(page 105)

2.4 PARANORMAL EFFECTS OF TRANCE

2.41 General

The payoff of the prototaxic mode, and the reason why individuals and societies in all times and cultures have so universally endured the privations and discomfort of trance must lie, of course, in the enormously voluminous and varied paranormal effects. To call the roll of alleged powers is so impressive as to be stupefying to the rational mind: curing the body, healing the mind, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychometry, mastery over pain, mastery over fire, control of breathing, psychic heat, out-of-body experience, materializations and the production of apparitions, psychokinesis, glossolalia (or speaking with tongues), automatic writing, psychedelic experiences, access to hidden knowledge, access to the dead, access to creativity, are but some of the better known ones, and there are probably others, of which it may be wisest not even to speak.

We shall discuss the particulars and examine the evidence in short order, but before doing so it may be instructive to note a) the global aspects of these alleged powers, b) the fact that they do not appear confined to a single type of trance, to a single locus in space or time, to a single article of belief, religious doctrine, or school of psychology, to a single method of procedure, to a single state of age, sex, class, or intelligence in the operator or operand; they appear to have universal elements characteristic of a new vivency. The only

(page 106)

common characteristics appear to be a state of trance involving excursion of the ego consciousness and extreme focusing of attention and high suggestibility. Such considerations suggest that whenever these requirements for juncture with the numinous element are met, that psychedelic powers result. And since these results are seen only with this union of the individual human mind and the general numinous element, there must be something peculiarly special and powerful about this union.

As we inspect the range and effect of the paranormal properties of trance, it is suggestive that they also cluster around "the three illusions" as if by their very presence to indicate that ultimate reality does not reside in the physical universe, in time, or in personality. To take a brief list of the psychic powers, telepathy and psychokinesis testify to the fact that there is more to ultimate reality than the physical universe: they are essentially denials of the laws of physics and the ultimacy of space. Psychometry, precognition, and accelerated mental process indicate the same for time, and suggest to us that "the Eternal Now" is outside of time. (Indeed, precognition is the principal tip-off). Finally, clairvoyance, OOB experience, healing, and the mastery of the body over various media (such as fire) suggest the interconnection between what we call individuals in the first instance, and from this following the contact between the individual and the general mind in which the former is a part of the latter as a grain of sand is of the beach.

Since it is incontestable that psychic powers are seen in much greater profusion in prototaxic mode (trance) than in either the parataxic (where they are almost altogether absent), or in the syntaxic mode (where while equally useful, they generally tend to be much less spectacular), one is justified in asking why this should be true. One answer, of course, is that the more complete excursion of the ego during prototaxic trance allows more chance for the special laws of OSC (the laws of physics) to be superseded by the larger laws of non-ordinary reality. In this connection, it is interesting that the excursion of even a single ego (of the entranced person) allows this alteration to take place, not only for his own percepts, but in some cases even for others around him. Since one might from ignorance equally well suppose that the OSC laws would not be superseded by the NOR laws unless all persons in the situation were in ASC trance, the evidence suggests that the hold of the OSC laws of physics (the hold of physical reality) is somewhat less "tight" than one might expect; the facts also suggest that even one person in contact with the numinous element represents a very powerful situation.

While we must postpone discussion of the similarities and differences

(page 107)

of the three modes until later in the book, it is only fair to point out that perhaps some of the reason for the less spectacular aspects of psychic powers in the syntaxic mode, is not that the powers do not exist, but that because there are fewer adepts at that level or that the adepts who are there are mindful of the injunction against display of "siddhis," one sees much less of it.

In fact, so universal an accompaniment of trance are psychic phenomena, that one might well be justified in stating their occurrence as a defining characteristic of a state which is otherwise somewhat hard to characterize. While it is true that psychic phenomena occur during other states of consciousness, (with the exception of "Psychic contagion" to which we shall later devote attention), the only other states with significant evidences of psychic manifestations are dreams and satori. The former is very similar to trance in many of its manifestations, and the latter is so incompletely researched by western psychologists that we know very little about it.

In comparing trance with dreams in their characteristics which may give encouragement to psychic manifestations, we note the altered state of consciousness, in which the ego is excursed or changed very significantly, the complete suggestibility, the increased possibility of the fulfillment of otherwise-denied wishes.
Tauber and Green (1959:106) state:
 

The way in which extrasensory perception, mental telepathy, clairvoyance, and other occult processes operate strongly suggest that they reflect subthreshold perceptual phenomena.
 
We have, for the sake of convenience, divided trance states into various categories. But the reader will quickly note that there is much overlapping, and many mixed aspects of trance. The difficulty in determining what hypnosis is, for example, is indicative of the fact the altered state of consciousness known as trance is a common experience, no matter how induced, and that its chief purpose is also its chief characteristic, namely the emergence of psychic phenomena of all kinds.

It may be useful before ending this section to give the views of others which support the close association between trance and paranormal powers.

Moss (1967:57) quotes Fenichel on the ease with which the schizophrenic deals with dream symbols: "The schizophrenic shows an intuitive understanding of symbolism. Interpretation of symbols, for instance, which neurotics find so difficult to accept in analysis are made spontaneously by the schizophrenic." Moss concludes that dreaming is a safety valve whose failure results in hallucination.

(page 108)

"Because the unconscious has become the conscious the psychotic is dominated by archaic modes of thinking."

It has long been noticed that subjects under hypnosis appear to develop extrasensory powers, such as clairvoyance or telepathy. As Moss (1967:30) tells us:
 

In the early nineteenth century, hypnotic subjects were believed to have remarkable powers of clairvoyance, and it was not uncommon to employ trance subjects to diagnose ailments.


A more psychological orientation of this linkage was the collaboration of Kubie and Erikson in two studies, demonstrating, in Moss' words (1967:13) "the exceptional ability of hypnotic subjects to understand and interpret symbolic modes of thought."

Erikson and Kubie (Moss 1967:101ff) also showed that hypnotized subjects showed impressive ability to intuit the meaning of unconscious and symbolic modes of expression. Telepathy between such subjects has also been noted, suggesting the hypothesis that in this state the subjects have closer contact with the collective preconscious.

Van Over (1972:65) notes the close relationship between hypnotism and psychic phenomena seen in altered states of consciousness:
 

In the hypnotic state, the subject abrogates his conscious, critical faculties, and exists in a profound altered state of consciousness. ... Research has also established that the condition most likely to produce phenomena such as ESP is an altered state of consciousness. . . . Numerous reports of telepathy, clairvoyance, and spontaneous healings in the early records come as no surprise. Just about everyone who practiced "mesmerism" in those days observed some form of psychic phenomena connected with trance techniques. Mesmer himself wrote: "Sometimes the somnambulist may perceive the past and the future through an inner sense. ... Man is in contact through this inner sense with the whole of nature."


Levinson (1969:PA14949) investigated the hypothesis that "hypnosis is a catalyst for unlocking latent psi faculties" using four male and one female, aged sixteen to thirty-five years, over a nine-year period. Results indicate that: (1) degree of rapport between the hypnotist and S, (2) waking hypnosis technique, and (3) achievement of deep trance were important in the achievement of psi faculties.

Moss and others (1971:PA0024) with teams of transmitter and receiver (in isolated rooms) used "emotional episodes" as stimulus material for the transmitter to "send" the receiver in order to learn if hypnosis would facilitate telepathic rapport. Eight teams of fourteen

(page 109)

"hypnotized" and nine "nonhypnotized" teams completed the required six sessions of twenty-four trials; the four teams achieving statistical significance all belonged to the "hypnotized" group.

Honorton (1969:PA0881) gave suggestions for high scoring during hypnosis to affect magnitude of ESP deviation, and a paper-and-pencil test was used to predict scoring direction. For two combined experiments, the hypnosis condition yielded a difference between predicted high-and low- scoring Ss significant at the .0005 level. An additional series is reported in which the same procedure was used with waking rather than hypnotic suggestions, with marginal results.

Krippner (1968:PA13763) reported various studies concerning the use of hypnosis and hallucinatory drugs and creativity. Psychotherapy, academic proficiency, susceptibility, and time distortions are treated in relation to hypnotic manipulation of creativity. Studies concerning and personal opinions of users of mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD are cited indicating a feeling of greater sensitivity to creativity after use. As both drugs and hypnosis alter the state of the conscious, they may foster creative activity since it is basically preverbal and unconscious in origin, and may allow transcendence of inhibitory societal conditioning.

Ullman, Krippner, and Honorton (1969:PA13498) investigated telepatbic effects in REM sleep. A single S spent eight nights in the laboratory. On each night, a target (art print) was randomly selected by a staff member (agent) after S was in bed. The agent spent the night in a distant (93 feet) room, attempting to telepathically influence S's dreams, when the monitoring Es signalled that a REMP had begun. At the end of each REMP, S was awakened by the Es and a dream report was elicited and tape-recorded. Only the agent was aware of the target content and he remained in his room throughout the night. Transcripts of the eight dream protocols and copies of the eight targets were given to three independent judges who assessed correspondences ("blind") on a 1-100 scale. Results were significant at p = .001.

Fitzherbert (1971:07943) tried integrating an explanation of the phenomena described in works by W. Sargant, S. Blac, and N. Miller. Hypnosis is described as somewhat analogous to fetal life: the trance as regression to an infantile state, and the hypnotist as a mother figure. The hypothesis suggesting intimate mother-child communication prior to two years of age, which may be confused for ESP communication with God, is cited. In a deep trance, ESP abilities, freed from repression, increase telekinetic power. The interaction of telekinetic mental energy with another mental energy field may affect all matter. Therefore, visualizing physical healing by suggestion in deep hypnotic trances becomes the resultant produced by telekinetic

(page 110)

activity. Similar mechanisms are described for autonomic learning and divine healing.

Krippner (1971:PA01235 and 17333) compared hypnosis and psychedelia, showing that they are not discrete entities, and that the latter can be reproduced by hypnotic induction. Von Castle (1970:PA13573) reviewed studies connecting hypnosis with ESP, and advanced the hypothesis that under proper conditions successful ESP scoring will be demonstrated under hypnosis.

We again feel it necessary to caution the reader that there is an important difference between a scientific discussion of psychological material and the (implied) advocacy of such behavior. One can discuss alcoholism or drug-abuse without the implication that one favors such behavior. Similarly, our discussion of various paranormal effects of trance (shortly to follow), does not imply our advocacy that readers attempt such behavior or experience. In our earlier effort (Gowan, 1974) we strongly advocated that the only proper path to psychedelia is through creative performance, and that only mature individuals in good mental health should attempt psychedelic adventures. We now wish to add that such experiments should be in the syntaxic, not the prototaxic mode. One should no more attempt contact with the numinous element in the prototaxic mode than one should fool around with high voltage electricity without suitable precautions and insulation. The fact that people have done so and lived to tell the tale is no guarantee of safety in either case.

To show that we are not alone in this attitude, we quote from an interview by Psychology Today(Oct. 1973:116) with Dr. Stanley Krippner:
 

People often ask me how they can learn to do telepathy or PK. My response is that I would first want to make sure that they had developed the capacity to love, to show compassion to other human beings, to have worthwhile human relationships. They should also engage in some sort of creative, fulfilling work. Next I would like to see them develop some sort of social consciousness, some way in which they can make a contribution toward making this a more humane world. Then if they want to develop their paranormal abilities, fine. But that goal ought to be pretty far down the list.


The remainder of this section will attempt a categorization of various paranormal aspects of trance. These are as follows:
 

1. (general introduction)
2. ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychometry
3. Hallucinations
(page 111)
4. Anesthesia of pain and healing
5. Fire-walking and other mastery over fire
6. Psychokinesis and Poltergeist Phenomena
7. Out-of-body (OOB) experience (magical flight)
8. Mob Contagion
9. Miscellaneous effects


We may observe this hierarchy by a "factor analysis" of "miracles" and "supernatural" events. Invariably it will be found that the principal factor relates to the invulnerability of the body by fire, wounds, disease, etc. A second factor has to do with the ability of the body to defy more prosaic physical laws (levitation, appearances at distances.) A third factor relates to the ability of the mind to gain knowledge not through sensory channels via telepathy, clairvoyance, psychic impression, etc. A fourth factor relates to curing of loved or valued individuals, a fifth to substance, the conservation of real wealth, and the provisions for feeding, clothing, and the general sustance of the individual, a sixth has to do with things (apports). There may be others.

2.42 ESP Effects

In the entire area of parapsychology nothing is clearer than that under trance conditions human beings can sometimes exercise extrasensory perceptions (ESP). These effects fall under three headings: telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. The evidence for the former, alone, is absolutely overwhelming. Interestingly enough, while the trance state seems to be sufficient for ESP effects, they do occur in other situations where there is some relaxation of the cognitive hold, such as the hypnopompic and hypnagogic states between wakefulness and sleep, in dreams, in revery, fantasy, or other relaxed states, and occasionally even in the normal state. The most obvious explanation for all this is that extra-sensory perception is a rudimentary ability possessed by some persons, but apparently inhibited by some type of insulator in most. When this inhibitor is removed, as in the relaxed states described above, the ability if present is able to work freely.

It is the theme of this section that whenever the collective preconscious is encountered whether in trance or otherwise, numinous effects such as ESP will take place automatically. Such adventitious epiphenomena are commonly noticed in hypnotic, drug, and mediumistic and possession trances, and are also found in psychoanalysis. Eisenbud (1970) has presented a scholarly analysis of psi correspondences found in psychoanalytic sessions, mostly in cross-correspondences in the dreams of different patients of the same analyst. If in trance, dream, and creativity we all dip into the common well of the preconscious, it is not surprising that the water has the same taste.

(page 112)

Fig. 2 Method of Telepathic Transmission

For those graphically-minded, Figure 2, which utilizes the generalized preconscious as a common substratum for telepathic transmission, may be consulted. In this figure, this generalized substratum, with complete impersonal intelligence and memory (somewhat like a giant computer) underlies all of human kind, and each of our individualized lives represents a projection of it into consciousness, much like a gigantic iceberg might push up spikes above the water. In order for us to experience free will, cognition, personality, and privacy, we are insulated from this preconscious mind by some kind of medium which gives us our sense of individual will and consciousness. This medium, however, is under some conditions permeable. In the transmission of telepathic messages for example, good visualization and strong motivation are very helpful. Ability to get into a state of revery may also be. When this juncture occurs the impulse is transmitted via this generalized substratum to the receiver, who appears to need some kind of "sensitivity" under most situations. Such an explanation for telepathy, also explains most other psychic powers as well. In conclusion, it should be emphasized that our individual minds are much like radio sending and receiving sets, and very slight adjustments (or tunings) are apparently all that is necessary to complete the circuit from sender to receiver. Naturally, such a diagram is somewhat an oversimplification of the process which differs slightly

(page 113)

between telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, and to which explication we now turn.

Masters and Houston (1966:114) point out the close relationship between various psychoactive drugs and various ESP effects:
 

Since very remote times there has existed a lore associating psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs with a broad range of ESP and occult phenomena. Some of this lore undoubtedly refers to actual occurrences, but ones which may be understood without appealing to ESP. For example, the use of various Solanaceae derivatives by witches appears to make intelligible to us on a scientific level many phenomena formerly seen as involving elements of the supernatural.

On the other hand, there are legends and writings by old historians describing events that do not easily lend themselves to explanations acceptable to most present-day scientists. To take a very early example, it often has been suggested that the priestesses of some of the Greek oracles made use of hallucinogenic drugs to activate clairvoyant and other paranormal faculties. Descriptions of the behavior of the pythian priestesses of the oracle at Delphi lead the authors of this book to conclude that again one or more plants containing the Solanaceae drugs was employed.

Some of the most impressive of the more recent reports of "telepathic" (or clairvoyant) phenomena associated with psychedelic drugs involve a psychochemical found in the western Amazon region and first discovered in 1850. The narcotic derivative or group of closely related derivatives is known variously as ayahuasea, caapi, yage and telepathine. The principal alkaloid producing the psychedelic effects is probably harmine, but some other chemicals also seem to be involved in the production. Despite various studies over the years, caapi, etc., remains but poorly understood.

