioning as defined by the wider communities in which serpent handlers live and work. Once outside the church, serpent handlers behave in a perfectly “normal” and socially acceptable manner, operating with a keen sense of their own ego boundaries and personal limitations. Other than the fact that they are given to somewhat extraordinary and spectacular behavior during religious meetings, they manifest no apparent or readily discernible psychological or behavioral characteristics that unequivocally distinguish them from non-serpent handling members of their communities. In sum, to interpret dissociative behavior among serpent handlers as a symptom of psychological abnormality would be gross error. The many serpent handlers of my acquaintance are, from a clinical standpoint, not psychotic, psychopathic, or even severely neurotic, but fundamentally normal people who, by Appalachian standards, are actually well adjusted and adapted to their behavioral environment. [Stephen M. Kane, Ritual Possession, p. 302.]
The next film on my agenda is Trance and Dance in Bali, produced in 1952 by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8YC0dnj4Jw) This was, by the way, the second ethnological short film that I viewed in that darkened classroom in 1972. The footage for this film was shot in 1937 (with complementary footage shot in 1939) by Gregory Bateson and Jane Belo during Mead’s and Bateson’s fieldwork in Bali. The narration by Margaret Mead and the soundtrack by Colin McPhee were added to the edited footage in 1951.
Mead and Bateson’s field work was funded mostly by the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox, based on their research proposal that posited that trance in Bali was essentially an expression of schizophrenia. In her book on Trance in Bali, Jane Belo shows disagreement with the basic premises of the research. Belo’s understanding was more aligned with the understanding of trance as a religious phenomenon, rather than laying a theoretical framework on what she observed, or what we could call a pathologizing of religious practice. She relied upon Balinese friends and local experts to give her deeper understanding of the religion, arts and culture of the place. To satisfy her own thinking, she notes that she brought in a European psychiatrist with experience in mental hospitals to observe ordinary Balinese people at work and in religious trance, and he affirmed that the people he observed and tested were in no way schizophrenic. It is admirable that Mead wrote the introduction to Belo’s book, despite Belo’s clear critique of the project. As an accurate representation, it is well documented, initially by Mead and Bateson, that Trance and Dance itself is flawed. We know that the footage is of a staged dance performance of the Calonarang, featuring the Rangda witch, her sisya assistants, the Barong dragon and his kris dancers. This performance, commissioned by Bateson for Mead’s 36th birthday, December 16, 1937, is set in daytime rather than at night, as it was normally enacted, to make filming possible. Belo notes that the young women in the film who perform the kris dance were specifically asked to do so by the research team, though it had never been done in Bali by women before. In the comments recorded by Belo from the Balinese before the performance, we can see that the younger women who are about to perform are nervous, this was their very first performance of the kris dance and ngoerek, a ritual self-attack with these kris knives, which were known to not cut the skin in a person actually in trance. Sequences of dance and ritual were filmed by Bateson, but the trance sequences were all taken by Belo. Bateson was not involved with the editing of any of the produced films, many years later. [Kate Pourshariati, Trance and Dance in Bali, PDF, Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/), pp. 1-2.]
Trance and Dance in Bali was recorded in two separate research excursions to Bali, on December 16, 1937 and February 8, 1939 in Pagutan village. Mead and Bateson recorded most of the film footage during the first performance, but recorded the second performance to provide supplementary footage. Following Mead and Bateson’s suggestion, the second performance was arranged to showcase female patih instead of the usual male patih. [. . .] For Trance and Dance in Bali, the footage stages a calonarang, also known as dramatari calonarang. The filmed performance was specifically staged for the researchers, rather than being a typical calonarang that happens periodically in Balinese villages. A sacred dramatari calonarang occurs during the night, to provide a mystical atmosphere of the performance, and some parts of the performance may sometimes even take place in a cemetery. However, the researchers arranged the calonarang staged during the day, in order to support the quality of light necessary in order to film. Significantly, the soundtrack for this film does not consist of original sound recordings corresponding to the footage on screen. Although it was technically possible to record the live sound of the events, as some previous anthropologist filmmakers had done, the cost, technical difficulty, and low quality of recording in the field on phonograph wax cylinders was deemed prohibitive. [I Putu Arya Deva Suryanagara, Trance and Dance in Bali: On the Musical Selections of Mead and Bateson’s Film, Revue musicale 01CRM, Vol. 9, No. 1, June 2022, pp. 94-95.]
At this stage, the dancers, while closing their eyes and kneeling, immerse their faces in the smoke of burning incense or fragrant sandalwood. The Kukus Harum, ‘Fragrant Smoke’, song is eventually sung to motivate and lead the dancers into trance, to put them into an altered state of consciousness. It is important to note that to the Balinese, even today, a state of trance is accepted naturally. In the West, on the contrary, trance is fascinating and is generally considered a rare and potentially harmful state. Psychologists refer to such self-induced trance alongside hypnotic trance and religious trance from meditation as dissociated states of consciousness. Perhaps the artist, during a height of creativity, slips into a similar state; it may explain why artists do not remember how, after an act of creative intensity, they achieved what they did. [Leon Rubin and Nyoman Sedana, Performance in Bali, Routledge Publishing, New York/London (2007), p. 57.]
While watching the film, it is important to bear in mind that this particular dance drama had been enacted in the village of Pagutan (present-day Bayung Gede) as a sacred cleansing ceremony for many years before Gregory Bateson commissioned a performance in a nonsecular setting in 1937. The performance is a fusion of two ancient Balinese animistic traditions: the Calon Arang and the Barong. (Calon Arang (also known as Rangda) is a legendary witch who is said to have wreaked havoc on the adjacent island of Java during the reign of King Airlangga (11th century); the Barong is a lionlike, dragon-like creature from Balinese mythology, who is said to be the king of all benevolent spirits, and in this capacity, the tireless enemy of Calon Arang and her evil spirit servants.
The Balinese dramatize these two aggressive and destructive forces, that of the rough, greedy, quarrelsome demons and that of the uncanny, devouring, deathly léjaks [witchlike spirits], by the mask play in which the Barong and Rangda appear as antagonists. The battle is enacted and reenacted. No one ever wins. What happens is that dozens of villagers, aroused by the excitement held incarnate in these two figures and by the stylized interplay between them, go into trance, go through pattern behavior in a somnambulistic state, attack the Witch with their krisses, are revived by the Barong, attack their own chests with their krisses, and preferably work themselves to a climax, a true convulsive seizure of hysterical order. After such a performance everyone goes home feeling perfectly great and at peace with the world. [Jane Belo, Bali: Rangda and Barong, University of Washington Press (1949), p.12.] [During the performance documented in Bateson and Mead’s film, the keris (kris) daggers which the dancers press hard against their chests while in trance are obviously theatrical props; witness the bent dagger thirteen minutes into the film—an authentic, weapons-grade dagger would have snapped, not bent—but this does not mean that theatrical-grade daggers, probably forged from mild steel, are not dangerous. Performers have unintentionally stabbed themselves to death.]
