🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <254.3473.uupcb@synapse.org> steve.crabtree@synapse.org (Steve Crabtree)  writes:
>
>This raises the point another poster made about the equivalence of
>different forms of trance. From the little I've read about Cayce, his
>trances seemed more like those of the spiritualist mediums of the time,
>spontaneous events rather than specifically induced ones? I'll check out
>whether the book is in my local library. Thanks for the suggestion.
>   

	I suspect that the kind of trance state that is developed by
hypnosis,  meditation and similar techniques is actually very strongly
metaprogrammed.  That is,  the person's experience and structuring of
the trance state will depend upon what he believes about hypnosis,  what
he's read about hypnosis,  what he's seen on TV about it and what the
hypnotist did in the induction.

	This is probably pretty similar to the kind of metaprogramming that
is involved with psychedelic drugs such as LSD.  When Albert Hoffmann took
LSD for the first time,  he had no reason not to believe that the experience
was going to kill him.  So,  he had a bad trip,  at least until he came to
believe that his survival as an individual unit wasn't all that relevant
to the cosmic flow and that he was probably going to make it anyway.  Today,
a person who takes LSD expects weird things to happen and brings in his
own metaprogamming that will control the experience and it's interpretation.
Monkeys universally have bad trips after eating psychedelic mushrooms,  as
evidenced by the fact that they will often get violent if you show them
mushrooms of any kind after they have been exposed to psylocybin-containing
species.  The point is that these substances were biologically evolved as
aversive agents against animals with nervous systems less sophisticated
than ours.  People can bring in metaprogramming that makes it a pleasant
experience.

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