In 1927, Dr. William McGovern, assistant curator of South American Ethnology, Field Museum of Natural History, provided one of a number of reports attributing apparent "telepathic" powers to the individual ingesting a drink prepared from the Banisteriopsis caapi.4

Describing some of the effects of caapi, which he took with the natives of an Amazon village, McGovern wrote:

"Curiously enough, certain of the Indians fell into a particularly deep state of trance, in which they possessed what appeared to be telepathic powers. Two or three of the men described in great

(page 114)
detail what was going on in malokas hundreds of miles away, many of which they had never visited, and the inhabitants of which they had never seen, but which seemed to tally exactly with what I knew of the places.
They further state (1966:116):
 
The theory often underlying such use of the psycho-chemicals is that ESP is a natural faculty of mind that is inhibited or kept inoperative by the production of body chemicals developed in the course of human evolution to serve just that inhibitory purpose. The inhibiting chemicals, that is, served to prevent man from perceiving a "larger reality" that would be too distracting and so interfere with his survival and progress in the world. The "medium" or "sensitive," then, is a person whose body does not produce these chemicals in the normal amount and whose mind, therefore, is not normally inhibited. If, as has been argued, psychedelic drugs "inhibit the inhibitors," then the drug subject might be able to experience what the medium experiences.


Telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition have in common the conveying knowledge across space or time. They are grouped together because in an Einsteinian world, space-time is a continuum, and whatever explanations suffice for spatial translations, also suffice for temporal. Again, the mechanism is an impression on the generalized preconscious which exists throughout space-time:

Telepathy is a kind of intuition, a "direct knowledge of distant facts." "Telepathy produces full and clear impressions in a way that clairvoyance does not." "It is a swift process of knowing through being" (empathy) (Garrett, 1949:133).

Sinclair (1971:128) explains the methodology of telepathy as follows:
 

If you succeed in doing this, you will find it hard not to drop asleep. But you must distinguish between this and the state you are to maintain.... After you have learned to induce it, you will be able to concentrate on the idea instead of the rose, and to carry this idea into sleep with you, as the idea to dominate the subconscious while you are asleep. This idea taken into sleep in this way, will often act in the subconscious with the same power as the idea suggested by the hypnotist ... You can learn to carry an idea of the restoration of health into this auto-hypnotic sleep, to act powerfully during sleep.... But this is another matter, and not the state for telepathy - in which you must avoid dropping into a sleep. After you have practiced the exercise of concentrating on holding the peculiar blank state of mind which
(page 115)
must be achieved if you are to make successful experiments in telepathy.


Puharich (1961:1-14) believes that telepathic reception is facilitated by a state of "cholinergia" of "parasympathetic activation" in which there is an increase in the amount of acetylocholine released into the system (p. 5). He is also of the opinion (Ibid:15ff) that facilitation of the telepathic sending of the message is accomplished by "adrenergia" or an increase in the amount of adrenelin in the system. It is to the author's credit that throughout his book he attempts to explain paranormal phenomena by natural and physical laws or their extension, rather than by supernatural means.

Garrett (1968:10-12) distinguishes between telepathy and clairvoyance in that clairvoyance involves imagery and telepathy does not.

Trance states seem to facilitate but are not always necessary for an ESP effect of telepathy called a "psychic impression." These appear to he impressed by very strong motivation (in the part of the sender (often a death crisis) which seems to give the signal a strength which can be picked up by a receiver even in the normal state of consciousness. Stevenson (1970:2) in an examination of nearly ten thousand such extrasensory experiences, found that about fifty-five percent were dreams, about twenty-five percent were waking psychic impressions, and about twenty percent were waking sensory images. He gives summaries (p. 6) of 160 authenticated cases of such impressions, and later in the same book, examines thirty-five new cases, personally investigated. Of the 160 cases, males are more often agents (projectors) by sixty-one percent (p. 15); sixty-two percent concern an agentpercipient in close family relationship (p. 16); the agent is either dying or in serious danger in eighty-two percent (p. 19); the percipient is awake ninety percent of the time (p. 23). Myers (1961:267-76) has many accounts of psychic impressions.

An example, Stevenson (1970:60):

 
I returned to the dinner dishes still unwashed in the kitchen sink. Quite suddenly while I held a plate in my hand, an awesome feeling came over me. I dropped the plate, turned my eyes to heaven and prayed aloud, "Oh God, don't let her get killed." For some unexplainable reason, I knew Joicey had been hit by a car. . . . I went to the telephone and dialed the theater. "My little girl was on the way to the theater. She has had an accident. Was she badly hurt?". . .
Joicey remembers that at the time she was hit, she called, "Mama." She remembers sitting on the curb and crying and calling "Mama, I want my Mama."
(page 116)

Moss and Gengerelli (1969) attempted to replicate a study in which telepathy seemed to occur between two people isolated from each other, when "transmitter" (T) was emotionally aroused and "receiver" (R) was relaxed. In this study, seventy-two T-R teams were divided into three groups: "ESP",  "ESP?", and "non-ESP." Significant results were obtained with the ESP group. Post hoc regrouping of teams into "artists" and "nonartists" gave highly significant results for "artists."

While telepathy occurs in mediumship and under the use of psychoactive drugs, the most common trance inducer for experimental work in telepathy is hypnosis. Tart (1968) investigated ESP experiences in mutual hypnosis. Granone (1968) found all states of hypnosis facilitated ESP. RyzI and Balounova (1969) found that in 8,000 trials the level of hits on IBM cards was about as high during the waking state as during hypnotic trance for a high scoring ESP subject (p = .01). Krippner (1969) in an experimental study of hypnosis and telepathy, found that hypnosis facilitated telepathy. It must be admitted that the hypnotic enhancement of telepathy is not strong; this may be due to the fact that telepathy (such as the calling of the Zener cards) seems more a function of the developed paranormal powers of a given individual than it seems to be facilitated by a trance state.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clairvoyance is much like telepathy, but appears to consist of a picture where telepathy consists of a message. Some psychics believe that the two ESP effects operate very differently. For example, mediums who are often clairvoyant, report traveling clairvoyance in which they purport while out of the body to visit distant places and return with mental pictures of situations and events there taking place. While this is a striking phenomenon, it is well authenticated, both for trance mediums, and in some rarer cases, in the waking state.

Probably the most famous example of clairvoyance is the incident in which Swedenborg, while in Gothenburg, clairvoyantly saw and described the progress of the great Stockholm fire. The account (Prince, 1963:48) goes on:
 

About six o'clock Swedenborg went out and returned to the company pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm ... and was spreading very fast. He was restless and went out often. He said that the home of one of his friends, whom he named, was in ashes, and that his
(page 117)
own was in danger. At eight o'clock after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, "Thank God, the fire is extinguished, the third door from my house."


Clairvoyance is less easy to deal with experimentally than some other ESP aspects, and there has been less research. Casler (1967) found a slight elevation in clairvoyance hits in hypnosis, and a slight depression in waking scores. Krippner (1971) in two clairvoyant perception of art figure targets in ASC states got two critical ratios lower than p = .05. Parker and Beloff (1971), attempting to replicate an earlier study by Honorton and Stump on hypnotically-induced clairvoyant dreams, were partly successful. Again, here the evidence while generally confirmatory is neither strong nor profuse.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Because we are "clutched into" time, precognition, of all the powers, seems the most mysterious. But the collective preconscious does not exist in our time but in the eternal now, and, consequently, it has access to future as well as past. Prince (1963:136) tells the famous story of Goethe's predictive vision of himself in later life. Riding a horse when about twenty, he saw himself on horseback on the path coming toward him dressed "in a suit such as I had never worn." He did wear the suit later when riding over the same route.

Premonitions of death, such as the dream Lincoln had before his assassination. A similar premonition (Prince, 1963:256) caused Schumann to change the title of a composition to "The Funeral Fantasy." Premonitions are often about imminent events,18 and as such bear a striking relationship to psychic impressions, for they are about an event about to occur in a different time, while the psychic event is about an event about to occur in a different space.

There has been very little research on precognition in the psychological laboratory. Indeed it must be admitted that in general, the trance states do not give easy clinical evidence of ESP. This may well be due to the fact that a conscious ego is necessary for the memorability involved. It is notable in this argument that telepathy seems to occur much more often in dreams and in some of the higher ASC's than in trance.

2.43 Hallucinations
2.431 General

The term "hallucination" has unfortunately become a pejorative word, suggesting that through ill mental health or for other untoward

(page 118)

reasons the individual saw "things" which were not there. Notice, for example, the difference in affective loading with regard to the word "visions," which is, at least, neutral with regard to the versimilitude of the theophany offered to a saint. In this book, in keeping with an attempt at scientific inquiry, we shall use the term "hallucination" without this associated stigma, making no judgment as to the external reality. To those who may reply that this vitiates the definition of a hallucination as a sensory impression for which there is no physical medium, we would reply that consistent with our theories it is possible that the individual is apprehending an object in non-ordinary reality. It is also possible that the aura of some entity can under trance-conditions act directly on the temporal lobe. None of this is of course proved; it is merely mentioned to show that since we do not know all the possible mechanisms involved in this situation, we are bound, as Laplace said, to investigate all the associated phenomena with increasing care, and we might add, without preconceived bias.

Solomon and Mendelson (West, 1962:141) define a hallucination as:
 

a sensory experience without basis in reality." It differs from an analogy which is an experience reported with the preface "it feels like." It differs from a daydream which is "a voluntary thought concerning events in the past or anticipated in the future." If differs from fantasy which reports an experience with recognition of its unreality. It differs from pseudosomatic delusions which are "a feeling of altered body sensations preceded by "as if." Finally, it differs from an illusion which is a "misperception of an actual perceptual experience."


Solomon and Mendelson (West, 1962:142) say further that a hallucination is a "sense perception without external basis," which implies "lack of insight into the false sensory impression." It is furthermore spontaneous and unwilled, and is experienced "as arising outside the self." They believe (lbid:143) that the reason hallucinations occur in sensory deprivation is that the maintenance of optimum conscious awareness "depends on a necessary state of alertness, which in turn is dependent on a constant stream of changing stimuli."

A vision is a hallucinatory-type experience, which differs from a hallucination, however, in the following ways:

 
1. whereas a hallucination occurs under conditions of trance, schizophrenia, dissociation, delirium, hypnopompic, or other similar altered states of consciousness, a vision occurs under a normal (or higher) state of consciousness;
(page119)
2. whereas it is considered that a person having a hallucination under an altered state of consciousness would not have it if in the normal state, no such assumption can be made in the case of a vision, or stated another way, whereas there is presupposition that the stimuli causing hallucinations are not externally real and are due to disorder in the brain, no similar presupposition is entertained in the case of visions.
 
It is recognized that this distinction is not fully satisfactory; nevertheless, it seems to be a useful one for the present.

Hallucinations according to Arieti (1967:281) have three characteristics:
 

1. perceptualization of the concept
2. projection of inner experience to the external world
3. extreme difficulty in correcting the erroneous experience.


Arieti (1967:300) points out that Sullivan's "parataxic distortion" occurs when past reaction patterns are applied to present situations (such as confusing the doctor with one's father).

Will (West, 1962:177) points out that dissociated thinking and ideation including hallucinations may occur in perfectly normal people in circumstances not requiring a completely sane mood by reason of security, such as:

(1) unguarded behavior in the presence of close friends;
(2) in impermanent situations when one does "not care" as in brief encounters with strangers while traveling;
(3) in the presence of those who do not require conventional behavior (as an infant, or an animal);
(4) drug-induced cortical activity alteration;
(5) in sleep;
(6) fatigue;
(7) in prolonged isolation.


West (1962:279) points out that in normal consciousness the scanning of sensory input inhibits hallucinatory activity. But when this sensory input is much diminished "its organizing effect upon the screening and scanning mechanism then decreases" with a consequent breakthrough of former perceptual traces and memories stored in the brain. This can give rise to fantasy, daydreams, or in some cases to hallucinations. He believes (Ibid:289) that the same mechanisms which make dreams and hallucinations possible in light sleep may also apply under certain conditions as outlined above to the waking state. In hypnosis, monotony, or trance, attention can be sufficiently withdrawn to permit the occurence of hallucinations.

Reef (1972:58) reports that experimental studies of hallucination fall into three main categories (a) the elicitation of responses to hallucinatory stimuli, (b) hallucinations as the effects of an experimental situation, and (c) personality characteristics of hallucinators. Type (a) involves set or expectancy, and are probably not hallucinatory at all. Type (b) particularly noted with sensory deprivation and drugs

(page 120)

are probably of the hypnagogic variety. Type (c), the study of the personality of hallucinators has been more productive. Reed observes that "people who readily experience imagery find (no) difficulty in discriminating between their images and perceptions of external reality." (P. 63) Field- dependence which involves the "weakening of ego boundaries" (commonly found in schizophrenics) seems to be characteristic of hallucinators.

Reed (1972:66) also discriminated between imagery, illusion, and hallucination. The first "involves the perceptual reconstruction of stored material." The second "the misinterpretation of input in terms of its synthesis with stored material" and the third "the perceptual reconstruction of stored material and its misinterpretation in terms of input."

Modell (West, 1962:172) speculates that auditory hallucinations may reflect a stage in the development of the super-ego from the ego in which the super-ego is externalized and heard as a voice. He points out that Freud implied such a situation (Ibid:166).

Stoyva (Miller and others 1973:491-501) in an update of West's views points out (ibid:498) that muscle relaxation and "passive volition" are critical in the induction of the hypnagogic revery state in which vivid imagery and hallucinations are likely to occur. This receptive mode of consciousness is necessary for both creativity and meditation; in this connection Stoyva refers to the research of Gellhorn on trophotropic muscle relaxation (ibid:488) which appears to make possible openings to the preconscious (see section 4.42).

Hallucination is an old word, from Latin allucinatio, which means a wandering of the mind. It has been used in English since the Middle Ages for the medical phenomenon of seeing or hearing percepts which did not occur in nature, hence a delusion of the senses. By adjunction and prejudice, the word early grew to include perception of psychic events which did not occur in physical space and time. There developed, hence, a presupposition that anyone who reported such a percept was ipso facto mentally unbalanced. Naturally this perjorative view kept a good deal of the experience of psychic phenomena the secret of the individual to whom it occurred, often with anxiety which may well have produced the very mental ill health with which society had branded the hallucinatory experience in the first place.

As Fischer (1974:30-1) notes, prior to the Renaissance, people did not hallucinate, they had visions, which society accepted as disclosures from on high. We have retained some of this double standard, so that even today we are more likely to speak of a schizophrenic as hallucinating, and St. Teresa as having visions. It is seen also in the fact that despite the evidences of hallucinations in the schizo-

(page 121)

phrenic, the drunkard, and the delirious invalid, when Edmund Gurney undertook his famous study of psychic events in 1882 for the English Society for Psychical Research, he called it "the census of hallucinations." Fischer (1974:31) reports:
 

Today the clinical concept of hallucinations is based on the definition of Lhermitte: "perceptions without an object" or a grin without the (Cheshire) cat. Unfortunately Lhermitte's definition is as meaningless as "perceptions without a subject" since both statements deny that perceptions result from an interaction between observer and observed. It is easy to see today that Lhermitte's definition was conceived in the true spirit of a mechanized hard-working austere, scientific-the puritan-protestant, and end-of-the-19th Century ethic which denies the reality of imagery if that imagery is not elicited "mechanically," i.e., in response to outside, or "real," that is "material," stimuli.
Fischer (1974) reminds us:
 
Perception may be described in Plato's words as "that which is always becoming and never is," an optimization of information out of which invariants and identity emerge as permanence within change.1-3 It should be emphasized, however, that perceptions occur at normal levels of arousal, i.e., those connected with daily routine activities. But when the level of (subcortical) arousal rises - as it does during dreaming or the rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM - whether such an arousal was induced naturally or, for instance, through hallucinogenic drugs, perceptions become transformed into what we moderns call 'hallucinations'.4 It is well to remember that with rising levels of arousal man's ability to verify with his hands and feet an experience as "real" is gradually diminished and ultimately blocked. Evidently the experience of "reality" is a touchy subject in that the proof of the sensory pudding is in the motor eating.

Hence in perception "appearances of things are transformed into things that appear" - a mixture of thoughts and images whereas in hallucinations "things that appeared are represented as appearances of things." 5 What are these appearances? They are vivid visuo-spatial or audio-spatial images and they can be accounted for by recent research findings which indicate that during hyper-arousal (as well as hypo- or, in the terminology of Hess, trophotropic arousal) information processing is gradually shifted toward the non-verbal, visuo-spatial, symbol-laden, or "minor" brain hemisphere.6-8 [his footnotes]

(page 122)

de Morsier (1970) in a review of hallucinatory activity discusses (a) physiological and psychological explanations for hallucinations; (b) hallucinations due to localized cerebral lesions; (c) hallucinations due to diencephalic crises allied to somatic problems, called the "Charles Bonnet syndrome"; and (d) the relationships between hallucinations and psychedelic drugs.