The plot of the play, which begins as a simple theatrical performance and usually ends in a series of violent trances with full religious paraphernalia of offerings and ritual, varies in detail from village to village, but is essentially uniform. The Witch is angry at a king because he or his son has rejected her daughter, or married her and then rejected her, or simply because the king has accused her of witchcraft. She summons her disciples—played by the most attractive little girls or by little boys dressed up as little girls—and, dressed as an old hag, she schools them in witchcraft. They go forth and spread plague and disaster over the land. People are driven from their homes; babies are born and strangled by the witches and tossed back into the parents’ laps; corpses fill the land. All of these horrors are in the broadest, slapdash comedy interspersed with exaggerated theatrical emotions. The king of the desolated country sends his ambassador, or he may come himself to fight the Witch, now no longer an old and infirm woman, but a masked supernatural being whose tongue is studded with flame, whose nails are many inches long, whose breasts are abhorrently hairy and pendulous, and whose teeth are tusks. Against her the emissary fails. He retires from the stage and is transformed into the Dragon (a two-man mask), who is as friendly and puppyish a beast as the Witch is terrifying. The Dragon confronts the Witch and they hold altercations in ecclesiastical Old Javanese. Followers of the Dragon, armed with krisses, enter and approach the Witch, ready to attack her. But she waves her magic cloth—the cloth baby sling—and after each attack they crouch down before her, magically cowed. Finally, they rush upon her in pairs, stabbing ineffectually at the Witch who has become a half-limp bundle in their tense arms. She is uninvolved and offers no resistance, but one by one they fall on the ground in deep trance, some limp, some rigid. From this trance they are aroused by the Dragon who claps his jaws over them. Or by his priest sprinkling his holy water. Now, able to move again but not returned to normal consciousness, they move about in a somnambulistic state, turning their daggers which were powerless against the Witch, against their own breasts, fixing them against a spot which is said to itch unbearably. Thus symbolically they complete the cycle of the childhood trauma—the approach to the mother, the rejection, and the turn-in upon the self. Women participate in these scenes but do not attack the Witch. They merely turn their daggers against themselves. The trancers of both sexes writhe and shriek in ecstasy, intermittently pausing for a blank moment, only to begin pressing their krisses against their breasts with an upward movement if they are men, but hurling themselves in a sharp downward gesture on their krisses if they are women. In this violent scene it is rare for anyone to be injured; priests wave their way in and out, sprinkling holy water, and the Dragon, who revived them from their first deep trance, has returned to give them the support and comfort of his presence. Finally, they are disarmed, carried into the temple, and brought out of trance with holy water and incense and an occasional offering of a live chick. The participants gather in front of the Dragon for a final prayer, the Witch mask is packed up and taken home, only to be brought out soon again for another enactment. [Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, New York Academy of Sciences (1942), pp. 34-35.]
As in the case of The Holy Ghost People, a number of questions remain to be answered after viewing Mead and Bateson’s film Trance and Dance in Bali, the most important of which is possibly the following: What sort of edifying psychological (or “spiritual”) benefits, if any at all, did the members of the dance troupe—be it the trance master, his assistants, or the dancers and gamelan musicians—derive from the years of dedicated training that underlay every performance of their art? The dancers appear bewildered and very much the worse for wear as they are brought out of trance at the end of the performance. This can hardly be considered payment of the edificatory kind. Indeed, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson came to the conclusion that the behaviour of the dancers while in trance, and while coming out of trance, would in the developed part of the world have been diagnosed as schizophrenic. What use would there have been for a follow-up report on the dancers’ emotional state in the hours or days following the performance? Apparently, it was clear to Mead and Bateson that the entranced Balinese were all as mad as march hares, and that the pathogenic child-rearing practices of the typical Balinese mother were largely to blame for the dancers’ psychotic behaviour—Good grief, Margaret and Gregory! Whatever were you thinking? (See the interview with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson that was conducted by Stewart Brand in 1976: For God’s Sake, Margaret! https://sites.evergreen.edu/arunchandra/wp-content/uploads/sites/395/2018/05/BatesonAndMead.pdf)
Trance is an altered state of consciousness (ASC) characterized by changes in cognition, perceptions, and/or physiologically based sensibilities. In these aspects it is identical to hypnosis, which produces a state in which cognition and perception are altered (F. H. Frankel, Hypnosis: Trance as a Coping Mechanism, 1976). Brown and Fromm (Hypnotherapy and Hypnoanalysis, 1986) have stated that “dissociation is part of many hypnotic experiences.”
Hypnosis is generally brought on or induced by another person, the hypnotist, and involves a relationship between the two (Brown and Fromm, 1986). Hypnosis induced by the individual herself/himself is called self-hypnosis. Trance states in most cultures do not involve intentional induction by another individual but occur spontaneously, often in association with music, chanting, singing, or verbal encouragement (G. Rouget, Music and Trance, 1985). Mind-altering or hallucinogenic plants or drugs are used in association with trance ceremonies in some cultures and these may also have supernatural significance. The Balinese do not use “mind-altering” substances or drugs in connection with trance. (In fact, they use very little alcohol and few psychoactive substances except betel-nut.) The balian [healer/shaman] usually lights incense sticks at the beginning of each treatment session and some smoke is inhaled. The ASC of trance and hypnosis can be induced in a variety of circumstances, including solitude, in groups, in ceremonies, and in therapy. The terms “trance” and “hypnosis” overlap and can be used interchangeably to refer to the same biophysiological state. Both show similar aspects of ASC.
Trance/hypnosis has both subjective and objective manifestations. Subjectively, the individual recognizes and can often describe changes in perception and feelings, such as a sensation of darkness or a sense of the body floating. There is a constriction of attention with consequent loss of awareness of much of the surrounding environment (Brown and Fromm, 986). Trancers may also experience hallucinations. They often describe a richness or vividness of normal thought or visualization (generally with their eyes closed). Objective signs of trance/hypnosis include fluttering and slowly closing eyelids (indicating a state of light trance); abnormal postures (e.g. the arm raising slowly, but automatically, and held steady and comfortably in a raised position for a prolonged period of time; decreased sensitivity to painful stimuli (e.g. walking on hot coals without feeling any pain); changes in physiological response to heat, cold, or piercing the skin (e.g. no blistering after touching hot objects); little bleeding when cut, as in surgery or tooth extraction; and increased sensitivity to stimuli (e.g. perception of pain when the hypnotist suggests that a pencil eraser is burning hot). It is important to note that all these manifestations, including hallucinations and “messages from spirits” while in trance states, also occur in normal, asymptomatic, non-mentally ill people.