We should note in passing the considerable similarity of hallucinations to dream material. Indeed hallucinations can be considered the intrusion of dreaming into the ordinary waking state. It is possible that whatever else stimulates the cortex in dreaming may also sometimes stimulate it in waking, and one then experiences a hallucination. It is also possible that there is an inhibitor of such internal stimuli systems in normal waking state, but that under unusual conditions the "inhibitor is itself inhibited" and the hallucination results.

Obviously all kinds of psychic and psychedelic experience can be considered as hallucinations, including the out-of-body experience of shamanistic and other trance, the psychedelic sensations of the psychoactive drug taker, the adventures of the patient under hypnosis, the visions of delirium, the voices of possession, and many of the effects of mediumship, to name but a few. We shall notice a few of the various types, others having been considered under their respective headings.

2.432 Auditory Hallucinations

Hearing voices has been a traditional symptom of schizophrenia. There are however, numerous accounts of hearing a voice under conditions of higher ecstasy (see section 4.72), and very few of these percipients could be called schizophrenic. Disturbances of the inner ear may also account for the phenomenon, and it seems to occur in many otherwise normal persons in the hypnopompic state. Such individual will report being awakened by a gong, bell, or buzzer when in fact there was no such external sound. Plain suggestibility should not be ruled out. Spanos and Barber (1969) found that half of a hundred student nurses reported hearing a suggested auditory hallucination.

West (1960) distinguished between visionary and hallucinatory experience, that is between the hallucinations of mentally sound persons and psychotics as follows: hallucinations of the mentally sound appeared to be unique experiences, of a visual nature and strongly remembered; whereas those of psychotics appeared to be chronic and recurring experiences, of auditory nature, and only vaguely remembered.

(page 123)

2.433 Visual Hallucinations

Visual hallucinations appear to occur under a great variety of circumstances, but they are especially found as a result of drug ingestion. These bizarre experiences have been given so much attention in the drug-related literature, that we will simply refer the reader to popular available sources, such as Tart (1969 and 1971), Masters and Houston (1966), A. Weil (1972), G. Weil and others (1971), and Huxley (1963).

Out-of-body experiences can also be considered as visual hallucinations. There is a very considerable literature on this subject also: Myers (1903), Muldoon (1929, 1970), Tyrrell (1961), Casteneda (1972), Crookall (1964), 1966,1970), Monroe (1971), and Gowan (1974:16-21). Another type of visual hallucination is the apparition. Again, the literature is replete with such material of which we mention Tyrrell (1961) and Myers (1903) as classics.

We return, however, to a discussion of hallucinations under trance states.

Malitz and others (West, 1962:60-1) believe it unlikely that visual hallucinations require the retina; instead they appear formed by the stimulation of the temporal lobe of the cortex. Some psychoactive drugs may have this effect, as do some of the acute organic psychoses, for example delirium tremens, as well as schizophrenia, which, however, is more likely to produce auditory hallucinations.

Feinberg (West, 1962:65) points out that the visual hallucinations produced by mescaline and LSD appear identical, certain visual figures such as lattice-work, tunnels, and spirals being constantly reported.

Baldwin (West, 1962:81) quotes Penfield and Jaspers as saying: "Psychical hallucinations bear the same relationship to the superior and lateral surfaces of the temporal lobes that sensory seizures do to the sensory areas of the cortex." One might conclude from this that any agency capable of stimulating the proper area of the temporal cortex of an individual, can produce any type of hallucination in that individual. If we admit the possibility of such stimulation by other than material means, we at once explain many types of psychic events.

Shurley (West, 1962:89) tells us that Boismont in 1859 described three types of hallucinations, (1) normal occurring in healthy individuals, (2) those occurring in the insane, and (3) those reported by the blind. Galton also studied hallucinations, and noted that "the mere act of fasting, want of sleep, and of solitary musing are usually conducive to visions."

2.434 Hypnagogic Hallucinations

There are various theories as to why the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states are so rich in reported hallucinations. One is

(page 124)

that since waking occurs shortly afterwards, it is easier to remember them. Another is that the ego is particularly open to psychic impressions during this period. A third is that dream material is essentially hallucinatory, and its persistence into the hypnopompic state may result in remembered hallucinations. Viscott (1970) believes that some drugs such as chlordiazepoxide may encourage this persistence of hallucinatory material into the waking state. Fischer and others (1970) after using hallucinogenic drugs of volunteers believe that hallucinations may be better described as "sensations without action" instead of as "perceptions without an object." Tauber and Green (1959:42) report on Silberer's classic experiments in hypnagogic imagery:
 

In analyzing this experience, Silberer states that it consisted really of two conditions - drowsiness and an effort to think. The drowsiness is a passive condition, not subject to the will; the effort to think is an active condition, manipulatory by the will. It is thus the struggle between these two antagonistic conditions that elicits what Silberer calls the autosymbolic phenomenon. He describes it as an hallucinatory experience which puts forth automatically as it were, an adequate symbol for what is thought or felt at a given instant.


This occurs only in the transitory state known as the hypnagogic. Tauber and Green continue (1959:45):
 

What Silberer describes as the autosymbolic experience corresponds closely to what has often been described as the work of intuitive insight or creative insight. The individual reaches a period of drowsiness, stagnation, or difficulty in thinking and then, as though coming to him, outside his command of it, a vivid image or half - formed idea at the kernel of the insight presents itself to him. From there on he begins to take command and to elaborate the half-formed notions or images into fully formed thought.
Silberer (1951:216) says:
 
In dreams ... (involving) autosymbolic hallucinations ... the symbol appears as a substitute for something which one could under normal circumstances clearly grasp ... a thought which in daytime would be entirely clear presents itself in dreams, etc., symbolically.
Freedman and others (West, 1962:108) report that the hallucinations

(page 125)

of sensory deprivation appear to be a type of hypnagogic imagery.

The psychedelic experience whether that of the dying, those in OOB excursions, or peak experiences is often accompanied by the hearing of celestial music, apparently played at a distance, and sweeter than any mortal music according to the hundred cases assembled by Rogo (1970).

2.435 Hallucinations under Sensory Deprivation19

The phenomena reported by subjects in sensory deprivation studies have been termed "hallucinations", "images," and "reported sensations." The term "hallucinations" may be further broken down into either visual hallucinations or auditory hallucinations. Due to the lack of agreement on terminology used to describe phenomena experienced in sensory deprivation, Murphy, Myers, and Smith (1965) coined the phrases "reported visual sensation" or "reported auditory sensation" (RVS, or RAS) as a generic term for all the phenomena. Distinction between "real" or "imagined" phenomena in a darkness-silence experiment is relatively easy. In the perceptual deprivation experiments, however, a distinction between illusion and hallucination must be made. In this case illusion defines the distortion of a real object. Distinctions between waking hallucinations, hypnagogic hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, day-dreams, and images are somewhat more difficult. The distinction between the first three types of phenomena depend upon the subject's degree of wakefulness. All three types may occur during different levels of consciousness; therefore the only reliable method of determining the level of arousal is by electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Evidence states that SD phenomena are most likely to occur during states of high or medium arousal. Distinctions between hallucinations, fantasies, daydreams, and images are difficult and must be made by the subject's reported quality of the phenomena and his reactions to them. Distinctions, however, made according to subject verbalizations must depend upon introspective criteria.

Leiderman (1962) developed a questionnaire which offers a systematized method for interpreting verbal reports.

Murphy, Myers, and Smith (1963) developed a reliable system for scoring reported visual stimuli or RVSs from verbal reports. Those phrases which contain the verb "see" or a synonym of the verb may be considered statements of RVSs. Other verbs such as "imagine" or "think" do not qualify as RVSs.

Visual hallucinations are distinguished from RVSs by Suefeld and Vernon (1961). To be considered an hallucination Suefeld and Vernon state that the RVS must possess:

(1) uncontrollability of onset, content, and termination;
(2) "out thereness";
(3) scanability; and
(4) apparent reality (Zubek, 1969, p. 94).


(page126)

Hallucinations may be further classified as Type A, unstructured, uninterpreted, vague, diffuse light, and geometric forms; and Type B, meaningful interpreted objects and forms, animate objects, complex structured images (see Zuckerman and Cohen, 1964a).

Auditory sensations have also been categorized into two feasible types. Type A includes "all kinds of interpretations of noise"; and Type B which is "restricted to the sounds of human voices, human presence, or music."

Research has shown sensory deprivation hallucinations to be similar to drug-induced hallucinations (see Malitz, Wilkens, and Escover, 1962; Cohen, Silverman, and Shamavonian, 1962a; Kluver, 1942; and Feinberg, 1962), notably those hallucinations caused by d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). This similarity is due to the fact that both SD and LSD impair normal sensory transmission while increasing the level or arousal.

The types of hallucinations experienced during sensory deprivation and LSD experiences are also similar. Subjective reports of phenomena content for both SD and LSD are somewhat alike (e.g., abstract and geometrical forms, lattice work, flashes, and human, animal, and familiar forms).

Malitz, Wilkens, and Esecover (1962) found that the percentage of subjects reporting Type B RVSs under drugs was within the percentage range of the Type B RVSs reported by sensory deprivation subjects. It has been found, however, that drug-induced hallucinations were more vivid in color and contained more detailed visual imagery than sensory deprivation-induced hallucinations.

Feinberg (1962) noted that both drug-induced and SD hallucinations "are more readily seen with eyes closed or in darkened surroundings. This fact is interesting in that it suggests that both drug and sensory deprivation phenomena may depend upon or result from reduced perceptual input" (Zubek, 1969, p. 122). In later research (see Vernon, 1961) it was found that SD had a facilitation effect on learning which was strongest after 24 hours of sensory deprivation.

In contrast to the findings discussed above, Manitoba studies (see Zubek, Sansom, and Prysiazniuk, 1960; Zubek, et al, 1963; Zubek and MacNeill, 1966) found that the performance of control groups was "significantly further in the direction of improvement than that in the performance of the experimental group" (Zubek, 1969, p. 425).

Psychoanalytic personality theory as applied to sensory deprivation (see Azima, Lemieux, and Cramer-Azima, 1962; Goldberger and Holt, 1958; Goldfried, 1960; Kubie, 1961; and Miller, 1962) has found that
 

Sensory deprivation cuts the ego off from reality resulting in
(page 127)
an increase in primary-process thinking (alogical, hallucinatory), an upsurge of influence from the id (aggressive and sexual impulses), and regression, in prolonged SD.
 
Gill and Rapaport (1959) offer a theory of ego autonomy which states that a person with a strong ego structure is tolerant of his id drives, capable of engaging in primary-process thinking without feeling threatened, and therefore can tolerate the temporary loss of reality supports. Kris's (1952) theory of "regression in the service of the ego," is closely related to Rapaport's. Kris purports that artists or other persons can allow themselves to experience their regressive fantasies in order to use the content of such material constructively. Silverman and others (West, 1962:127) report that the flashing lights seen as hallucinations in their sensory deprivation experiments can be attributed to the common physiologic sensations known as phosphenes. They conclude (Wept, 1962:133):
 
Loss of reality orienting cues, change in body image, and the loss of sensimotor and sensorideational integration may all contribute to an over-all decrease in ego integration and control, and to an externalization of inner psychic activity to the extent that it becomes reality.


2.436 Hallucinations Associated with Death of Agent

There is a considerable literature (Prince, 1963; Stevenson, 1970) showing that psychic impressions can be conveyed from an agent to a receiver (see Figure II, and Gowan 1974:12). Sometimes such experiences are more than mere impressions, and become auditory or visual hallucinations. Instead of having a psychic or telepathic impression of the projector, the percipient "sees" him; in other words, there is an apparition or phantasm. We are not concerned here with whether this "double" is "real" or an hallucination; hopefully, we have said enough about "reality" previously so that it is recognized as a more complex matter than might be supposed. This type of activity associated with death is also remarkably common. The modal experience is the transitory appearance of the dying individual to a distant friend or relation. More rarely there is auditory experience, and sometimes the phenomena takes place when the percipient is dreaming. While more spectacular, this experience is closely akin to the former psychic impression except that for some reason whatever stages such phenomena has been able to bring in one of the five senses.

Prince gives an account (1963:164), this time vouched for by no less than Victor Hugo, in which an old lady and her daughter were talking about an elderly friend:

(page 128)

"I shall go and see her today," (said the daughter, Mme. Guerard).
"It will do no good ... she has been dead for an hour," (said the mother, Mme Guerin).
"What are you saying? ... Are you dreaming?" (said Mme. Guerard).
"No, I am wide awake, and I have not slept all night; as it struck four o'clock, I saw Mme. Lanne pass, and she said to me:
'I am going; are you coming?'
The daughter went to see Mme. Lanne, but the woman had died in the night ...
Mme. Guerin died the next day at noon.


Prince gives thirty of these cases alone, some involving very famous persons (1968:16, 30, 32 Linneaus, 34 Maxium, 38, 41, 44, 60, 66, 72, 75, 77, 88 Garibaldi, 95 Oberegon, 98, 100, 116 Tallmadge, 131, 151, Belasco, 161, 163 Victor Hugo, 187, 203, 205, 231, 248, 262 Bizet, 265 Rubenstein, and 278). Other cites include Osborn (1966:65:SPR XIX), and Myers (1961:202-60) where many instances are given.

The rationale for this kind of experience is well given by EvansWentz (1967:166) in his discussion of the joining of the individual spirit with "the Clear Light of the Void." Similar to the hypnagogic state just preceding sleep, this juncture of the individual and the general mind allows the individual's last desires to be projected over the general network, and thus to be manifested at a distance. As Russell Noyes of Iowa University put it in an examination of dying persons' feelings (Time, Dec. 4, 1972, p. 64), this kind of experience is not unlike mystical states of consciousness. Noyes also found the oft-reported syndrome of "the past flashing before the eyes of the dying person." (See also Crookall 1970:115).

Edwards (1969:124) tells a fascinating story about an historic visual hallucination. The Bishop of Grosswarden could not sleep on the night of June 27, 1914, so he went to his study to read. He noticed there a small note, edged in black by the lamp; reading it he recognized the coat-of-arms of the Archduke who had studied with him years before. The note was dated Sarajevo, June 28, and said that the Archduke and his wife has been the victims of a political crime. Greatly agitated the Bishop called his servant to demand where the note had come from. When the servant came, the note was nowhere to be seen; it had vanished without trace. Admitting that he may have experienced a strange hallucination, and agitated still, the Bishop wrote down the contents of the note from memory on the spot. Ten hours later the Archduke was assassinated, starting World War 1.

(page 129)

2.437 Critique and Conclusions

Hallucinations appear to occur under all types of trance experience, spirit possession, mediumship, shamanism, hypnosis, psychoactive drugs, and sensory deprivation. They also appear to occur rather uniquely outside of trance to "normal" persons when there is sufficient psychic pressure (such as the death of a friend or relative). Whether one is dealing with the voices of spirit possession, and mediumship, the magical flights and other out-of-body experiences of the shaman, the induced hallucinators of the hypnotist, the psychedelic colors of the drug-user, or similar visual imagery in sensory deprivation, the diversity and universality of such imagery is evident.

Nash (1972) in a review with seventy-one cites, covers the considerable evidence for relationships between medical or psychiatric practice and parapsychology, including faith healing, death bed hallucinations, psychopathology, telepathy, and drugs. He notes West's (1960) distinction between the hallucinations of psychotics and those in good mental health. Psychotics' hallucinations are generally auditory, occur often, are vague, and reflect illness, while the others are visual, unique, remembered, and received in health. He notes that Duane and Behrendt (1965) found that when alpha was induced in one identical twin it was found in the other who was in another room. He quotes Bendit (1943) on psychic behavior of schizophrenics, and quotes Fodor that dissociation is the basis of poltergeist phenomena.

L. Rhine (1967) has offered an ingenious explanation of 137 cases of hallucinatory pain in which the experiencing person had a physiological effect which corresponded with one suffered by a target person who was concurrently undergoing a crisis unknown to the experiencing person. The process which produces the hallucinatory pain seemed similar to other types of hallucination, and also connected with sympathetic psi experiences.

And no less a researcher than Cyril Burt (1967) in a review of paranormal and hallucinatory experience concludes:
 

Quantitative experiments on the nature and frequency of hallucinatory experiences and the phenomena of mediumship revealed that:
(1) hallucinations of normal Ss differed markedly from those of neurotic and psychotic Ss,
(2) the state of mediumship greatly resembled those of autohypnosis and dissociated personality, and
(3) evidence of telepathy is quite strong, for clairvoyance nearly as strong, for precognition somewhat weaker, and for survival positive but inconclusive.
Doubts about the validity of the results are based chiefly on their antecedent improbability and are largely removed if thought of in terms of quantum physics and recent neurological discoveries. The processes involved are likely to be psychological rather than physical, and normal and natural rather than paranormal or supernatural.
 