The psychological set of the trance/hypnosis subject is characterized by feelings of trust and a desire to allow oneself to enter and go freely into the state. Orne [M. T. Orne, The Nature of Hypnosis, 1959.] pointed out that “the skills of the hypnotist consist largely in creating a context where the patient can feel comfortable, trusting and willing to allow himself or herself to respond” (Soskis, Teaching Self-hypnosis, 1986). Jensen and Suryani [The Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character, 1992] hypothesized that the strong sense of trust-belief in the Balinese personality facilitates trance induction. This trust-belief is derived not only from a prolonged period (by Western standards) spent in the company of supportive and loving parents and caretakers in infancy and early childhood, but also from the closeness and security imparted by one’s family, ancestors, and sibling spirits throughout life. Jensen and Suryani (The Balinese People, 1992) also identified hypnotisability or hypnotic susceptibility, meaning an inherent facility in a majority of the population to enter trance easily, as another trait of the Balinese. [Luh Ketut Suryani and Gordon D. Jensen, Trance and Possession in Bali: A Window on Western Multiple Personality, Possession Disorder, and Suicide, Oxford University Press, 1993.]
The third and last film on my agenda is The Mystical Dervishes of Kurdistan, a television documentary, produced and directed by Brian Moser, which was first broadcast in 1974. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhwr5Och790) (My original viewing of this film in 1974 was pure happenstance, a result of my turning on the television at the fortuitous moment.) The film documents the ecstatic religious behaviour of the members of the Qadiri order of Sufism who, at the time of filming, lived as refugees in the Iranian village of Baiveh on the border to Iraq. The dervishes of this order strive towards marifa (ultimate knowledge) through submission and service to their sheikh, in the case of the dervishes in this film, to the strikingly handsome and intensely introspective Sheikh Hussein, whom the dervishes of Baiveh considered to be an intercessor between the devout Qadiri and Allah. With approval from Sheikh Hussein, the dervishes commit various acts of self-mortification in order to prove their absolute subservience to the sheikh and, thereby, even to Allah himself.
Having viewed this film, we are not left wondering why the dervishes engage in self-harm: This behaviour is encouraged, if not actually made obligatory, through the dictates of the Qadiri order. Nor is it unclear the manner in which the trance state, certainly a prerequisite for engaging in acts of self-mortification, is induced among the dervishes: The induction is a combination of rhythmic drum beating, ritual chanting, and protracted headbanging. (Such a combination would probably put even the least devout person, dervish or otherwise, into a profoundly dissociative state.) On the other hand, the fact that the dervishes appear to be relatively unharmed by their acts of self-harm is more difficult to explain satisfactorily.
That the act of licking a heated steel shovel without incurring severe burns of the lips and tongue is at all possible must have something to do with the Leidenfrost effect; science tells us that a wet hand can be very briefly plunged into a crucible of molten lead without any risk of injury. However, very few people, in their ordinary state of consciousness (right state of mind), would be willing to prove by self-demonstration that “the unburned hand immersed in molten lead” is not just another urban legend or conspiracy theory.
We also know for a fact that surgery performed using hypnosis as the sole anaesthesia results in less bleeding during the operation and better healing of the surgical wound following the operation: “More than 200 years have passed since Mesmer’s demonstrations of animal magnetism, and more than 150 years have passed since the first documented use of hypnosis as the sole anaesthetic for general surgical cases. We now have data showing physically measurable effects of suggestion or hypnosis on the nervous system. Imaging and electrophysiologic studies have demonstrated changes in spinal and supraspinal pain pathways under the influence of hypnosis. Because suggestions and focused attention can measurably alter pain perception and pain pathways, a similar influence may be expected for the autonomous nervous system involved in modulating gastric motility, regional blood perfusion, and the humoral response to stress. Faster wound healing, earlier postoperative gastrointestinal recovery, and less nausea have been reported when hypnosis or positive suggestions were part of the perioperative management.” (Albrecht Wobst, Hypnosis and Surgery: Past, Present, and Future, Anesthesia & Analgesia, 104[5] May 2007, pp. 1199-1208.) And yet, the silken cheeks of boys who have been pierced by steel skewers, in through one cheek and out the other, on earlier occasions of the same ceremony, show in the film footage no readily visible signs of what should have been inevitable scarification, which seems to me inexplicable.
Furthermore, at about 14 minutes into the film, several of the dervishes engage in a behaviour which, in psychiatry, is known as hyalophagia. The dervishes chew and swallow shards of broken glass; however, they appear to suffer no harmful effects from this behaviour. When I first saw this film, I became convinced that if the dervishes were not actually chewing and swallowing sugar glass (a dilute mixture of corn syrup and cane sugar that has been heated to 150˚C and subsequently moulded into stage props that can safely be smashed to shards on the heads of theatrical performers), then I was witnessing a paranormal event that could prove the “magical” potential of the trance state of consciousness. At the time, I was unaware of the fact that sideshow performers have been eating wine glasses, oil lamp chimneys, and, more often than not, incandescent light bulbs, ever since the early years of the Barnum & Bailey Circus in the late nineteenth century. The acquired ability to ingest glass is not necessarily a paranormal ability. The sideshow artist does not have to be in a trance in order to perform the classic glass eating stunt, but he or she does have to train extensively before the stunt can be performed with impunity. I still feel, however, that the dervishes who eat glass in this film, do so with an abandon and a lack of concern for personal safety that borders on the supernatural, especially considering the likelihood that they first ate glass in the trance state of consciousness without any preliminary training in the performance art of glass eating.
The American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology defines “trance” as “an altered state of consciousness characterized by decreased awareness of and responsiveness to stimuli and an apparent loss of voluntary control.” This is but one of numerous attempts to accurately define the trance state of human consciousness in as few words as possible; as such, it is as good an attempt as any of the others. But as difficult as it is to describe the phenomenon in a manner that would include every suspected instance of it, we who view these three films will have little difficulty in deciding which of the documented participants are in a trance state of consciousness and which are not. It’s true; the most obviously entranced are those who are in a profoundly dissociative state. These people behave in a manner they would not even consider doing in everyday circumstances, while in their more usual state of consciousness. Trance is, however, always more or less dissociative. Some of the participants are undoubtedly under the spell of what may be called a “light to medium” trance, but they are nonetheless in a trance state of consciousness. Sheikh Hussein (at about 9-13 minutes into the film, while he is granting the dervishes permission to show their faith in Allah) is, I think, a good example of a person who is in a “medium to deep” state of trance. His demeanour is by no means ostentatious or overbearing, even though he is the de facto spiritual leader of the dervishes in Baiveh. He moves about among the dervishes in a slow, purposeful manner. There is no doubt that he is master of this ceremony, and yet there is something “off” about him, something about his eyes, his face, and his body movements that tells us that he is presiding over the ceremony while in a trance state of consciousness. We know, perhaps instinctively, that he is not a fraud.