(page 130)

Fischer (1974:32) connects hallucinations with the image-making of the right hemisphere in stating:
 

Information processing during hallucinatory or inner experiences is predominantly shifted to the non-rational, intuitive, symbolic, Platonic spaces of the "minor" hemisphere. A very similar situation prevails during dreaming, i.e., mainly during the REM-state of sleep. We have to wake up to ascertain that the experience has been "only" an inner experience. During both hallucinations and dreaming the sustained high level of (subcortical) arousal that is bound to culminate in "over-inclusion" may be the result of an inability to separate symbolization from rational thinking, or in other words, to distinguish the analog from the digital.


The right hemisphere's image-making ability (see sections 4.14 and 4.5) may be connected with the parataxic image explicated in dreams, myth, and particularly art (sections 3.3, 3.4, and 3.6).
Fischer (1974:32) concludes:
 

It has to be emphasized that hallucinatory and dream experiences may have strong symbolic significance for the individual in relation to his unresolved (and sometimes unresolvable) problems. Such problems closely resemble certain mythical patterns, that is they center around unresolved (and sometimes unresolvable) "archetypal" problems of the human condition.


If one believes in the primacy of sense experience, then hallucinations must be regarded as a psychotic-type irregularity, and the person who reports them suspect of mental illness. On the other hand if we remember that the physical sensorium is dependent upon the normal state of consciousness, then it becomes possible to believe that hallucinations are percepts for which there may be no physical data, but possibly data appropriate to those states. We shall find there is more to say on this wider view in the subsequent chapters.

While hallucinations occur most often to schizophrenics, and those in trance, it is incontestable that visions occur to normal persons both in the ordinary state of consciousness, and under parataxic and particularly syntaxic conditions. The peak experience, for example, the "illuminations" described in Bucke (1923), the visions of the saints, even the inspiration of creative imagination, are all so near to auditory or visual hallucinations as to force us to realize that the explanation for these experiences lies outside the prototaxic characteristics of

(page 131)

trance. The most likely explanation, it seems to us, is that any contact with the numinous element involves the possibility of hallucination, and that the type of hallucination will depend upon the mode of contact, and the mental mechanism of the individual involved. We shall, of course, defer the exploration of these "higher" visions until later in the book, but simple truth requires that mention here be made of the total extent and range.

2.44 Healing and the Conquest of Pain20

2.441 General

One of the substantial public benefits of the prototaxic contact with the numinous element lies in its by-product of the conquest of pain and the consequent aspects of healing. We find this aspect well-high universal in trance states in various cultures. Whether it is the primitive savage who by means of an orgiastic dance makes "hot medicine" and then can touch and heal, or the possessed medium who may do the same or offer advice on how healing can be accomplished, or the shaman who often performs healing at his touch, or in our own culture the hypnotist with his ability to control pain, or the drug-curing sessions of South America, the uniform result appears to be that having undergone a great deal of discomfort, the trancer is enabled to cure himself or somebody else.

The difference between prototaxic healing, parataxic healing, and syntaxic healing lies in the different ways each mode approaches the numinous element. In the prototaxic mode the approach is through trance, in the parataxic mode the approach is through ritual, and in the syntaxic mode it is through celebration (i.e. orthocognition). In each case the healing is occasioned by the juncture with the numinous. Remembering the relationship of these several forms, let us now investigate prototaxic healing effects. Since healing is of such practical importance, one could devote a book to such aspects of healing as the miracles at Lourdes, Guadalupe, etc., or the examples of prototaxic healing seen in savage group trance dances. But we shall confine our discussions of it to three areas:

(1) Folk healing in America using drugs, etc.,
(2) the work of shamans, especially in psychic surgery, and
(3) the alleviation of pain by hypnotic intervention.21
 
2.442 Folk Healing in South America With Drugs

Before getting at the literature in this area, it is important to notice that there has been a considerable change in our attitude toward illness in the last hundred years due primarily to the development of western medicine, so that we do not recall that the point of view of our rural ancestors a couple of centuries ago was similar to that

(page 132)

obtaining in many other cultures today - namely that illness has a psychic origin.

Frank (1963:38) describes how the primitive feels about illness:

 
Illnesses tend to be viewed as symbolic expressions of internal conflicts or of disturbed relationships to others, or both. Thus they may be attributed to soul loss, possession by an evil spirit, the magical insertion of a harmful body by a sorcerer, or the machinations of offended or malicious ancestral ghosts. It is usually assumed that the patient laid himself open to these calamities through some witting or unwitting transgression against the supernatural world, or through incurring the enmity of a sorcerer or someone who has employed a sorcerer to wreak revenge. . . .


Dobkin (now de Rios) (1970,1971a, 1971b, 1972) has done extensive research on the healing in South America by curandos with the aid of the psychedelic drug ayahuasca (which contains harmaline). The drug is not the curative agent, but gives the healer entry into the psychic world and hence an understanding of the cause of the disease, enabling him to neutralize the magic responsible for the disease. The actual curing includes singing, whistling, and other ceremonies. The main locus of the usage of this essence of the liana vine is in the upper Amazon and Orinoco rivers, where it is taken for oracular and predictive aid, as well as for disease.

2.443 Shamanistic Psychic Surgery

One of the most spectacular manifestations of the shaman's art (and one of the most controversial) is psychic surgery. According to claims by some shamans and reports by onlookers, the shaman using only his hands, opens up the body of the afflicted person, and extracts "something" from it. He then closes up the wound in a similar way and the patient quickly heals and is cured. Shamans have been claiming this feat for a long time, but recent attention has been focused on the subject by reports of psychic surgery in South America and the Philippines.

Eliade (1964:256-7) describes psychic surgery:
 

Often they undertake an "operation" that preserves all its shamanic character. With a ritual knife duly "heated" by certain magical exercises, the shaman professes to open the patient's body to examine his internal organs and remove the cause of illness. Bogoras even witnesses an "operation" of this kind. A boy of fourteen lay naked on the ground and his mother, a celebrated shamaness, opened his abdomen, the blood and gaping
(page 133)
flesh were visible; the shamaness thrust her hand deep into the wound. During all the time the shamaness felt as though she were on fire, and constantly drank water. A few moments later the wound had closed, and Bogoras could detect no trace of it. Another shaman, after drumming for a long time to "heat" his body and his knife to a point at which, he said, the cut would not be felt, opened his own abdomen. Such feats are frequent through North Asia and they are connected with the "mastery over fire," for the same shamans who gash their bodies are able to swallow burning coals and to touch white hot iron.
 
While there have been a number of contemporary psychic surgeons, surely one of the best known and most intriguing is the Philippine A. C. Agpaoa, about whose well-publicized feats several books have been written.

After a careful on-site investigation of Agpaoa, the spiritualist healer of the Philippines, and his alleged feats of psychic surgery without use of instruments, anesthesia, or pain, Valentine (1973:122) comes to the conclusion that while there may sometimes be fraud in such surgery, there are also cases which cannot be explained by western medicine. Valentine feels that such healing is akin to acupuncture and adjusts the flow of pranic energy through the chakra centers of the vital (etheric) body. In this sense it is akin to Kirlian photography of aura in faith healers' fingertips.

Commenting upon Agpaoa's ability to do surgery without sepsis, Valentine (1973:125) states that he "cannot doubt that their powers kill germs in some fashion." He points to similar experiments conducted by Sister Justa of Rosary Hills College which have shown that healers' hands can indeed affect enzyme activity.

2.444 Hypnotic Control of Pain

More understandable to western minds is the increasing literature on hypnotic control of pain. A sampling from this literature will be useful. Kienle (1968) noted that hypnotic pain management involved a shift from subjective body awareness to an object-to-object relationship. Sacerdote (1970) studied pain control in malignancy through hypnosis. Schenck (1967) noted the ability of hypnotherapy to deal with cataract. Duensing (1968) found parallels between surgical leukotomy and hypnosis in managing pain. Von Bekesy (1971) discussed the physiology of pain anesthesia. Bachet (1970) investigated the use of hypnotherapy with phantom limb pain. Ferguson (1973) devotes chapter 5 to the inner control of pain.

Hilgard (1973), with his usual scholarship has produced a "neodissociative interpretation" of pain reduction in hypnosis, which extends

(page 134)

some of the dissociative aspects of the "gate theory" of Melzack and Wall (1965). While a short reprise cannot do justice to the nuances of the full article which should be studied in its entirety, Hilgard believes that:
(1) there are two receptor processes for pain;
(2) the central process can modify pain perception;
(3) the most modifiable aspect of pain is the suffering;
(4) the least modifiable aspect is the information.

While hypnotic intervention seems quite effective for the eradication of symptoms of physical pain, it also appears to have benefits in the disappearance of mental anxieties and phobias, and other distressing symptoms, ranging from obesity to the improvement of sight and reading ability. Hypnotherapy apparently involves the control of dissociation, which according to Webster is "the separation of an idea or desire from the mainstream of consciousness." Hypnotism seems sometimes to alleviate this condition.

There are also a variety of psychosomatic difficulties which Brenman and Gill (1947:55) point out are amenable to hypnosis. These include warts, menstrual disorders, psoriasis, asthma, rheumatism, migraine, constipation, sea-sickness, and insomnia. Sanders (1969:PA 44:14849) described the effects of hypnosis on visual imagery. Vingoe (1968 PA:42:14864) presented an alert-trance induction procedure to engage the mind in mental activity during the trance state, and Donk (1970 PA 44:13721) showed that this method could be used to increase reading efficiency. Reid and Curtsinger (1968) (PA 42:14863) showed that under certain conditions hypnosis produced increases in oral and body temperature. Ulett and others (1973) (PA 49:03835) demonstrated significant EEG changes during hypnosis. Bashkirov (1966) (PA 41:00008) discusses experiments in "hypnopedia" or "sleep-learning."

But while these other effects are additional benefits, the major use of hypnosis appears to be in the control of pain.

Houston (1973) in discussing the mind's ability to control the body's reaction to pain says:
 

States of consciousness research makes it increasingly clear that all sense perception as it becomes conscious is more or less altered by brain processing and the subjectivity of the individual perceiver. In the area of pain and pleasure especially, subjective factors play a very large part in determining the content of conscious experience. Different individuals may react with considerable variation to the same stimulus. We find that it is readily possible in the laboratory using altered states of consciousness and accompanying suggestions to considerably alter pleasure, pain, and other sensory responses.
(page 135)
It is possible, for example, using these to decrease both the intensity and the experiential duration of pain.


In another recent book (1973) Professor Melzack examines the various facets of pain from a well-defined theoretical framework. He offers the Melzack-Wall "gate-control" theory as an up-to-date basis for understanding pain mechanisms and suggesting new forms of treatment. In the first half of his book he describes the psychological, clinical, and physiological aspects of pain; in the second he looks at the major theories of pain in terms of their ability to explain pain phenomena and their implications for the control of pain. Dr. Melzack's new theory also sheds light on the theory of acupuncture.

The essence of psychical healing is a speed-up in time. Healing which would naturally be accomplished in a given number of days under ordinary conditions is somehow accelerated to be accomplished in a given number of seconds. What we are really witnessing then is the acceleration of chemical reactions in clock time. Such accelerations, as every high school chemistry student knows, are accomplished by the presence of catalysts. So psychical healing reduces to the introduction of some kind of catalyst into a situation in which ordinary healing will occur.

It is intriguing that psychical healing involves time acceleration, for time, as we have seen in section 1.32 is one of the three illusions that form our natural prison. If ultimate reality exists outside of time, the distortion of clock time through orthocognition (see section 4.5) and the consequent psychical healing is not too difficult to understand. Such a view also explains psychic endothermic (cold-producing) and exothermic (heat-producing) chemical reactions, as natural chemical reactions in some way speeded up time through the presence of a psychical catalyst. For example, spontaneous combustion is merely rapid oxidation. If normal oxidation processes were vastly increased through psychical catalysts, one would have instantaneous fires breaking out, an effect often seen in poltergeist phenomena.

Harding (1964:213-4) gives four conditions for spiritual healing:
 

1. the individual must be conscious of his need;
2. he must have done all he possibly can, and be utterly unable to resolve the difficulty;
3. the symbols arising from the unconscious must be realized as truly belonging to his own condition;
4. unless he shows himself to be moved by the happening, and unless he experiences the full affect connected with it, he will not be radically changed.
(page136)

We now leave the subject of pain and healing with the intent to return to it later in the parataxic and syntaxic modes, at which times the rationale for the effects will become more obvious. But even with this incomplete explication in the prototaxic mode, it can be seen that psychic healing is more than "faith cure." It is the contact with the numinous which accomplishes the healing, and the importance of faith is merely to keep the attention of the patient solidly on the numinous experience. Thus arises the usual necessity for trance which operates to short-out the conscious mind with its wavering attention to multifarious percepts and stream of consciousness concepts. When the mind at higher stages is steady and tranquil enough to be capable of directed attention to the numinous, these crude prototaxic measures are no longer necessary.

2.445 Accelerated Mental Process

While not directly a part of healing, accelerated mental process (AMP) is connected to it by the speeding-up of reaction time. Only in this case it is a mental rather than a physical speed-up that is involved. AMP is another example of the fact that our sense of time is part of the OSC and that in an ASC something peculiar seems to happen to it.

Cooper and Erickson (1959:157-8) in their definitive study, note that time distortion can be demonstrated in a majority of subjects under hypnosis:
 

The experiences are continuous. Thought under time distortion can take place with extreme rapidity ... recovery of materials from the unconscious (and) ... creative thought can be facilitated.


Other experiments have shown that a slowing down of time can also occur. Both distortions can have therapeutic applications.

Aaronson (1968) describes a study done with six males in which time distortion under hypnosis was observed.

Accelerated mental process is not only interesting for the remarkable effects it produces, and the light it throws on the prodigious activities of certain creative geniuses, but also for the implications it has regarding the relativistic nature of clock time. It is one thing to try to understand Einstein's relativity theories; it is much more immediate that time distortion can occur in an ASC as well as at very high speeds. It suggests that the speed of light is a boundary not only for our physical universe but for the OSC upon which our knowledge of it depends.

Readers wishing more information on AMP should consult Cooper and Erickson (1954), Krippner (1972, quoted in Gowan 1974) and

(page 137)

McCord and Sherrill (1961). The most recent summary of AMP is that of Jean Houston, who (1973:265-6) says:
 

we found that it is possible to greatly increase the rate of thought or amount of subjective experience beyond what is ordinarily possible within a unit of clock-measured time. That is to say, under certain conditions of altered consciousness a person might experience within a few minutes, as measured by the clock, such a wealth of ideas or images that it will seem that hours, days, or even longer must have passed for him to have experienced so much. Only a few minutes of objective (clock) time have elapsed; the change has been on the level of subjective experiential time and the explanation lies in the phenomenon of accelerated mental process (AMP).

It has long been known that AMP occurs spontaneously under conditions of dreaming sleep (the "hours long" dream that takes only a few seconds or minutes of clock time). Then there are the cases related to great emotional stress. A man falling from a bridge, and expecting to die, but who by some chance is saved from death, may later recount that during the fall his whole lifetime flashed (as images) before his eyes, or that he relived his entire lifetime or at least relived all significant events, so that it seemed his whole lifetime was lived through, and lived through without any haste, events all seeming to happen at the same rate as they happen during everyday working experience. This last-mentioned kind of experience is also an experience of images, but it is an experience in which the person participates fully, as a dreamer may participate in some of his dreams. The Swiss Alpine Club has recorded hundreds of such experiences reported by mountain climbers who have fallen, expecting to die, but who survived.

Persons who have taken psychedelic drugs sometimes experience the accelerated mind phenomena, only to discover that all of the mental experience occurred within just a minute or two of time as measured by the clock.

It is important to note that in all of the above mentioned experiences of AMP, imagery plays a predominant role. This would seem to be in part because imagistic thinking does not seem to be bound by the time-inhibited mechanisms which retard the flow of verbal thought. Related to this is the fact that most thinking is geared to speech and the movements of the body in work or play, and this is an additional causative factor to the slowness of most thinking. It is evident that thinking need not be limited

(page 138)
by the slow pace of our physiological being, or by the linear inhibitions of our verbal thought. When we look at the phenomenology of high level creativity, we note that the mind races over many alternatives, picking, choosing, discarding, synthesizing, sometimes doing the work of several months in a few minutes.
 