My grandfather once had a small dog, a mongrel named Jerry, that absolutely adored him. Well, almost. I write “almost” because my grandfather had since his teenage years had something else that was much bigger than this dog: his problem with alcohol, a problem for which the dog showed no tolerance at all. Whenever Jerry’s master had been away in town, not to return until late evening, the dog would wait patiently inside the farmhouse gate—but always in utter silence. When he finally heard the clip-clop of his master’s horse approaching the stable, he would certainly have pricked his ears and begun to wag his tail in expectation—but still in utter silence, no barking, no whining. (The stable was situated about a hundred yards from the gate, along the narrow path that led from the farmhouse to the road that led to town.) Once his horse was stabled, my grandfather would come back out onto the path, but if he displayed any signs, however subtle and veiled by the dark, of having had anything alcoholic to drink, the dog at the gate would start to bark; and the barking would change to a menacing growl as my grandfather neared the gate. My grandfather, knowing that the dog was not just pretending to be aggressive, would not attempt to open the gate and enter the yard, not until my grandmother, cognizant of the situation at hand, had come out of the house and tied up the dog. The next morning everything was back to normal—my grandfather was sober, and Jerry once again adored his master without reservation.
We don’t need to have conclusively defined the trance state in order to be able to recognise it. Since infancy, we have grown accustomed to the sort of countenance, body language, and apparent state of consciousness in others that is generally considered to be indicative of a good state of physical health and a normal state of human consciousness. Any deviation from this behavioural norm, however slight, will almost invariably prompt us to ask the other person: “Are you sure you are feeling okay? Is there anything I can do for you, or anything I can get you?” (After all, we are, at least basically, kind and considerate creatures.) It is, of course, quite possible that this other person, about whom we have become worried, is actually physically or mentally ill, and we will usually be able to pick up on this because we have been trained to—so to speak—we have been taught by others to know what to look for. But this other person may, instead, be experiencing an altered state of consciousness, different from our own, and we should be able to pick up on this possibility because we easily become aware of human behaviour that is in any way out of the ordinary, and the behaviour of people in trance is almost always odd, to say the least; in the case of the entranced people who were documented in the films referred to above, very odd indeed.
It might be appropriate at this point to explain why I was, in the early 1970s, especially interested in studying the behavioural manifestations of the trance state of consciousness, and also why I was trying to distinguish and describe the various ways in which the trance state may be induced. At this time, I was working on a theory that I hoped might help me understand why it is that some people have a very keen sense of musical pitch and an excellent tonal memory, while others, most others, it would appear, do not. I was speculating over the propensity of some people to almost effortlessly fall into a trance state of consciousness, sometimes with little or no awareness of the fact that they have. I wondered if this propensity might make all the difference when it comes to developing musical ability. In other words, do people who are more suggestible than others make the better musicians. Imagine that a hypnotic or a meditative technique could be devised by means of which people with questionable musical ability might enhance whatever ability they actually do have; or by means of which people with unquestionable musical talent might become true masters of their art.
It’s all good and well with theories; it’s good fun and not that difficult to devise them, especially for a theorist who is theorising entirely on the basis of other people’s experiences. But how in the world was I ever going to devise a hypnotic or meditative technique for the enhancement of musical ability if I didn’t know from personal experience what it is like to enter into a trance state of consciousness? I could sing (reasonably well), and I could play several musical instruments (with some amount of proficiency), but I had never hypnotised anyone, nor been hypnotised myself; and I had never really succeeded in my attempts at meditation. I was convinced that the trance state is a very real and very disparate mental phenomenon that in various circumstances can occur in some people—but, apparently, not in me. This unhappy state of affairs would, however, suddenly change, a week or two after I saw the documentary on the mystical dervishes of Kurdistan.
I was living and studying in Sweden at the time, and I was on my way by (borrowed) car from Stockholm to Gävle. The trip had gone without problems prior to my pulling in at a filling station just outside and to the north of the city of Uppsala. Uppsala is situated about 70 km north of Stockholm along the E4 highway, and about 100 km south of Gävle. The highway between Uppsala and Gävle is reasonably level, fairly straight, and has always been kept in a good state of repairs, which may help to explain what happened to me after I pulled out of the filling station and turned back onto the E6. I remember continuing on my way northward from Uppsala for fifteen or twenty minutes while drinking my hot coffee before it went cold, but after that I only remember suddenly finding myself on the E16 turnoff into the town of Gävle, seeing a large road sign directing traffic to a side road leading to the county hospital. At the time, I felt compelled to pull into a nearby parking area, park the car, and try to gather my wits about me. I knew about the phenomenon called highway hypnosis, or white line fever, or automatic driving; but I had not experienced it before. It was unnerving, to say the least. I had just spent nearly an hour of my life that I could not account for. Needless to say, perhaps, I kept the car radio blaring during the entire return trip to Stockholm. I had, however, learned what it is like to enter a profoundly dissociative mental state; drive a car in fairly heavy traffic for over an hour, entirely with the help of some strange kind of autopilot; and live to tell the tale.
I have had a rather long list of favourite philosophers. I won’t bore you by enumerating them all; however, I added the latest and, I suppose, final name to the very top of my list, during the Christmas holiday in 1974 when I first read the books—four books at this time—by Carlos Castaneda. The name of the philosopher, however, was not Dr. Carlos Castaneda, whom I consider to have had about the same relationship to Juan Matus as James Boswell had more successfully had to Dr. Samuel Johnson.
I had the good fortune of reading the third book of the tetralogy, Journey to Ixtlan, first, which gave me a better initial understanding of what the teachings of don Juan actually were, than reading the books in order would have done. The first two books, The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality, mostly concern Carlos Castaneda’s attempts to master the use of various hallucinogens in his quest for transcendental knowledge while under the tutelage of don Juan Matus, but Castaneda admits in the introduction to Journey to Ixtlan that his assumption in the first two books, that is to say: “the articulation points in learning to be a sorcerer were the states of non-ordinary reality produced by the ingestion of psychotropic plants,” had been a mistake. “They were not the essential feature of the sorcerer’s description of the world,” he wrote, “but were only an aid to cement parts of the description which I had been incapable of perceiving otherwise. It was simply my lack of sensitivity which had fostered their use.”