2.45 Mastery Over Fire24  (see Table III, page 142)

One of the best documented paranormal properties of the trance state is imperviousness of the human body (especially the hands and feet) to fire. It appears to occur in every society of the world, and in all ages and cultures from the most ancient to modern times. Since the documentation is large and impressive, and the firm establishment of one paranormal property of trance or ASC makes more believable others less frequent and well documented, we devote a detailed analysis to this phenomenon. If we are to remain scientific, such analysis suggests that our present laws of physics are but special cases of more general laws, and that we can begin to define the conditions (such as trance) under which the larger laws take over from the special laws of the ordinary state.

Unlike some other paranormal effects, mastery over fire, especially as seen in fire-walking, has been vouched for by the most impeccable witnesses - in many cases western men of science, who often were not only eye-witnesses to the phenomenon, but in some cases were even temporarily granted the power to participate themselves.22 The list includes bishops, medical doctors, scholars like Joseph Campbell, and Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society. Certainly an effect so well documented, and so much at variance with our usual concepts of physical reality, deserves careful consideration.

Probably the best Western material on fire-walking are the bulletins by Price (1936) and Brown (1938) from the University of London on fire-walking conducted in England under scientific auspices in 1935 and 1937. These reports contain extensive bibliographies, besides thorough accounts of the firewalks supported by pictures. McDougall himself, witnessed the 1935 tests where Kuda Bux walked a twenty-foot trench four times without any hurt or blistering. Reports of this feat appeared in Nature(September 21, 28, 1935) and The Lancet (September 28, 1935). In the 1937 tests, Ahmed Hussain did the fire walk and conferred his immunity on five volunteers, who, however, were slightly burned. Brown's report (1938) concludes that "fasting is not necessary" and that "there is no evidence that immunity can be conferred." Brown was unable to advance a scientific theory to account for the phenomenon.

It is interesting that Rawcliffe (1959:292), certainly a hostile witness

(page139)

for psychic phenomena, devotes a whole chapter to fire-walking, which he admits occurs. In considerable contrast to his other "exposes" of paranormal effects he makes no effort to explain what he plainly regards as an anomaly, equally well documented with dowsing.

He says:
 

In general the fire-walk is confined to walking over glowing embers. Virgil, Strabo, and Pliny give accounts of such emberwalks in Cappadocia two thousand years ago. Until well into the nineteenth century ember-walks took place as far west as Bulgaria. In the past ember-walking was common in China and Japan, and it is still practiced in many parts of India today. . . .


In a lengthy article quoting many Germanic sources, Benz (1969) describes Ordeal by Fire used throughout the ancient and medieval Indo-European world, and sanctioned in the Middle Ages by the Church. References to such are found in the Bible; for example, God says (Isaiah 43:2) "When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned."

There were also at least six places in the Bible where accounts of fire miracles are noted:
 

a . The rescue of Abraham from the fire of the Chaldees (Genesis 11)
b. The Burning Bush of Moses (Exodus 3)
c . The rescue of three youths from the fiery furnace (Daniel 3)
d. The rescue of Lot from the fire at Sodom (Genesis 19)
e. The deliverance of Israel from Egypt by the pillar of fire (Exodus 14)
f. The Pentacostal tongues of fire (Acts 2)


With this authority it is not surprising that the early church gave its sanction. The Christian rite was elaborate, containing a mass of purification, and ending with the adjuration to the probandus that he must be free from blame to be unharmed, but that if he is innocent, he may safely traverse the flames. There is elaborate ritual connected with the rite, much like that described in the Hindu fire walking, with purification, fasting, abstinence, and the induction of trance. Various forms of the ordeal were used:

(a) walking over a firey pit;
(b) walking through a fire or being ignited wearing a shirt soaked with wax;
(c) walking over nine red hot plowshares;
(d) carrying a red hot ball of iron, or pitching it into a pot;
(e) walking between two burning pyres.
There are many historical accounts of such actions in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, but the practice was discontinued sometime in the 13th century. Here are some examples quoted by Benz:
 
1. Bishop Poppo of Hamburg walked through a bonfire dressed
(page 140)
in a sheet of wax to prove to the heathen Danes of the power of God;
2. Copres, an Egyptian Christian monk, was unharmed by fire, while his adversary, a Manichean was burned;
3. St. Francis of Assisi offered to undergo ordeal by fire before the Sultan of Egypt to prove Christianity superior to Mohammadism;
4. Petrus Igneus (Florence 1067) walked between burning pyres;
5. Petrus Bartholomeus (1098) did the same;
6. Queen Emma walked across nine red hot plowshares in Winchester cathedral in 1043;
7. Empress Kunegunde in a trance did the same in Bamberg in 1007.


Godwin (1968:169-170) gives excellent accounts of fire-walking with pictures. Godwin (1968:165) states: "There is no doubt fire-walking began as a religious rite."

Fire-walking occurs not only in widely diverse spots such as India, Micronesia, but also in the U.S.A. In 1935, Kuda Bux performed this feat at Rockefeller Center, New York. The only explanation for this mystifying phenomenon is that fire-walkers are either in religious trance, or have been able to achieve a mind concentration of "onepointedness" during which extraordinary control over the environment can be achieved.

Eliade (1964:372) notes that in Fiji, shamanistic powers such as walking on hot coals are transmitted by heredity in families. There are numerous western observations of this rite which on occasion includes other members of the tribe and even outsiders. Insensibility to fire has been documented in numerous Polynesian prophets.

One of the earliest reliable accounts of fire-walking is given by Lang (1901:270ff) who devotes a chapter full of references to it in various localities in the Pacific. So does Gaddis (1967), (see p. 142).

Houston (1973) says:
 

Scientific observation would appear to have validated the fire walking phenomenon. This leads us to ask how necessarily susceptible to damage is the human body anyhow? No one seems to know the answer, but these examples and many others that could be cited seem to suggest the possibility of a very high degree of mental control over a wide range of body responses to even the most extreme stresses.


Pearce (1971) believes that at some ancient time someone appointed for a fiery sacrifice survived this kind of thing, and became an instant deity. "Fire walking is an autistic venture."

Puharich (1962:88) describes the fire walking experience of the

(page 141)

eminent Western scholar, Joseph Campbell, who, observing the ceremony in Kyoto, was conducted over the coals by a monk without any injury. He also refers to the extensive investigations of M. R. Coe (True Magazine August, 1957) into the same subject.

Fire walking in Ceylon has been the subject of magazine articles (Feinberg, L. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1959) and (Gilbert Grosvenor National Geographic, April, 1966). Each of these accounts is well authenticated by Westerners, with illustrations.

We should not conclude the examination of fire walking without noting the existence of the reverse phenomenon - that of raising burn blisters by hypnotic suggestion. J.A. Hadfield (The Lancet, 1917:ii:678) was able to produce burn blisters in a hypnotized subject by touching him with his finger while telling him that his arm was being touched by a red hot iron. A blister formed within nine hours identical to the usual burn blister.

The production and absorption of heat in a paranormal manner (which amounts to a psychic transfer of energy) appears to be closely connected with juncture with the numinous. We have investigated and authenticated fire-walking, but we should also look at a rarer converse phenomenon, tumo or the production of psychic heat. We have seen this effect in the prototaxic mode (sections 2.35), but it is also found as a siddhi in the syntaxic mode (see section 4.15). While this sort of thing is confined mainly to Eastern monks who are reputed to dry wet coverings in the icy cold of winter, one finds it mentioned by Richard Rolle (cf 4.155), George Fox (cf 2.62), and others. And as we can all remember from Good King Wenceslas:
 

Mark my footsteps my good page
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter rage
Treats thy limbs less coldly.

Page and monarch forth they went
Where the snow lay dinted
Heat was in the very sod
Which the saint had printed.


What shall we conclude from this amazing anomaly, which lays bare the inadequacy of present laws of physics to explain the universe? We are here in the presence of the same kind of "discrepancy" which led Einstein to discover the theory of relativity; in short, present theories of the reactive nature of mankind as a creature are no more adequate to explain ultimate reality than was the ether theory of light able to explain the constancy of its speed. In the case of relativity, the difference between Einsteinian relativity and Newtonian physics

(page 142 - 143)

Table III "Gaddis" Documentation of Mastery Over Fire

(page 144)

was not great from a practical standpoint, but enormous from a theoretical one. In the same way, we must not expect the new orthocognition to enable us to roast potatoes for supper or to dwell on the Sun's surface, for the effect is as uncertain and fleeting as it is phenomenal. But the theoretical consequences are likewise enormous. For they indicate that the human being is not merely a reactive creature in a world of nature, but he is under certain special conditions able to become part of the noumenon, and as such he partakes of the more general laws of meta-physics which apply to the noumenon. And a corollary of one of these laws specifies that by this juncture he has power to effect psychic transformation of energy, namely in the production and absorption of heat and other electromagnetic waves. And this understanding is far more important in the long run than the quaint prototaxic antics of playing with fire.26

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SPECIAL ADVISORY NOTICE

Let no one conclude from the above section that he is able or empowered to perform similar feats, or that this review of research in this area openly or covertly suggests or sanctions such activities. Persons not in the proper state of trance have been seriously burned under similar circumstances.


2.46 Psychokinesis and Poltergeist Phenomena

Psychokinesis has to do with the movement of physical bodies by the direct application of psychic energy. The affected bodies are usually small, though this is not always so. They are then known as "apports."

A low form of psychokinesis is poltergeist phenomena. This age old psychic nuisance consists of noisy disturbances, the breaking of dishes and the throwing of apports (usually inside a house), and occasionally the spontaneous combustion of fire. The word "poltergeist" means "noisy spirit," and the phenomenon which is universally reported often centers on the presence of a young adolescent with emotional problems. Since there is already a very extensive literature on this subject, we shall concentrate on explanations.

Gaddis (1967:203) after a thorough canvas of poltergeist phenomena, quotes Bayless as saying that "the poltergeist-force is almost always indicative of a psychological rather than a spiritistic origin," and himself concludes in regard to poltergeist phenomena:

(page 145)

Such stresses within the subconscious mind, if unrelieved and sufficiently intense, can result in a psychological state known as dissociation.... When these conditions exist, a person can commit acts, including destructive acts representing his repressed frustrations and desires, and then return to his normal self with no conscious memory of what has been done. In poltergeist phenomena we are witnessing the projection and dramatization of subconscious repressed tensions and conflicts . . . .
 
Another researcher who believed in the "poltergeist psychosis" was Fodor (1948), (1959) who "cured" many such cases by offering love and understanding to the adolescent agent (Gaddis, 1967:205).

A thorough account of the subject was made by Owens (1964) in Can We Explain the Poltergeist? Some of the reported phenomena make it look as though in some manner the numinous influence (which in concert with the adolescent agent appears to produce the phenomena) does so by increasing the rate of oxidation of inanimate objects in the surround. This increase in oxidation furnishes the heat energy which is then employed in tricks involving mechanical energy, and occasionally in the instances of spontaneous combustion when the oxidation rate is very high.

In the Parapsychology Review for November-December, 1973, (4:6:4:2), the statement is made that when the psychic Rudi Schneider was stripped and searched as a matter of routine during his performances, it was found that during every exhibition of telekinesis, he had had an orgasm. This fact is extremely suggestive. In particular it points to the chakra center in the genital area as connected with apports, and one is immediately reminded that poltergeist phenomena (also prominently connected with apports) is almost always characterized by the presence of a pubescent adolescent, for whom mastabatory activity would be quite probable. Is it possible that orgasm in trance is the cause of telekinesis?

More fruitful and better scientifically organized research with regard to the PK effect has been commenced by the Russians (Schroeder and Ostrander, 1970:62-80). Because perhaps of military applications, PK is taken very seriously by Russian researchers, and their top exhibit, Mme. Mikhailova, has demonstrated PK on film. Viewing this film, in which the lady makes compass needles spin, and brings a matchbox and other small articles across the table toward her by holding her hands near (but not in contact with them) is a very convincing experience. More recently, Uri Geller, has been breaking spoons and bending keys in the USA, even when under serious controlled conditions (see Puharich Uri, 1974) as well as performing other PK effects.

(page 146)

2.47 The Out-of-Body Experience

If all men are yogis, uniting the individual with the general mind at the moment of death, there appear to be some men who by accident or study learn the knack on other occasions. This phenomenon, possible of further confirmation because the projector remains alive, is known as the out-of-body experience. OBE may be distinguished from psychic impressions by the shift in attention from the percipient to the projector, although all are of different degrees on the same continuum. OBE also have their gradations; we start with one very near to the deathbed activity last noticed.

The unconscious out-of-body experience. This experience occurs when the projector is alive but asleep. He is unaware that he has projected until later it is confirmed to him by a percipient of the projection. A very famous case of this involving two men well known in the world was that of Theodore Dreiser and John Cooper Powys which we have quoted elsewhere (1974:16-7) from Wilson (1972:54) in which Powys appeared before Dreiser as he promised when he was actually far away.

Despite the spectacular nature of such phenomena, and despite their relative rarity as contrasted to the earlier-noted experiences, these phantasms of the living are quite well documented in psychic research. One of the best evidential examples are the so-called "Elsie projections" (Fox 1962:56-63), wherein a young man while asleep appears to his inamorata, Elsie, in her bedroom. Prince (1963:30-1) tells of a similar projection vouched for by none other than William James, and another case (1963:166) in which Gilbert Parker is the guarantor. Much of the psychic material of Castenada (1972) in the "Don Juan" protocols, can be explained along these lines. F. W. H. Myers (1961) in Personality and Its Survival After Death, represents (1903) the earliest accounts of the British investigators. Other sources for similar phenomena are Sylvan Muldoon (1970), The Projection of The Astral Body, and G. N. M. Tyrell, Science and Psychical Phenomena and Apparatus (1961).

We believe that in some way, either through accident, illness, or learned knack, the projector, while in the hypnagogic state just preceding deep sleep, and having a desire to appear, connects somehow with the generalized preconscious, and is able to affect the sensorium of the percipient - sometime (and this is more difficult to explain), even the sensoriums of several percipients at the same time. The projector is always asleep at these times and is not aware of the projection until it is later confirmed, and the projection itself does not speak or show other signs of consciousness.

We now come to the last in the continuum of related phenomena, which can be called the conscious out-of-body experience. This episode,

(page 147)

the rarest and yet the most spectacular of the series, occurs when the percipient is alive and awake (or at least not asleep) and is conscious that he is projected, that is, he has consciousness of being in another place than that where his body is; he can describe this location, so that frequently it can afterwards be identified evidentially, and very often he can communicate with and show other conscious awareness of the percipient. In some (perhaps advanced?) cases, the projector can consciously will and effect his projection. At other times, the projector is also the percipient; in these, there seems to be clear and distinct differences between such experiments and the purely subjective revery of imagining oneself at a distant spot.

This conscious legerdemain is known as "astral projection"; the projected consciousness, often being known as the "astral body," the "Etheric body," or simply as "the double." In all cases of such projection it appears to be connected to the physical body by an infinitely extensible "silver cord." There also appears to be momentary unconsciousness when the projector leaves the physical body, and a "click phenomenon" upon his return.

The most authoritative writer on this subject is Crookall (1964, 1966, 1970), an investigator who has amassed a great deal of corroboratory evidence. He believes (1970) that the etheric double is released in two stages: the first stage involves quitting the physical body with the vehicle of vitality. Doubles of this type (1970:127) are never seen by the projector who does not have consciousness but only by others. The projector is usually mediumistic, in a dreamy, slightly dissociated condition, and the double, which is not an instrument of consciousness is perceived as solid and lifelike, not luminous, subtle or tenuous. The conscious vehicle is the product of a second unveiling, quitting the vehicle of vitality, in which case there is a click, pop, or repercussion when the double reenters the physical (1970:125).

Crookall records comments by other investigators on the subject. He quotes Myers (1970:19) as saying "Astral projection is the most significant of all psychical phenomena." Crookall (1966:81) describes the OBE experience of Mrs. Garrett (a famous medium) and alleges that it "proves" that the "psychical body is an object and not as some orthodox investigators believe, no more than a mental image of the physical."

Muldoon and Carrington in The Phenomena of Astral Projection (1951) discuss this subject thoroughly. The authors (1951:18) recount the famous case of the Monk Liguori, who on the morning of 21 September 1774 at Arienzo, four days journey from Rome, fell into a cataleptic sleep and upon awakening stated that he had been present at the death of the Pope. He was seen at the deathbed, where he led prayers for the dying Pontiff.

(page 148)

In discussing two evidential cases (1951:112-3) they point out the "great importance of suppressed desire" and also (1951:114) note the "click" phenomenon, upon return.

Muldoon was himself capable of astral projection, and his books are enlivened by personal accounts. Carrington as a topflight psychic investigator, made an admirable coauthor. In an earlier book (1929:65) they laid down the fundamental law of astral projection:
 

If the subconscious will becomes possessed of the idea to move the body, and the physical counterpart is incapacitated, the subconscious will move the astral body independent of the physical.


Muldoon identifies the connecting link between the conscious and the preconscious as "passive will." He says with respect to projections (1929:239):
 

You can never force the passive will successfully, for the instant you try to force passive will, it becomes active will. You must just have the desire to project so strongly within you that it produces passive will, which in turn builds up the stress of the desire, and convinces the subconscious mind that the visions you imagine concerning projection are perfectly reasonable and possible.


This section is quoted because this is a clear statement of the manner in which the union between the individual consciousness and the generalized preconscious is established and therefore is of more universal application than astral projection alone.

2.48 Mob Contagion

As scientists, we must note that it would be incorrect to ascribe the source of the numinous prototaxic effects solely to the altered state of consciousness involved in supernatural, religious, or other paranormal efforts. They can apparently occur in far more mundane activities when mob psychology has reached a sufficient height. The playwright, Eugene Ionesco, gives an excellent example of this behavior in citing how in 1938 the writer Denis de Rougemont was swept up in a frenzied Nazi demonstration over Hitler. He says:
 

The hysteria spread and advanced with Hitler, like a tide. This delirious enthusiasm first of all astonished the writer. But when the Fuhrer came quite near, and all the people round him gave way to the general hysteria, de Rougemont felt the same raging madness in himself, struggling to possess him. He was on the
(page 149)
point of falling under the spell. . . . His hair stood on end, literally, he says, and then he understood what is meant by Holy Terror.


Even so seasoned a reporter as Alastair Cooke has testified23 that Hitler and Lloyd George were two of the most hypnotic speakers he ever covered, each possessed with an uncanny power to sway multitudes, even those who opposed them on sound logical grounds.

Many of the preachers of the past are said to have had similar powers, among them John Wesley, the great non-conformist. Mooney (1896:940) acknowledges the following to Southey's Wesley:
 

The most remarkable of these exhibitions took place under the preaching of Wesley, following him, as we are told, wherever he went. Whitefield, although more forcible and sensational in his preaching, did not at first produce the same effect on his hearers, and considered such manifestations as but doubtful signs of the presence of the Lord and by no means to be encouraged. On preaching, however, to a congregation in which Wesley had already produced such convulsions, and where, consequently, there was a predisposition in this direction, several persons were thus seized and sank down upon the floor, and we are told by the biographer "this was a great triumph to Wesley."

Wesley himself describes several instances. At one time, he states, a physician suspecting fraud attended a meeting during which a woman was thrown into a fit, crying aloud and weeping violently, until great drops of sweat ran down her face and her whole body shook. The doctor stood close by, noting every symptom, and not knowing what to think, being convinced that it was not fraud or any natural disorder. "But when both her soul and body were healed in a moment he acknowledged the finger of God." On another occasion, Wesley tells us, "While I was earnestly inviting all men to enter into the Holiest by this new and living way, many of those that heard began to call upon God with strong cries and tears. Some sank down, and there remained no strength in them. Others exceedingly trembled and quaked."

At another time, while he was speaking, one of his hearers dropped down, and in the course of half an hour seven others, in violent agonies. The pains as of hell, he says, came about them; but notwithstanding his own reasoning, neither he nor his auditors called in question the divine origin of these emotions, and they went away rejoicing and praising God. . . . Sometimes he scarcely began to speak before some of his believers, overwrought with expectation, fell into the crisis, for so it may be called in this case, as properly as in animal magnetism.

(page 150)
Sometimes his voice could scarcely be heard amid the groans and cries of these suffering and raving enthusiasts.


That the experience involved psychic contagion, as well as religious trance is made clear by the following, (Mooney 1896:941):
 

A Quaker, who was present at one meeting, and inveighed against what he called the dissimulation of these creatures, caught the contagious emotion himself, and even while he was biting his lips and knitting his brows, dropped down as if he had been struck by lightning." (Southey's Wesley.)
 
Mooney (1896:944) also describes similar behavior among religious enthusiasts in early America:
 
Twenty years later the jerking epidemic again broke out in Tennessee, and is described in a letter by the famous visionary and revivalist Lorenzo Dow, who was then preaching in the same region. His description agrees with that given the author by old men who lived at this time in eastern Tennessee. We quote from Dow's letter: "There commenced a trembling among the wicked. One and a second fell from their seats. I think for eleven hours there was no cessation of the loud cries. The people, some who were standing and sitting, fell like men shot on the field of battle, and I felt it like a tremor to run through my soul and veins so that it took away my limb power, so that I fell to the floor, and by faith saw a greater blessing than 1 had hitherto experienced." At another place he says: "After taking a cup of tea, I began to speak to a vast audience, and I observed about thirty to have the jerks, though they strove to keep as still as they could. These emotions were involuntary and irresistible, as any unprejudiced mind might see." At Marysville "many appeared to feel the word, but about fifty felt the jerks. On Sunday, at Knoxville, the governor being present, about one hundred and fifty had the jerking exercise, among them a circuit preacher, Johnson, who had opposed them a little while before. Camp meeting commenced at Liberty. Here I saw the jerks, and some danced. The people are taken with jerking irresistibly, and if they strive to resist it, it worries them more than hard work. Their eyes, when dancing, seem to be fixed upward as if upon an invisible object, and they are lost to all below. I passed by a meeting house where I observed the undergrowth had been cut down for a camp meeting, and from fifty to a hundred saplings left breast high, which appeared to me so slovenish that I could not but ask my guide the cause, who observed they were topped
(page 151)
so high and left for the people to jerk by. This so excited my attention that I went over the ground to view it, and found where the people had laid hold of them and jerked so powerfully that they kicked up the earth as a horse stamping flies. Persecutors are more subject to the jerks than others, and they have cursed and swore and damned it while jerking." Then he says: "I have seen Presbyterians, Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, Church of England, and Independents exercised with the jerks - gentlemen and ladies, black and white, rich and poor - without exception. Those naturalists who wish to get it to philosophize upon it and the most godly are excepted from the jerks. The wicked are more afraid of it than of the smallpox or yellow fever."


It is worthy of note that, according to his account, investigators who wished to study the phenomenon were unable to come under the influence, even though they so desired.

This gross prototaxic display will immediately remind readers of "unstressing" phenomena (sect. 2.23); and it it also akin to some of the behaviors in glossolalia (2.51) next to be discussed. That even hard-headed scientists may be swept up is also on record. One of the most interesting of the many ASC protocols that Goodman reports is that of her own ASC, apparently induced in a nonbeliever by the atmosphere of the Pentecostal scene around her. She recalls (1972:72) from notes:
 

Then some place in the church, I do not remember where, I leaned against something, I do not know what. I saw light, but then again I was surrounded by light, or perhaps not because the light was in me and I was the light. In this light I saw words in black outline - or were they just letters - descending upside down as if on a waterfall of light. At the same time I was full of a gaiety as if my entire being were resounding with silver bells. Never before had I felt this kind of luminous, ethereal, delightful happiness. I recovered with the thought: now I finally know what joy is.


Speaking of the contagious aspect of this ASC she continues:
 

I was in the proper place at the proper time, thinking of prayer and then it happened to me, quite spontaneously and without any conscious effort on my part. It did not happen again, because I intentionally blocked subsequent occurrences. I needed at all times to be in complete control of all my faculties.


This first-hand testimony of a researcher agrees with other accounts

(page 152)

that one does not have to be a believer to experience a "sympathetic" ASC under conditions where ASC's are occurring.


We have now completed a brief survey of the paranormal effects of trance. Generally we find that the purpose of trance is to effect some kind of juncture with the subconscious or numinous element. No matter what procedures are used to effect this union, the effects are similar, - namely some transcendence of time, space, and personality. The major uses for this activity are to heal, to advise, to prophesy, and to placate supernatural forces. Later, we shall be able to compare these paranormal effects with the siddhis (section 4.15) of the syntaxic mode. The paranormal effects of trance, however, differ from the siddhis in being more overt, and hence more noticeable.

(page 152)

2.5 THE AUTOMATISMS OF GLOSSOLALIA AND AUTOMATIC WRITING

We now come to two examples of automatic behavior that have transitional aspects and therefore appear somewhat difficult to classify. It seems as though an organ of the body (the larynx, the arm) rather than the brain has become entranced. While there is certainly dissociation in both cases, it is commonly lighter than in other forms of trance, and both forms of behavior have replaced most kinesthetic activity with oral or verbal response. Instead of being seen as "bad," they are both seen as "good," and the recipient is considered to have been singled out for special attention as a witness or amanuensis by the numinous element conceived of as holy. Glossolalia (or speaking with tongues) has some similarities to "unstressing" (sect. 2.23), while automatic writing has some similarities to creative inspiration (sect. 4.35).

2.51 Glossolalia

"Speaking in Tongues" takes its authority from the Pentecostal experience described in Acts II:
 

And when the day of Pentecost was come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a mighty rushing wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they
(page153)
were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.


It is clear that this was a group prototaxic numinous experience; it changed the behavior of the apostles, and it has continued to change behavior of Pentecostal religious groups ever since. One may note that modern Pentecostals may be indulging in mere mimesis, for the ASC evidence of "cloven tongues, as of fire" is not found in modern experience.

Goodman (Bourguignon, 1973:185-6) defines the issue well:
 

The central behavior of the Apostolic worship service is speaking in tongues. In the following I should like to summarize research results detailed elsewhere (Goodman 1969 a, 1969 b, 1971, 1972), that refer to this behavior. Speaking in tongues, or glossolalia (from Greek glossa "tongue" + lalia "speech"), is an act of vocalization in trance. It is actually a behavior complex, consisting (and learned in this sequence)3 first of all of a mental state in which a person is dissociated from ordinary reality - that is, he is largely unaware of what is going on around him. He does not perceive many ordinary stimuli, such as strong light, heat, sounds, or discourse directed at him. Instead, he has experiences not verifiable by an observer, such as pressure on his chest, floating, disappearance of persons around him, and so on. In physical terms, he is hyperaroused; his body works more intensely than under ordinary conditions, evidencing an accelerated pulse and heart beat, exaggerated perspiration, salivation, tear flow, flushing, and various patterns of motion.

Second, there is vocalization, that is glossolalia proper. This vocalization is superimposed on the hyperaroused state - in other words, it is learned while the person is dissociated. It has a very distinct pattern that does not vary from language to language: persons speaking various English dialects, Portuguese, Spanish, or Maya, all display the same pattern in this vocalization. A simplified description that concentrates only on what is relevant here follows. At the onset, a unit utterance of glossolalia - that is, a vocalization pattern (a sequence of syllables) uttered without a longer pause between its parts - is heard by the listener as being in the medium range of the usual range of the particular person's speech. It then rises to a peak that is perceivable as louder and more intense, often simply very fast4 as compared with the rest of the vocalization or containing vowels and consonants that take more effort to pronounce than those that preceded (the e in eel, for example, takes more effort to form than the

(page 154)
a in accompany). Finally, the utterance decays in dropping of the voice, but much faster and to a lower pitch and intensity than it does at the end of a sentence; in fact, the end of a glossolalia utterance is sometimes hardly audible.

Third, after the glossolalia has been uttered, most persons do not immediately return to ordinary reality. They remain on something like a platform; they are not as hyperaroused as before, but appear rather somewhat disoriented, their speech possibly a bit disturbed, sounding as if "squeezed" or drawn out (with overlong vowels), their recall of memory material halting. An important psychological correlate of this mental state is a considerable depression of inhibitions, making people say or do things that they would not if they were not in this altered mental state.

Finally, a dissolution of this residual hyperarousal takes place, and the person returns to ordinary reality. Very little of what an observer knows has taken place is remembered by the person who has been in this form of dissociation. He may not remember that he uttered anything, he recalls none of the movements the observer has seen. [Her footnotes]


Goodman (1972:55) points out that these accounts show striking parallels to the "classical shamanistic patterns: vision, which incorporates the call, extended loss of consciousness, illness, recovery, and service."

Regarding characteristics of the ASC, Goodman (1972:58-9) says:
 

Some of them are aware of having cried; they speak of veins seemingly bursting open, the tongue being locked in place or swollen; of being lifted up, of feeling hot, of pressure in the chest, sometimes from both sides, of cheeks ballooning, of the head swelling then shrinking again; of gentle rain coming down on neck and shoulders and penetrating the chest; the sensation reaching down into the legs, and the middle of the back.

Apart from the flow of tears, however, the outside observer sees entirely different manifestations. These are tightly closed eyes and rapid breathing, occasional pallor and goose pimples; a twitched and flushed face; in addition to lacrimation, salivation, and perspiration; inability to swallow, rigidity of limbs, trembling, spasms, and unusual kinetic behavior, such as rhythmic movements, sometimes of great rapidity. . . .

I have seen such perspiration in some instances that even the upper part of a man's trousers was soaked through, and heavy beads of sweat appeared on the back of another's hand; salivation

(page 155)
so intense, that afterward there were hand-sized or even larger pools of clear saliva on the cement floor of the church.... In the Merida congregation a man somersaulted from one end of the church to the other ...


Goodman (1972:75-6) points to the psychological term of "driving" which is a conscious attempt to produce altered behavior through interference with bodily rhythms. Examples are photic driving (regular flashing of a light), and auditory driving (drum-beats). She feels that because these may interfere with normal EEG patterns, conscious control is lost and an ASC is thereby induced. Goodman (1972:96) points out that with practice the ASC trance becomes lighter during glossolalia, but that the person seems to lose power. This is in line with other dissociative types of experience, such as automatic writing and mediumship for example.

Goodman (1972:156-7) identifies the glossalalic state as an ASC occasioned by hyperarousal dissociation. She says:
 

I mentioned the young woman who spontaneously started writing and drawing in trance (Goodman 1971b). In Bali small girls are placed in dissociation and then taught the vastly complex ritual dance (Belo:1960). Among the Wolof and Lebou in West Africa, dance is superimposed on the dissociation and the drummer literally drives the mentally ill subject into a peak and a decay by accelerating the drumming within the framework of curing rites (Zempleni: 1966). The Shakers (Spiritual Baptists) have ritualized the kinetic behavior accompanying a hyperarousal dissociation not as a dance but as rhythmic manifestation, which at its height assumes a complete unison of breathing and motion patterns "so that they are depersonalized and unified and each person as if in a dance line is reproducing the same movement (Henney 1967:8).


Goodman says further (1972:59) of hyperarousal:
 

This type of behavior is in distinct contrast to certain meditative conditions (e.g. Hoening 1968, Kamiya 1968, Wallace 1970) in which the person, eyes usually open, remains perfectly motionless, his pulse rate and breathing slower than normal.


Here, Goodman is referring to alpha wave biofeedback and Transcendental Meditation states which she refers to as hypoarousal (1972:60). "In contrast, the mental state of the glossolalist, with its obvious somatic agitation, seems to me hyperaroused." Thus Goodman distinguishes between these states in terms of sensory overload versus

(page 156)

sensory underload. Since sensory overload can produce an ecstatic state, and sensory underload (hypnosis) can produce dissociation, we respectfully disagree, and think it better to distinguish the two categories in terms of prototaxic and syntaxic experiences as we have in this book, We do agree with Goodman that the somatic agitation is characteristic of the lower state and lack of somatic agitation (except in unstressing phenomena) is characteristic of the higher stages.

In another place Goodman (1971) associates glossolalia with single limb trance (e.g. automatic writing). We would agree with this classification, giving the name "single organ trance" to both glossolalia and automatic writing.

Goodman (1972:127) points out that there is a taxonomy of kinetic behavior from miniscule to magiscule which goes as follows:

1. trembling and shaking
2. twitching
3. fingers cramping and stretching
4. head shaking
5. hand manipulation
6. throwing trunk from side to side
7. jumping while kneeling or standing
8. rocking, bowing, or armlifting


At a single time the kinetic behavior seems to vary inversely as the glossolalia, as though both were fed from a single energy pool; although over time, this pool seems to be depleted, and both behaviors suffer correspondingly.