Thus, it appeared to me that I should discount the first two books almost entirely if I wanted to understand the message that don Juan had wanted to convey to the world at large by the means of his agreement to become the primary native informant for Castaneda’s proposed ethnographic research.
Don Juan contended that only a warrior can become a keeper of knowledge. And what sort of person is a warrior, don Juan? Basically, the warrior is a person who has elected to follow a path that may eventually lead to knowledge. And what sort of knowledge could a warrior’s path lead to? Don Juan never says, possibly because this particular sort of knowledge defies description. How does the warrior traverse the path to this inexpressible knowledge? By overcoming all feelings of self-importance through the means of “stopping the world.” And what did don Juan mean by the metaphor “stopping the world?” I believe he meant the warrior’s acquired ability to purposely enter into a trance state of consciousness. And how does the warrior acquire the ability to enter into a trance, don Juan? By learning to “stop the internal dialogue” through the means of an “appropriate form of walking.” “Whenever the [internal] dialogue stops, the world collapses, and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way.” By “stopping the internal dialogue,” I think he meant steadfastly maintaining a mental state of focused attention. “The appropriate form of walking” involved “walking for long stretches without focusing the eyes on anything. His [don Juan’s] recommendation had been to not look at anything directly but, by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. He had insisted, although I had not understood at the time, that if one kept one’s eyes at a point just above the horizon, it was possible to notice, at once, everything in almost the total 180-degree range in front of one’s eyes. He had assured me that that exercise was the only way of shutting off the internal dialogue, and that the world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so.”
For the purpose of presenting my argument I must first explain the basic premise of sorcery [brujería] as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description. For the sake of validating this premise don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born. He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as described. According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it. For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common. The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are rarely, if ever, open to question. [Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, Simon & Schuster (1972), pp. 8-9.]
As soon as I had read the above quoted passage from Journey to Ixtlan, I realised that I had a new most-favourite philosopher: Juan Matus.In 1974, there seemed little reason to fear that Carlos Castaneda had invented this Mexican Indian sorcerer for the purpose of fraudulently obtaining his PhD in anthropology by passing off his own, made-up brand of (Native-American) philosophy to his academic advisors as the result of ethnographic research he had carried out in Arizona and Mexico. (The book Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory, by Richard de Mille, was published in 1976, and the research presented in this book showed beyond a reasonable doubt that Castaneda must actually have fabricated large portions of his narrative. In his book The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies, published in 1980, de Mille went all the way out on the limb and asserted categorically that don Juan could not possibly have been a real person. This assertion, unfortunately, would set the tone for all further discussion concerning the truth or the lack thereof in Castaneda’s writings.) Nonetheless, the books by Carlos Castaneda were generating a considerable amount of controversy as early as by the turn of the year in 1975. Some of the critics were claiming that Castaneda could not be trusted to be entirely truthful concerning his experiences with Juan Matus. It occurred to me that an attempt to validate these books, at least in part, might be done experientially, in much the same manner as another, at that time, very popular “New-Age” publication, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain was being investigated by its readers:
“But what does the shape of the pyramid do?” we asked.
“It generates energy,” the Czech said straight-faced.
Was it a joke? If not, how come the Czechs were so familiar with the “secrets of the pyramids?”
They told us. Some years ago, [1930s] a Frenchman, a Monsieur [Antoine] Bovis, had visited the Great Pyramid in Egypt. A third of the way up the structure is the pharaoh’s chamber. Tired with the heat, Bovis entered. He found the air unusually humid. But there was something else in the room that surprised the Frenchman, something that had no connection with the pharaohs. There were garbage cans in the chamber containing cats and other small animals that had wandered into the pyramid, lost their way, and died. “There’s something strange about those animals,” Bovis thought. “There’s no smell of decay from them.” The animals were dehydrated, mummified despite the humidity. It struck him as very odd.
“Could it be,” he wondered, “that the shape of the pyramid alone could guarantee that the pharaoh’s corpse would be preserved even if the intricate embalming failed?” He noted that the ratio for the dimensions and also the bearings for the base were correct within 5 seconds of a degree on the north-south, east-west axes—the most accurately oriented building known to engineering science. “This is certainly not by accident,” he decided.
Bovis made a model of the Cheops pyramid, with a base about one yard in length. He oriented it squarely on the north-south axis, and a third of the way up in this structure he placed a dead cat. After a time, it mummified. Gradually he experimented putting different types of organic matter that decayed quickly. From these experiments, Bovis concluded that there must be something about the pyramid that stops decay and causes quick dehydration. [Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, Bantam Books (1970), p.376.]
Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain was published in 1970 and had almost at once become a bestseller.
Read the blurb from the back cover:
The Soviet bloc got there first. And set off a titanic struggle between good and evil to control and use psychic powers. Read about decades-long scientific work with PK—mind over matter; the telepathic knock-out; a device to photograph the human aura and chi energy; psychic machines, and dowsing at the service of geology. Find out about artificial reincarnation to unleash talent; suggestology to access genius; astrology to beat infertility and choose the sex of your child; the psi-meister who kept employees in trance for twenty years and explored the moment of death—and beyond.
Read also the book review by Robert Van de Castle, an American clinical psychologist and parapsychologist, in the Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 34, Iss. 4, (1970), p. 296:
I found the book difficult to review. A considerable part of my difficulty derives from the fact that I am not a physical scientist and am therefore unable to evaluate the various physical theories propounded of the explanations of the technical equipment described in the book. Additionally, because I have never visited the “Iron Curtain” countries mentioned in the book or interacted with their scientists, I have no personal basis upon which to gauge the standards of investigation and validation employed by them in pursuing their research activities. Since no original research reports by these scientists are included, the reader is dependent upon Ostrander’s and Schroeder’s evaluations of these new “psychic discoveries,” although the inclusion of some brief appendices and a bibliography containing 425 citations enables some independent examination of the authors’ claims to be made. Unfortunately, the majority of these citations are to Russian sources, and many of them refer to newspaper or magazine stories. The authors of this book are professional writers whose literary accomplishments encompass several books, plays, magazine articles, and poetry. Information obtained from attending the First Annual Parapsychology Conference in Moscow in 1968, and from correspondence and interviews with scientists in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 was utilised to create the 29 chapters making up the book. The chapters are not linked together very well and the reader is absentmindedly introduced over and over again to the same people and their findings as if they were appearing for the first time. The titles for the chapters are such journalistic “grabbers” as: “UFOs and Psi, Seeking the Cosmic Messiah,” “The Telepathic Knock-out,” “Artificial Reincarnation,” “Astrological Birth Control,” and “Pyramid Power and the Riddle of the Razor Blades.”
I myself have found the book impossible to review, probably because it is impossible for me to take it seriously at all. In the early 1970s, there were two camps among the students and staff at the Department of Psychology in Stockholm. Some believed, or at least hoped, that these psychic discoveries from behind the Iron Curtain had actually been made, while others felt that Ostrander and Schroeder’s book reeked of chintzy tabloid journalism and could not be trusted any further than the distance to the nearest wastebasket. In addition to an ongoing debate, there was even a considerable amount of pyramid making going on amongst the students, a sort of extracurricular activity. Those who wanted to believe in the veracity of Ostrander and Schroeder’s reports from Russia and Eastern Europe were building cardboard pyramids with which they hoped to prove that organic matter would not decompose within an exact scale model of the Great Pyramid of Giza that has been placed in perfect alignment with true north, but would become desiccated instead, and eventually mummified. (The question of how the ancient Egyptians were able to determine the exact direction to the geographic North Pole before building their pyramids was never considered, as far as I know.) Those who thought it was all an elaborate, and rather silly, hoax wanted to prove that a cod fillet placed in one of these scale model pyramids would stink to high heaven in a matter of days with no sign of mummification. Which side won? Oddly enough, both sides. The adherents of desiccation claimed that the other side had been careless with the construction and cardinal orientation of their pyramids, and thus they had ended up with inedible, or at least, unpalatable sashimi. The debunkers complained that they were not given access to their opponents pyramids in order for them to verify that the freshly filleted codfish had indeed been transformed, at room temperature and at a normal percentage of relative humidity (30-50%), into Norwegian stockfish.
The best way to validate the books by Carlos Castaneda would have been to personally track down, and preferably, also interview Juan Matus, the primary source for the Teachings. Conducting such an interview would still have been possible in the early 1970s. Then one could decide whether or not one would still like to follow said teachings once Carlos Castaneda’s interpretation was no longer an integral part of the equation. Unfortunately, Castaneda was not forthcoming with a full name or an address because, he said, his informant had claimed the prerogative of remaining anonymous. It occurred to me that the second-best way to validate the books would be to put the Teachings to the test by personally examining and attempting to follow some of the practices that, allegedly, “make up the lot of a man of knowledge.”
Two of the more important concepts in the teachings of don Juan would appear to be lucid “dreaming” (in Spanish, most likely el arte de soñar) and “the appropriate form of walking” (probably: la forma correcta de caminar). Of these two, dreaming was the practice I was most anxious to try out and see if it actually did work. Let us take a look at what Carlos Castaneda wrote about the warrior’s task of “setting up dreaming:”
“There are certain things we will talk about from now on only at places of power,” he went on. “I have brought you here, because this is your first trial. This is a place of power, and here we can talk only about power,”
“I really don’t know what power is,” I said.
“Power is something a warrior deals with,” he said. “At first, it’s an incredible, far-fetched affair; it is hard to even think about it. This is what is happening to you now. Then power becomes a serious matter; one may not have it, or one may not even fully realise that it exists, yet one knows that something is there, something that was not noticeable before. Next, power is manifested as something uncontrollable that comes to oneself. It is not possible for me to say how it comes or what it really is. It is nothing and yet it makes marvels appear before your very eyes. And finally, power is something in oneself, something that controls one’s acts and yet obeys one’s command.”
There was a short pause. Don Juan asked me if I had understood. I felt ludicrous saying I did. He seemed to have noticed my dismay and chuckled.
“I am going to teach you right here the first step to power,” he said as if he were dictating a letter to me. “I am going to teach you how to set up dreaming.”
He looked at me and again asked me if I knew what he meant. I did not. I was hardly following him at all. He explained that to “set up dreaming” meant to have a concise and pragmatic control over the general situation of a dream, comparable to the control one has over any choice in the desert, such as climbing up a hill or remaining in the shade of a water canyon.
“You must start by doing something very simple,” he said. “Tonight, in your dreams, you must look at your hands.”
I laughed out loud. His tone was so factual that it was as if he were telling me to do something commonplace.
“Why do you laugh?” he asked me with surprise.
“How can I look at my hands in my dreams?”
“Very simple, focus your eyes on them just like this.”
He bent his head forward and stared at his hands with his mouth open. His gesture was so comical that I had to laugh.
“Seriously, how can you expect me to do that?” I asked.
“The way I’ve told you,” he snapped. “You can, of course, look at whatever you goddamn please—your toes, or your belly, or your pecker, for that matter. I said your hands because that was the easiest thing for me to look at. Don’t think it’s a joke. Dreaming is as serious as seeing or dying or any other thing in this awesome, mysterious world.”
“Think about it as something entertaining. Imagine all the inconceivable things you could accomplish. A man hunting for power has almost no limits in his dreaming.”
I asked him to give me some pointers.
“There aren’t any pointers,” he said. “Just look at your hands.”
“There must be more that you could tell me,” I insisted.
He shook his head and squinted his eyes, staring at me in short glances.
“Every one of us is different,” he finally said. “What you call pointers would only be what I myself did when I was learning. We are not the same; we aren’t even vaguely alike.”
“Maybe anything you’d say would help me.”
“It would be simpler for you just to start looking at your hands.”
He seemed to be organizing his thoughts and bobbed his head up and down.
“Every time you look at anything in your dreams it changes shape,” he said after a long silence. “The trick in learning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but to sustain the sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded in bringing everything into focus. Then there is no difference between what you do when you sleep and what you do when you are not sleeping. Do you see what I mean?”
I confessed that although I understood what he had said I was incapable of accepting his premise. I brought up the point that in a civilized world there were scores of people who had delusions and could not distinguish what took place in the real world from what took place in their fantasies. I said that such persons were undoubtedly mentally ill, and my uneasiness increased every time he would recommend that I should act like a crazy man.
After my long explanation don Juan made a comical gesture of despair by putting his hands to his cheeks and sighing loudly.
“Leave your civilized world alone,” he said. “Let it be! Nobody is asking you to behave like a madman. I’ve already told you; a warrior has to be perfect in order to deal with the power he hunts; how can you conceive that a warrior would not be able to tell things apart?
“On the other hand, you, my friend, who knows what the real world is, would fumble and die in no time at all if you would have to depend on your ability for telling what is real and what is not.”