In a somewhat similar manner glossolalia has some characteristics or speech anomalies. Goodman (1972:160) says:
 

Fitzgerald (1969) identifies through careful analysis of the
prophetic speech of Ga (Africa) spirit mediums the following
trance-generated traits, which I have arranged in a sequence
going from low to high arousal:
1. vowel elongation
2. interruption or drowning out of speech
3. interjection of sounds not employed in standard speech
4. marked glottal constriction not normally occurring
5. hyperventilation, sudden volume increase in position of or glottalization of initial speech segments
6. extremely high suddenly rising pitch
Goodman (1972:160) concludes her dissertation by indicating that she perceives glossolalia as a ritualization of hyperarousal dissociation.
Samarin discusses glossolalia as an automatism (1972:22) thus:

(page 157)

When glossolalia is described as an automatism it is said to be an "involuntary movement of the speech organs" (Coe 1916:114) "a stereotyped pattern of unconsciously controlled vocal behavior or "psychomotor behavior" in which the conscious centers of the psyche are bypassed." Typical also are the words of Cutten (1927:160) "We have to do with a state of personal disintegration in which the verbo-motive centers of the subject are obedient to subconscious impulses ... (in tongues) the subconscious concentrates its energy on one motor or sensory function." Elsewhere he characterizes a glossolalic utterance as "a mass of meaningless syllables gushing forth under the control of the excited lower centers (1927:174)."
 
Samarin (1972:27-8) quotes Kelsey (1964:167) on an ASC with glossolalia:
 
As they prayed for me to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit ... I was filled . . . every part of me, every bone, tissue, and muscle. So complete was the electrifying presence that my hands became heavy and felt as though they were bursting with electricity. Then both hands began to rise and Father placed his hand on them and his other hand on my cheek and I burst out in an unknown tongue. My spirit, the inner man was completely in the control of the Holy Spirit ... My whole body tingled and was filled with (Christ's) warmth.
Samarin (1972:28) says: "These symptoms of heaviness, electricity tingling and warmth are reported by some of my own correspondents." Samarin (1972:39) says:
 
In Jungian terms, glossolalia is froth of a different kind. It is the manifestation of the invasion into one's consciousness of the "collective unconscious," a disorder which reveals a psychical disequilibrium because the contents of the invasion are not fully integrated; the new and the old are not in complete focus. (Jung (1958:163).... Kelsey ... uses Jungian terms to show that man has direct contact with God through this collective psyche identified in Christian theology, he says as the Holy Spirit (Kelsey 1964:ch 7).
Goodman (1972:xxi) quotes Spoerri (1967) as believing that glossolalia is an example of the "disintegration of the speech profile (which) may arise in cases of exorcism, acute catatonic schizophrenia, and chronic schizophrenic defects." She further states that glossolalia is "associated with altered states of consciousness. This has led some

(page 158)

authors to class it as psychotic." She cites Mackie (1921) and Cutten (1927) who contend that glossolalia is linked to the psychoses, hysteria and schizophrenia. She contends however, that modern research has shown significant differences between glossolalics and those presenting other dissociative behavior. For one thing, research shows that personality test studies of glossolalics do not significantly differentiate them from normals (Goodman 1972:25). Goodman's thesis hypothesis (1972:8) is
 

that the glossolalist peaks the way he does because his speech behavior is modified by the way his body acts in the particular mental state, often termed trance, into which he places himself.


It should be noted that Samarian (1972:33) disagrees with Goodman. He says:
 

Pentecostal glossolalia is sometimes associated with some degree of altered states of consciousness, and this occasionally involves motor activity that is involuntary, or rarely a complete loss of consciousness.


We give some of Goodman's protocols for evidence:
 

(Goodman 1972:25, speaking from her tape of Juan) I remember him saying "I want to be silent, but my tongue is locked in place. I hear my words, but I do not understand them. Then almost without having to catch his breath, he passes into language and kneels down again. I can easily see now why glossolalia is so universally considered a divine inspiration, a possession by a supernatural being. There is something incredibly, brutally elemental about each such outbreak of vocalization, and at the same time something eerily, frighteningly unreal.

(Goodman 1972:31; Salvador speaks) It was only my third time of going to a service and I was told that we would pray for two women so that they would receive the Holy Spirit. I really had no business praying for them, for I did not have it either. But I did not know this so I started praying for them. And seeing the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in them, it was given to me that I should sing the praise of the Lord in tongues, and I sang it for a very long time, and at this occasion I saw a light that descended from heaven. It was very beautiful and a great joy to me."

(Goodman 1972:39; Trinidad speaks) Then finally on the fifteenth day of August, I was baptized by the Holy Spirit. This

(page159)
feels wonderful. It is very difficult for me to explain, but one feels delight, and one doesn't care that people are looking on, that they see the foolish things that one does - one shouts, one despairs, cries; well, anyway, it is a very, very strong emotion; you feel as if your veins would burst open; well anyway, it is a very beautiful thing ...

(Goodman 1972:42; Lorenzo speaks) After I was baptized, I prayed for the Holy Spirit long and hard, but did not receive it. There was one time when I cried and cried, and I was bathed in perspiration, and I saw a light, but I did not receive the gift of tongues; it was my companion who did. But the next time it was also given to me. It was a lovely experience the first time; something you can hardly describe; there was a pressure on my chest. I felt as if I was being lifted up bodily, and my tongue felt swollen. At first it is not possible to control the manifestation in any way, and it is such a pleasure.

(Goodman 1972:47; Nohoc speaks) For they are words that you don't understand, and yet they keep coming. And when the Holy Spirit comes, it feels as if my head were swelling up, but real big, and then it becomes small once more. And this feeling reaches down into the legs and the middle of the back. It grabs you and you feel the Lord's power. There is nothing like it, and nothing will stop it.

(Goodman 1972:61; Consuelo speaks) I started praying in tongues lying in my hammock. All of a sudden instead of going to sleep after praying, my head began hurting terribly, as if it was going to split in half, and I saw a great light. I could not stop praying until two the following morning.


The organ (larynx) trance of glossolalia is certainly akin to more kinesthetic prototaxic effects of religious excess, which we have elsewhere noted under "unstressing" and "higher trance," in this chapter. When one considers that there is good evidence in Goodman's protocols that glossolalia is induced out of a more general prototaxic trance by "driving," one can well understand the mutual relationships between these several kinds of vocal, gestural, and bodily movements. Mooney (1896:943) describes an early Pentecostal meeting in similar terms:
 

"The people remained on the ground day and night, listening to the most exciting sermons, and engaging in a mode of worship which consisted in alternate crying, laughing, singing, and shouting, accompanied with gesticulations of a most extraordinary character. Often there would be an unusual outcry; some bursting
(page 160)
forth into loud ejaculations of thanksgiving; others exhorting their careless friends to 'turn to the Lord;' some struck with terror, and hastening to escape; others trembling, weeping, and swooning away, till every appearance of life was gone, and the extremities of the body assumed the coldness of a corpse. At one meeting not less than a thousand persons fell the the ground, apparently without sense or motion. It was common to see them shed tears plentifully about an hour before they fell. They were then seized with a general tremor, and sometimes they uttered one or two piercing shrieks in the moment of falling. This latter phenomenon was common to both sexes, to all ages, and to all sorts of characters." (Caswall, The Prophet ofthe Nineteenth Century,quoted by Remy.)

After a time these crazy performances in the sacred name of religion became so much a matter of course that they were regularly classified in categories as the rolls, the jerks, the barks, etc. "The rolling exercise was affected by doubling themselves up, then rolling from one side to the other like a hoop, or in extending the body horizontally and rolling over and over in the filth like so many swine. The jerk consisted in violent spasms and twistings of every part of the body. Sometimes the head was twisted round so that the head was turned to the back, and the countenance so much distorted that not one of its features was to be recognized. When attacked by the jerks, they sometimes hopped like frogs, and the face and limbs underwent the most hideous contortions. The bark consisted in throwing themselves on all fours, growling, showing their teeth, and barking like dogs. Sometimes a number of people crouching down in front of the minister continue to bark as long as he preached. These last were supposed to be more especially endowed with the gifts of prophecy, dreams, rhapsodies, and visions of angels." (Remy, Journey to Great Salt Lake City, I)


This behavior may be compared to that in section 2.48; both involve prototaxic (somatic) display as a result of hyperarousal. But any man fortunate enough to have made successful love to a passionate woman has doubtless noticed some of the same effects. While the orgiastic group religions experience was generally regarded as due to the presence of devils or angels by the former ages, our view of the presence of the numinous element would be that the experience is like an outpouring of molten magma from a volcanic eruption in that the words lack semantic content, and often are not even words but mere sounds; it is as if the numinous element in the guise of a computer were simply "printing dump" without any

(page 161)

guidance from the terminal. Let us hear from witnesses:

Podmore (1902:7-8) describing the St. Medard phenomena of 1730:
 

Insensibility to pain, even the pain of burning, and to severe blows, and other ill treatment was repeatedly demonstrated. The ecstatics frequently preached under inspiration and are commonly reported to have spoken in Greek, Latin, and other languages, which they had never learnt, and occasionally in unknown tongues. The evidence for speaking in recognized (i.o.) foreign languages is defective; but there seems to have been no question that the ecstatics did occasionally pour forth unintelligible sounds which the bystanders assumed to represent utterances in an unknown tongue.


2.52 Xenoglossia

Although Xenoglossia (speaking in a real foreign language in ASC which one does not understand when in OSC) is mentioned in connection with the Pentacostal experience in Acts, there is little modern scientific evidence for it. Goodman (1972:149-50) discusses it, but found no trace of it in her work. Osborn (1966:40-44), however, gives several cases of Xenoglossia under mediumship trance which he explains as due either to ability of the controlling spirit to speak the language which he learned as his mother tongue on earth, or as the effect of reincarnation of the medium and the resultant trance remembrance of the language of a previous life.
 

2.53 Single Limb Trance: Automatic Writing

Single limb trance (when not automatic writing) was investigated extensively by Charcot. He concluded that it was related to hysteria. It also seemed related to the "phantom limb phenomenon," as where an amputated leg continues to give pain.

Goodman herself (1971:PA 47:05353)
 

proposes, on the basis of data from anthropological literature and two personal observations, that the single-limb trance of preliterate societies and the graphic automatism of literate societies is the same trance behavior. In the same manner as glossolalia, single-limb trance shows distinct characteristics depending on the energy level producing the manifestation. The graphic samples analyzed present a restricted inventory of shapes and the establishment of stereotype, as well as a "seepage" from the memory bank with the depletion of the energy level. However, single-limb trance does not result in the favorable subjective aftereffects reported from glossolalia.
(page 162)

Among the automatisms exhibited by mediums and others, the facility of automatic writing deserves some passing attention. In automatic writing, the medium does not usually lose consciousness, and the "possession" extends only to the hand doing the writing. A great deal of trash has been produced in this way, but it must be admitted that Blake, Madame Guyon (see Underhill 1960:66),Rulman Merswin, and St. Teresa (Underhill 1960:194)were outstanding exceptions. In some celebrated cases (Coleridge, Wordsworth), it becomes difficult to distinguish the seizure of poetic inspiration of genius from automatic script. We can only conclude that automatic writing is a feature of the continuum of psychic development, and not a characteristic of any particular stage.

2.6 HIGHER TRANCE: A DISPUTED ANCHOR POINT

2.61 General

In the discussion of the prototaxic mode, schizophrenia was placed as a lower anchor point to establish the direction of a taxonomy. The indication of a similar "high" anchor point in "higher trance" leads to semantic problems. Is it proper to consider yogic samadhi as "trance" or should such states be separately discussed under the syntaxic mode heading in Chapter IV?

As this chapter has progressed, a gradual taxonomy of behavior has become evident, which goes somewhat as follows:
 

1. from an earlier situation where the possession is malignant, demonic, and crude, to a later situation where it becomes more benign, human (or angelic), and refined;
2.from an earlier situation where the possession involves gross somatic and kinesthetic aspects, to a later situation where it becomes more verbal and intellectually negotiable;
3. from an earlier situation where the possession serves no useful function, but is considered an "illness" to be avoided, to a later situation where the possession does serve a useful personal and social function, and is to be sought after;
4.from an earlier situation where the possession is wild, and uncultivated, to a later situation where it is induced, earned, and cultivated;
5. from an earlier situation where the possession entity is in complete control of the individual to a later situation where the individual comes to gain more and more control over the possessing entity;
6.from an earlier situation where the individual ego is excursed during the possession to a later situation where the individual ego
(page 163)
retains some consciousness in an altered state or remains in the normal state with only possession of an organ of the body;
7. from an earlier situation where there is no memorability of the incident of possession to a later stage where there is partial or nearly complete memorability of the event.
 
As one inspects these concomitant changes one comes to see that we are moving through the prototaxic mode and gradually out of it.

The major attributes of the prototaxic mode are the trance excursion of the ego and lack of memorability of the event, these being the chief differences by which a prototaxic ASC differs from a syntaxic one. We therefore feel that such states as yogic samadhi are not properly a part of prototaxic trance and should receive separate consideration in a later section.

2.62 Religious Trances

This classification is rather unsatisfactory, but we have found no way to produce a sharper categorization. There appears to exist a relationship between the following:
 

a) Boisen-type and positive disintegration experiences
b) "Unstressing"
c) "Religious trances"
d) Theophanies or Mystical Experiences.


All of these experiences appear to involve a shedding of the impurities of the former "carnal" life and a dedication to a higher cause under the influence of a supernormal beneficent agency. The taxonomy goes from fear, dread, and panic in the first categories to joy and ecstasy in the latter. The characteristics of a) seem to be a transient schizophrenic outbreak, of b) prototaxic and kinesthetic movements and speech while in a normal state of consciousness, of c) some mixture of a) and especially b) but with definite conscious memory of a superordinate beneficent agency, of d), the absence of any aspects of a) and b) and transcendent ecstasy resulting from a theophany - Bucke's "cosmic consciousness." Hence a) and b) clearly belong in the prototaxic mode, and d) clearly in the syntaxic. Since c) is mixed, it is much harder to indicate where it should go; we have tentatively placed it here.

As the thoughtful reader inspects the following protocols, he will notice further examples of prototaxic unstressing behavior which has been seen in sections 2.23, 2.48, and 2.5. It is this effect which constrains us to place these experiences in a special category (away from the syntaxic graces of section 4.7) despite the fact that many of them do show evidence of a peak experience.

(page 164)

A typical example is the prophet Muhammad (Mooney 1896:931):
 

We are told that ordinarily his body had but little natural warmth, but that whenever the angel appeared to him, as the Mohammedan biographers express it, the perspiration burst out on his forehead, his eyes became red, he trembled violently, and would bellow like a young camel - all the accompaniments of the most violent epileptic fit. Usually the fit ended in a swoon. There is no question that he was sincere in his claim of divine inspiration. His last hours were serene and peaceful, and there is no evidence of the slightest misgiving on his part as to the reality of his mission as a prophet sent from God. Some of his inspiration came in dreams, and he was accustomed to say that a prophet's dream is a revelation. At times the revelation came to him without any painful or strange accompaniment.

The fit during which he received the revelation of his religious mission is thus described, as it came to him after a long period of despondency and mental hallucinations: "In this morbid state of feeling he is said to have heard a voice, and on raising his head, beheld Gabriel, who assured him he was the prophet of God. Frightened, he returned home, and called for covering. He had a fit, and they poured cold water on him, and when he came to himself he heard these words: 'Oh, thou covered one, arise, and preach, and magnify thy Lord'; and henceforth, we are told, he received revelations without intermission. Before this supposed revelation he had been medically treated on account of the evil eye, and when the Koran first descended to him he fell into fainting fits, when, after violent shudderings, his eyes closed, and his mouth foamed." (Gardner, Faiths of the World.)

Nikhilanda (1942:10-14) describes the trials of the budding saint Ramakrishna similarly:
 
During this period of spiritual practice he had many uncommon experiences. When he sat to meditate, he would hear strange clicking sounds in the joints of his legs ... He would see flashes like swarms of fireflies floating before his eyes, or a sea of deep mist with luminous waves of molten silver ...

Many of his actions being contrary to all tradition, seemed sacrilegious to the people ... Nearly all the temple officials took him for an insane person. His worldly well-wishers brought him to skilled physicians, but no medicine could cure his malady. Many times he doubted his sanity himself ... (a brilliant Buddhist nun) assured him that he was passing through an almost unknown

(page 165)
spiritual experience described in the scriptures ... She told him that this extreme exaltation had been described as manifesting itself through nineteen physical symptoms, including the shedding of tears, a tremor of the body, horripilation (bristling of the hair) perspiration, and a burning sensation, (For similar phenomena in the case of Christian mystics cf. A. Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer).


It is possible that the somatic prototaxic signs of oncoming trances, such as giddiness, sweating, organ seizure and the like, may sporadically occur in some meditators seeking to contact the numinous element at the syntaxic level, and that the accompanying fear and dread may persuade them that this is an example of unstressing.