Don Juan’s instructions to Carlos seemed to me straightforward enough. Once the warrior has become aware of the possibility to dream lucidly and has chosen lucid dreaming as an avenue to gaining and storing personal power, all he or she needs to do is to hold meditative sessions, staring at some prechosen object, until that object appears in a dream, thus making it evident to the sleeping warrior that he or she is in the midst of a dream. I thought I could do that, if it didn’t take too long or expend too much mental energy. For some reason, waiting until I might catch sight of my hands in a dream did not appeal to me. Perhaps because of what I consider to be my natural affinity for dreaming about the ocean—I spent my first years living and sleeping in a house at the very edge of the Atlantic Ocean—I chose the waterscape, any kind of waterscape, as a mnemonic device that might trigger an awareness of the fact that I was dreaming if I were indeed asleep and in the midst of a dream. In other words, if a particular dreamscape included the image of some body of water, like a river, or a lake, or the ocean; I would, in the most ideal of cases, realise that I was asleep, and yet fully aware of what was going on, both in my dream world and in the real world. According to don Juan’s premise, I could then turn my attention to other elements of my dream and attempt to purposely manipulate the course and outcome of the dream in question.
To this end, I walked down to the shoreline of that bay of the Baltic Sea which is only about 200 metres from the house in which I was living at the time. I sat down on a big rock, and then I stared at the water for as long as I could—about half an hour was the limit of my patience, apparently—in order to implant this particular mnemonic device into my consciousness. It was a fairly windy day, and therefore, my miniature waterscape was everchanging. I repeated this procedure on several later occasions, always on windy days. Very early one morning, soon after I had completed these training sessions, I woke from what I suppose was REM sleep with the clear memory of having been in very heavy ocean weather on a relatively small ship while I was asleep. I had experienced storms at sea in real life. For this reason, perhaps, I even had the memory of realising in my dream that such a storm could be life-threatening for seafarers in small ships, but also that I was not really at risk because all I had to do in order to put myself out of danger was to wake up. And this I had done, but upon wakening from my dream, I had found everything in my bedroom absolutely shipshape and Bristol fashion—with the exception of some very negligible saltwater stains on the wallpaper that were probably already there before the room was tossed about on stormy sea. (You may think that this initial dream experience must have been a fluke, but let me tell you, I have since found myself in stormy dream weather any number of times, but with varying outcomes.)
It seemed to me that learning to dream lucidly might not be as far-fetched an endeavour as it first had appeared to be. Freud would probably have had a field day with my dream experience of heavy-weather sailing, but interpretation was not really the point of the exercise; the point was to answer the question of whether or not it is possible to influence dream content, and also outcome, by following the instruction of Carlos Castaneda’s native informant, Juan Matus. Apparently, it is possible. Just imagine what one might be able to do in dreams if the meditative part of the exercise could be performed while in a profoundly altered state of consciousness. Let us once again take a look at what Carlos Castaneda wrote about “setting up dreaming:”
Don Juan looked at the western horizon and said that there were still a few hours of daylight left.
“We have to be here for a long time,” he explained. “So we either sit quietly or we talk. It is not natural for you to be silent, so let’s keep on talking. This spot is a power place and it must be used to us before nightfall. You must sit here, as naturally as possible, without fear or impatience. It seems that the easiest way for you to relax is to take notes, so write to your heart’s content.
“And now, suppose you tell me about your dreaming.”
His sudden shift caught me unprepared. He repeated his request. There was a great deal to say about it. “Dreaming” entailed cultivating a peculiar control over one’s dreams to the extent that the experiences undergone in them and those lived in one’s waking hours acquired the same pragmatic valence. The sorcerer’s Allegation was that under the impact of “dreaming” the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from reality became inoperative.
Don Juan’s praxis of “dreaming” was an exercise that consisted of finding one’s hands in a dream. In other words, one had to deliberately dream that one was looking for and could find one’s hands in a dream by simply dreaming that one lifted one’s hands to the level of the eyes.
After years of unsuccessful attempts, I had finally accomplished the task. Looking at it in retrospect, it became evident to me that I had succeeded only after I had gained a degree of control over the world of my everyday life.
Don Juan wanted to know the salient points. I began telling him that the difficulty of setting up the command to look at my hands seemed to be, quite often, insurmountable. He had warned me that the early stage of the preparatory facet, which he called “setting up dreaming,” consisted of a deadly game that one’s mind played with itself, and that some part of myself was going to do everything it could to prevent the fulfilment of my task. That could include, don Juan had said, plunging me into a loss of meaning, melancholy, or even suicidal depression. I did not go that far, however. My experience was rather on the light, comical side; nonetheless, the result was equally frustrating. Every time I was about to look at my hands in a dream something extraordinary would happen; I would begin to fly, or my dream would turn into a nightmare, or it would simply become a very pleasant experience of bodily excitation; everything in the dream would extend far beyond the “normal” in matters of vividness and, therefore, be terribly absorbing. My original intention of observing my hands was always forgotten in light of the new situation.
One night, quite unexpectedly, I found my hands in my dreams. I dreamt that I was walking on an unknown street in a foreign city and suddenly I lifted up my hands and placed them in front of my face. It was as if something within myself had given up and had permitted me to watch the backs of my hands.
Don Juan’s instructions had been that as soon as the sight of my hands would begin to dissolve or change into something else, I had to shift my view from my hands to any other element in the surroundings of my dream. In that particular dream I shifted my view to a building at the end of the street. When the sight of the building began to dissipate, I focused my attention on other elements of the surroundings of my dream. The end result was an incredibly clear composite picture of a deserted street in some unknown foreign city.
Don Juan made me continue with my account of other experiences in “dreaming.” We talked for a long time.
At the end of my report, he stood up and went to the bushes. I also stood up. I was nervous. It was an unwarranted sensation since there was nothing precipitating fear or concern. Don Juan returned shortly. He noticed my agitation.
“Calm down,” he said, holding my arm gently.
He made me sit down and put my notebook on my lap. He coaxed me to write. His argument was that I should not disturb the power place with unnecessary feelings of fear or hesitation.
“Why do I get so nervous?” I asked.
“It’s natural,” he said. “Something in you is threatened by your activities in dreaming. As long as you did not think about those activities, you were all right. But now that you have revealed your actions you’re about to faint.
“Each warrior has his own way of dreaming. Each way is different. The only thing which we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.”
He asked me if I was capable of selecting topics for “dreaming.” I said that I did not have the faintest idea of how to do that.
“The sorcerer’s explanation of how to select a topic for dreaming,” he said, “is that a warrior chooses the topic by deliberately holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal dialogue. In other words, if he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming, even if for only an instant, then the desired topic will come to him. I’m sure you’ve done that, although you were not aware of it.” [Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, Simon & Schuster (1974), pp. 10-12.]
At the beginning of our association don Juan had delineated another procedure: walking for long stretches without focusing the eyes on anything. His recommendation had been to not look at anything directly but, by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. He had insisted, although I had not understood at the time, that if one kept one’s unfocused eyes at a point just above the horizon, it was possible to notice, at once, everything in almost the total 180-degree range in front of one’s eyes. He had assured me that that exercise was the only way of shutting off the internal dialogue. He used to ask me for reports on my progress, and then he stopped enquiring about it. [Castaneda, ibid., p. 13.]
“The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world. Every effort of a teacher is geared to prove this point to his apprentice. But accepting it seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we knew everything about the world. A teacher, from the very first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it stopping the internal dialogue, and they are convinced that it is the single most important technique that an apprentice can learn.
“In order to stop the view of the world which one has held since the cradle, it is not enough to wish or make a resolution. One needs a practical task; that practical task is called the right way of walking. It seems harmless and nonsensical. As everything else that has power in itself or by itself, the right way of walking does not attract attention. You understood it and regarded it, at least for several years, as a curious way of behaving. It didn’t dawn on you until very recently that that was the most effective way to stop your internal dialogue.”
“How does the right way of walking stop the internal dialogue?” I asked.
“Walking in that specific manner saturates the tonal,” he said. [According to don Juan, if I understand him correctly, the tonal is the totality of a person’s socially acquired state of consciousness at any given time between that person’s birth and death.] “It floods it. You see, the attention of the tonal has to be placed on its creations. In fact, it is that attention that creates the order of the world in the first place; so, the tonal must be attentive to the elements of its world in order to maintain it, and must, above all, uphold the view of the world as internal dialogue.”
He said that the right way of walking was a subterfuge. The warrior, first by curling his fingers, drew attention to the arms; and then by looking, without focusing the eyes, at any point directly in front of him on the arc that started at the tip of his feet and ended above the horizon, he literally flooded his “tonal” with information. The “tonal,” without its one-to-one relation with the elements of its description, was incapable of talking to itself, and thus one became silent.” [Castaneda, ibid., pp. 236-237.]
Once again, don Juan’s explanation of the state of mind that has to be mastered in order to do dreaming is quite straightforward. “Stopping the internal dialogue” is the particularly apt metaphor that don Juan used to describe a person’s entrance into that disparate, more or less dissociative state of mind and pattern of behaviour that is generally known as “trance.” Ask people, who claim to have experienced the trance state of consciousness, to describe it, and they will probably say: “I had somehow lost my ability to think, to hold conversation with myself.” To describe the profoundly dissociative trance state, don Juan used another very apt metaphor: “stopping the world.” Ask people, who claim to have experienced a profoundly dissociative state of trance, to describe it, and they will probably not be able to say anything at all about it.
According to don Juan, the best way to enter into the trance state is to walk for a long stretch, looking straight ahead, while keeping the eyes slightly crossed, and thus, unfocused. How far is a long stretch? I imagined that the necessary length of road would depend on the particular person doing the walking. I considered my apparent ineptitude for meditation, and then I decided upon choosing a road that would allow me to walk for several hours if need be, but, initially, to walk in the manner of a warrior only as far as my limited capacity to persevere would allow, and then turn around and walk home. My first walk as a fledgling warrior (á la Juan Matus) lasted about half an hour before I had to turn around and walk home again. Nothing noticeable happened. The following three or four attempts were of about the same duration as my first, and with the same disappointing result. I decided to extend my walks to a full hour’s duration, and after my first trial walk according to this revised paradigm, I was delighted to note that, in terms of sheer perseverance, I had no problems in following it; however, I felt not so much as the tinge of a trance on any of these walks. It’s true; I did not have much of a chance to talk to myself while walking in the manner of a warrior; my attention was all too focused on avoiding the obvious pitfalls of this particular style of bipedal locomotion, such as tripping over my own feet and finding myself scratched and bruised in the roadside ditch. But the mental state of focused attention, however well focused it might be, and free from distracting thoughts, is not the mental state that I thought don Juan had meant with his expression “stopping the internal dialogue.” I was convinced that he was talking about a person’s entrance into a profoundly dissociative state of trance after he or she has conscientiously walked in the manner of a warrior for a shorter or, judging from my own experience, probably longer period of time. And I was expecting that if I did actually succeed in stopping my internal dialogue, it would be much more a moment of eureka than merely discovering that I had gained the ability to curtail the number of words that I say to myself.
I had continued my daily “warrior” walks for about a week when I finally lost patience. I had come to the conclusion that the exercise probably did not work—at least, it probably did not work for me. I decided to give it one more chance before giving up, but on this final attempt at stopping my internal dialogue by walking in the manner of a warrior, I would not set a predetermined limit to the duration of my walk; I would attempt to walk the entire length of the road, which was about 25 kilometres from where my house was situated to where this single-laned gravel road intersected the only paved double-laned highway on the island. I would walk until I could walk no further before definitely admitting to myself that I was acting like a damned fool.
I did make it all the way to road’s end. From there I managed to hitch a ride back to within a more comfortable walking distance from my house, but I had felt very disoriented, and I probably did not hold a very coherent conversation with the man who gave me the ride. I was racking my brain, trying to remember the actual spot along the gravel road where I had lost touch with my walking/waking self. It seemed to me that I had stopped my internal dialogue and, at the same time, very obviously stopped the world, at about the halfway mark along the road, having walked for at least two hours. The remainder of the walk was a complete blank in my memory. I had negotiated the ruts and the bends in the road entirely on autopilot.
Once I got back home and also, more or less, back to my normal state of consciousness, I was feeling quite pleased with myself. After two weeks of daily practice, I had succeeded in doing something that Carlos Castaneda conceded had taken him years to accomplish: to intentionally put oneself into a trance state of consciousness. I also felt that I had even validated the books by Carlos Castaneda—at least, to my own satisfaction. Juan Matus (c. 1891-1973) had been a real person, an indigenous Mexican sorcerer (Sp. brujo) with whom Carlos Castaneda had worked during the 1960s and, possibly, into the early 1970s. Despite all of Castaneda’s very apparent embellishment to his field reports, the Teachings of Don Juan were, basically, the actual teachings of don Juan, and not the teachings of don Carlos. And the Teachings were wonderfully simple: The warrior’s path to (transcendental) knowledge was, and is, a path anyone can take, provided the fledgling warrior should procure a single, absolutely prerequisite ability: the ability to shut off the internal dialogue at will, and thereby, even to stop the world—and enter an almost separate reality in which the warrior can have no presumptions about what may or may not occur.