We now report, without comment, some early experiences of religious leaders. As in the case of Muhammad there are clear relationships indicated to the ecstasies noted in section 4.7; however, for various reasons including the youth of the person, the evidence of prototaxic or fearful aspects we have refrained from placing these experiences in the syntaxic category. This is not to deny either the validity of the experience or its usefulness as an earnest of future development; we simply feel that there is enough admixture to preclude them standing as examples of higher ecstasies.

Our first exhibit is George Fox, founder of the Quakers. We quote from Nickalls 1952 (1962):
 

(p. 9) "Now though I had great openings, yet great trouble and temptation came many times upon me. . . . (p. 10) And when all my hopes were gone ... then I heard a voice which said, "There is one, even Christ Jesus that can speak to thy condition".

(p. 14) Then after this did a pure fire appear in me ... then the spiritual discerning came into me, by which I could discern my own thoughts, groans, and sighs.... I found to be the groans of the flesh ... which could not give up self to die by the Cross.... (p. 19) ... a great work of the Lord fell on me to the admiration of many ... for I was very much altered in countenance and person as if my body had been new moulded or changed.


Mooney (1896:937) says of George Fox:

 
We are told that on one occasion, on coming into the town of Lichfield, "a very remarkable exercise attended his mind, and going through the streets without his shoes he cried, 'Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield.' His feelings were deeply affected, for there seemed to be a channel of blood running down the
(page166)
streets, and the market place appeared like a pool of blood." On inquiry he learned that a large number of Christians had been put to death there during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian thirteen centuries before. "He therefore attributed the exercise which came upon him to the sense that was given him of the blood of the martyrs."


This experience, despite some prototaxic overtones, compares well with an Adamic time ecstasy (section 4.72). We are accustomed to think of psychedelic experiences as occurring to those in the 25-40 age bracket, but here is the Green and Green (1968:16) account of the theophany of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism which occurred when he was fourteen:

 
It was a beautiful spring morning in 1820 when Joseph went into the woods to pray. . . . Almost immediately he was all but overcome by a strong power, which he felt was trying to destroy him. Exerting all of his strength he called upon God to deliver him. 'Just at this moment of great alarm,' he later wrote, 'I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered of the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me, I saw two Personages, one of whom spake unto me calling me by name...'


This started Joseph Smith on his road to leadership and martyrdom. Bailey (1951:-35) describes her theophany as a vivid adolescent experience which seemed absolutely real:
 

It was Sunday morning. The previous Sunday I had heard a sermon which had aroused all my aspiration. This Sunday for some reason, I had not gone to church. . . . I was sitting in the drawing room reading. The door opened and in walked a tall man dressed in European clothes (very well cut, I remember), but with a turban on his head. He came in and sat down beside me. I was so petrified at the sight of the turban that I could not make a sound or ask what he was doing there. Then he started to talk. He told me that there was some work that it was planned that I could do in the world, but that it would entail my changing my disposition very considerably; I would have to give up being such an unpleasant little girl and must try to get some measure of self-control.... He said that if I could achieve real self-control, I could then be trusted and that I would
(page 167)
travel all over the world and visit many countries "doing your Master's work all the time."


This was the precipitating event which pointed her on her life's work as a famous theosophist teacher.

2.7 CONCLUSION

We now come to the conclusion of this long chapter on the prototaxic mode - a primitive and archaic technique of the involvement of the human ego with the numinous element - which because the experience cannot be cognitively processed - requires the presence of a trance state, the excursion of consciousness, and lack of memorability of the event, with concomitant somatic and kinesthetic resultants. Before we investigate higher modes of juncture with the numinous element, it may be useful to summarize our observations:

1. The realm of the prototaxic is the domain of research. This is so because the prototaxic mode is concerned with physical behavior and involves phenomena which is "spontaneous" rather than "developed." The former is much easier to observe than the latter, and offers a wider purview for speculation and hypothesis.

2. There are remarkable relationships between all types of prototaxic experiences. As Moss (1967:62-3) notes:

Gubel (1962) reported that many of the experiential features of the drug-induced hallucinogenic experience seem to be remarkably similar to experiences reported by hypnotized subjects. Halpern (1962) argues that no essential qualitative differences exist between hypnotically induced visual percepts and toxicogenic hallucinations. About the same time Aldous Huxley (1961) recognized similarities in the two states, and suggested that hypnosisbe used to control the LSD reaction. . . .
Levine and Ludwig (1965a, 1965b) have employed hypnosis in the direct manipulation of LSD psychotherapy, calling this the "hypnodelic" treatment. More recent work by Caldwell (1968) has reinforced the startling improvements exhibited by many subjects through an altered state of consciousness, using drugs, but controlled and guided by hypnotherapeutic processes. In helping the patient stay with his problem, and in protecting him against the threat of prototaxic material with its dreadful aspect, hypnodelic therapy has been very effective.

Indeed, the various catalogue of prototaxic experiences constitute a "structure d'ensemble," a gestalt, better understood as an organic

(page 168)

whole than by analysis of any of its parts. We have traced in the previous section, the remarkable taxonometric graduations which characterize the several members of this family, and which serve to emphasize their interrelationship with one another.

3. Following as a necessity from item 2 we find similar features in the trance behavior of the various categories, particularly in the gross kinesthetic manifestations (see Table IV, page 36).

Podmore (1902:11) presents an admirable summary of these experiences:

All these cases, it will be seen, present the same general features. We find a highly contagious epidemic, manifesting in convulsions and ecstasy, and variously interpreted by the subject and the onlookers according to their prepossessions as demoniac or divine possession. The more marvellous features - speaking tongues, the reading of thoughts - rest upon evidence which must be adjudged quite insufficient. On the other hand, it appears to be fully established that the possessed persons were able to speak with extraordinary fluency and sometimes in a language with which they were at best very imperfectly acquainted.
4. As described in an earlier section, pronounced paranormal effects accompany the prototaxic trance. These effects (probably because of the excursion of the ego) are seen in greater profusion here than elsewhere. They include: telepathy, precognition, time-distortion, hallucinations, pain anesthesia and healing, fire-walking, OOB experience, psychokinesis, glossolalia, and organ trance, clairvoyance, and others. They may be best understood as properties of non-ordinary reality (NOR) flowing from an ASC in which the orienting unities of space, time, and personal ego of our physical world are seen as illusions and are set aside for the operations of more general laws. This effect appears to be a general result of contact between the human ego and the numinous element.

5. Within the various trance states there exist hierarchies which go from

a. ego absent to ego present
b. no memorability to much
c. possession by the devil to that by the Deity
d. minus personal value to plus
e. unsought uninduced state to sought induced state
f. illness to theophany
g. unintelligible speech and gross physical symptoms to intelligible speech and no kinesthetics
h. spontaneous trance to learned trance.
(page 169)

All this is explicated in Table IV, page 36.

6. Is it possible that all somatic resultants of the presence of the numinous element (including those, like levitation and fire-walking which western civilization has tended to class as miracles), are actually low-grade prototaxic manifestations of a presence which would better be interpreted in the parataxic and syntaxic mode? One is reminded of what a wise man said on the subject (Huxley 1945:259-60):
 

The abnormal bodily states by which the immediate awareness of the divine Ground is often accompanied are not of course, essential parts of the experience. Many mystics, indeed, deplored such things as being signs, not of divine grace, but of the body's weakness. To levitate, to go into trance, to lose the use of one's senses - in De Condren's words, this is "to receive the effects of God and his holy communications in a very animal and carnal way".


7. The evidence from psychic healing, fire-walking, hypnotic trance effects, such as the production of blisters, the production of psychic heat, and stigmata, all suggest that the current medical view of the body as a reactive object in the physical world is not correct, but that the body instead is the physical agency of the preconscious mind, being nourished and sustained by its energies, and exhibiting effects, in seeming contradiction to the ordinary laws of physics, which can only be explained on the basis that in conjunction with the numinous element, the body becomes in effect its prototaxic agent, and hence part of the noumenon.

In adult behavior in the prototaxic mode, dissociation and regression open the door to a revival of child-like or infantile wants and needs. This revival emerges from a dependence on an external source of guidance or authority; in hypnosis for example, the transference relation with the hypnotist, in the trance states, dependence upon other worldly spirits. The relationship is governed, however, by the subject's susceptibility to the suggestion of the guiding figure, especially in the ego-consent experiences. When one is dependent on some force for guidance or authority, the concomitant behavior is to follow the suggestion or advice of the superior figurehead. The concept of suggestibility has its roots in earliest history when guidance was derived from the spirit world, and today registers behaviorally in such institutions as the schools, churches, and political parties. The colloquial expression "the power of suggestion" captures the intensity of relationship between suggestion and control over behavior.

8. Indeed, we may regard the prototaxic somatic symptoms as a lower level of consciousness. In short, the body manifests what is

(page 170)

going on in the subconscious mind. This explication of mind in matter has become a lot clearer recently with the exploration of the control of autonomic processes through biofeedback, but it is a mere continuation of psychosomatic medicine. And since it appears to be the subconscious mind which can manifest illness, it should be only necessary to change the subconscious mind to make the body whole again. Brown (1974:54) says it this way: "Long before conscious recognition by the brain, the body and its subconscious substructures recognize and make adjustments about what goes on in the environment." She adds that "the subconscious is more in touch with reality than the conscious." Because the body is the ultimate material manifestation of what is going on in less easily accessed areas, it offers important research possibilities, provided it is understood that the body conditions are results and not causes, - the somatic difficulties are truly "symptoms" of underlying difficulties.

9. The Bardo Thodol carefully instructs that the visions of wrathful and frightening deities one sees after death are mere imaginations of the human mind itself. If so we then may ask the following important question. Can it be that all kinds of prototaxic experience with the numinous element (whether schizophrenia, dissociation, possession, UFO sightings, hypnosis, automatisms, glossolalia, and the like) are of common or associated origin in which an unprepared and undeveloped ego is overwhelmed by some aspect of the numinous element which effects are either exacerbated or ameliorated by the belief system of the individual or society which is attached or projected onto the phenomena? Thus in such behavior as possession (where the devil or evil spirit is believed to be involved, as in the Devils of Loudon or the Salem Witchcraft cases) things get very much out of hand, whereas in the Kung Bushman ceremony, the irruption is used for healing, and in glossolalia the phenomena is considered the manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

Podmore (1902:14-15) notes in this connection:
 

The spiritual beings . . . which . . . intervened in mortal affairs, were not human spirits. The nuns of Loudun were possessed by demons; the Tremblers of Cevennes were inspired by a divine afflatus. . . . The idea of intercourse with distinctively human spirits, if not actually introduced by Swedenborg, at least established itself first in the popular consciousness through his teaching.


10. If there is a lesson or moral in all this investigation it is that useful as prototaxic mode procedures may appear, they are inherently dangerous, and there are better ways of contact with the Ground

(page 171)

of Being. We have the testimony of a number of persons that putting oneself into a prototaxic trance state is not wise; whether it be hypnosis or drugs on one hand or the more spectacular procedures on the other. Weed (1970:71) quotes the composer J. Brahms as saying:
 

I learned a valuable lesson from Tartim, that is, never to lose consciousness when inducing the semi-trance state.


11. In the behavior of primitive fire-walkers, glossalalists, shamans, and other persons in dissociation or under hypnosis, there are significant common elements. The belief systems of these people vary, so that one cannot explain the miraculous phenomena on the basis of the participant's belief or creed. What is common is that each of these persons has entered an altered state of conscious characterized by trance, the suspension of the cognitive intellectual factor, and some kind of juncture with the numinous element, brought on by fasting, abstinence, vigils, prayers, ingestion of psychedelic drugs, drum beats, incantations, ceremonies, or the like. Under these circumstances the ordinary reality of our world with its attendant laws of physics as they apply to the individual are seen as a special case of more general laws and conditions, so that the individual temporarily becomes part of the noumenon and hence subject only to the general laws of meta-physics which obtain in the Eternal Now outside of time and space.

To be sure, the experience of the presence of the numinous element in the prototaxic mode (whose chief characterization is the necessity for the excursion of the ego in a trance state) results in benefits to the individual and to his society. Like other numinous experiences it brings the individual some measure of increased energy and health, and it gives to society an earnest of revelation, and a leaven against materialism. But the lack of memorability of the event is a severe disadvantage, as is the loss of control of the ego, and the need for dependence on an "ally" or a tutelary deity.

12. Finally, in the prototaxic mode man is at the low point in his relationship to the numinous element, altho in the ego-consent behaviors he is striving, especially in shamanism and group trance, to establish a viable connection with the greater cosmology. As he evolves a more conscious relationship with his ego and consequently his ability to control his connection with the numinous element, he is able to allow his id greater expression without losing control. Thus, as he ascends the ladder of ego development, man is able to achieve what is absent from the prototaxic mode - the clear artistry of expression, the creative utilization of energies, which in the prototaxic

(page 172)

mode are diffused and undisciplined, without significant organization into the unknowing and unknown.

In its best light, therefore, the prototaxic experience is a prefiguration for immature and archaic man of some of the glories of the full syntaxic psychedelic state as seen in yogis, full mystics, and self-actualizing meditators. To the next level of this development (the parataxic mode) we now turn our attention.

FOOTNOTES

1. As we shall see, these characteristics become "lighter" as one proceeds through the mode. For example, in shamanistic and hypnotic trance there is sometimes some memory. There is considerably less dissociation in glossolalia than in schizophrenia.

2. The reader will find examples of this in section 2.4 and especially 2.45 (fire-walking).

3. Arieti 1967:268 in discussing prepsychotic panic says:

This panic has been well described by Sullivan (1953) who considered it as the outcome of injury to self-regard. He described it using such terms as disorganization, terror, perception of danger, and need to escape."

For an alternative description see Perry 1974:32.

4. Schizophrenia also has its ersatz ecstasy in the "psychotic insight" of Arieti (1967:274) in which the patient has a transitory feeling of lucidity and exuberance.

5. Admitting a background of medical naivete, the writer suggests that psychiatrists might find the use of reserpine helpful here.

6. See also sections 2.5 and 2.6; for cause of unstressing see 4.15.

7. 1 wish to acknowledge the help of Ellen Fishman in the preparation of this section.

8. 1 wish to acknowledge with thanks the help of Ellen Fishman in the preparation of this section.

9. (See note 8)

10. We have confined our selective analysis of possession to the "highest" examples of it in mediumship; for more primitive accounts, the reader is referred to Prince (1968).

11. 1 wish to acknowledge with thanks the help of Ellen Fishman in the preparation of this section.

12. 1 wish to acknowledge with thanks the help of Ellen Fishman in the preparation of this section.

(page 173)

13. For an update on this subject, consult Barber and others (1970), Stoyva and others (1971), Shapiro and others (1972), and Miller and others (1973). These Aldine Annuals come out each year.

14. (See note 8)

15. These two paragraphs are due to Sybil Richardson.

16. Compare Macbeth's witches: "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."

17. 1 wish to acknowledge with thanks the help of Beverly Adams in the preparation of this section.

18. Many persons have trouble with precognition as it implies to them a determined future. Yet since most premonitions involve disaster, they may be psychic warnings given so that the event may be circumvented by informed action, in which case they are precognitions only if not acted upon.

19. This section is taken from the M. A thesis of Beverly Adams, a sponsee of the author's.

20. See also section 4.54.

21. The trance healing of Edgar Cayce is relevant here, but has received so much attention in the literature, that we neglect it.

22. through touching the hand of the adept. Recall what the Ghost of Christmas Past said to Scrooge: "Bear but the touch of my hand and you shall be upheld in more than this."

23. On the TV "Masterpiece Theatre" segment on "Lloyd George."

24. 1 am particularly indebted to the scholarship of Vincent Gaddis (1967) for this section, and regret that due to the rapacity of an agent, we cannot quote him.

25. Solomon and others (1961) and Zubek (1969) have excellent reviews of this area, to which we are indebted.

26. That the effect is fleeting may be noticed from the restricted times of exposure. Table III, (p 142) does not report any modern instances of time greater than a minute, nor of distance greater than 150 ft. Furthermore there is fire contact with only a small part of the body surface.

27. The reader may wish to compare the visions of this section with those of 4.7 and note many similarities.

28. Excursus of the ego, or dissociated behavior, is the essential aspect of the trance state as well as of the obsessional and schizophrenic. We assume the conscious level as man's normal threshold, not realizing that it is the function of the ego to summon into this vivency the rational consciousness, (OSC). Under severe physical or psychical stress or ego exhaustion the ego may not be able to perform this function, and then another lower form of consciousness, less human, less split off from the uroboros, may present itself.