We share trances for the effects of trance; that is, for the effects brought about by an altered cognition space.
With less awareness of pain whether it is emotional, physical or ontological, and with less awareness of the wide variety of choices that exist in an enabled
reality, the person in trance happily chooses among an impoverished and smaller set of options.
Life, perhaps, would be too difficult if people were al
ways aware of their bodies, always had a perfect memory and always made perfect judgements and were always aware of the infinite possibilities of life.
Because most people cannot stand pain, because most people fear chaos, uncertainty and death, most people enter into social, institutional and mutual personal trances in order to reduce awareness. Perhaps, in the not too distant past, life was uncertain _ in times of war, or in hunger, poverty, fear and abuse situa
tions _ and it made sense to hide and to create trance by singing ourselves songs, or saying prayers, or by putting our minds on certain constant images or vi
sions. This is indeed how natural trances are creat
ed; and the usual reason is to hide from something.
By a mutual trance, I mean that each of us in various ways and by social behavior supports an impover
ished awareness in others. Our purposes in support
ing impoverished awareness are: to be able to have some peace ourselves, to reduce the noise and the pain. Again, the reason for this is to reduce our awareness of the reality of chaos and escape the pain of the human condition. There is also some pleasure in entering trance in spite of the fact that trance re
duces awareness.
If we speak of degrees of trance, it is my opinion that there is only a difference in degree between passively
watching TV, ordinary rational thought and rigorous scientific thought, religious fervor, addictive states, and the states of mind belonging to mass murderers.
All of the mind states above represent differing de
grees of trance states.
There is also a strong similarity between addictions, hypnotic trance and "altered states of consciousness."
All of these "nonnormal" states come about first by the progressive narrowing of perception and the lim
iting of awareness to a single, or at most very few ob
jects of attention. The narrowing of attention can be induced by drugs, chanting, television, etc. Second, an association must be made which connects every attempt to make the attention wider to an effort to make the attention more narrow. This association will serve to concentrate attention on the objects of attention. Third, when the association is strong enough, the original impulse to narrow attention can be removed. The reason is that the strong association already created will continue the attention toward the few objects.
Tribes, cults, societies and nations inculcate restrict
ed social behaviors through trance, training, customs and laws because it requires simply too much cogni
tive processing to understand the unusual. In the abysmal past, the unusual were simply killed. Nowa
days trance helps to limit awareness and therefore the more unusual have more of a chance to exist.
This in itself is probably a positive evolutionary phe
nomenon.
It may seem bizarre to advocate the development of more intense trances and limited awareness and more impoverished realities as a global solution to so
cial ills, yet, with drug addiction, religions and televi
sion isn't that precisely what seems to be happening?
Let's understand what it is we are really doing and do it more efficiently! In America, where more than 95% of the homes have television and the daily aver
age time spent in front of a television is in excess of five hours, people may believe themselves to be in
formed, but their realities are impoverished.
When people walk around with their virtual reality helmets, trance music reverberating in the vacuum of inner space, they may believe themselves to be 'con
nected' to the Host and King of the information mountain, but they will be only aware of a certain limited class of toxic atmospheric discharges, and so
cial inequities. They will be unaware of their own abuse.
In lieu of a fearless awareness of an enriched life, most people have chosen the way of trance. Let it be.
Tranceless awareness is not for everyone.
Habits
A habit usually is a long and complex trance generat
ing loop and therefore when done only a few times represents a weak trance, that is, a trance with an unstable dissociated trance plane. Yet, when the habit is done hundreds or thousands of times, the be
havior may become compulsive and appear like an addiction. In such a case, there is a more stabile trance force with constructive trance generating loops.
Socially or economically reinforced habits such as shaking hands, smoking cigarettes, having sex in the missionary position, wearing clothes when in society, answering the telephone when it rings, flushing the toilet after it is used, coming home after work and turning the TV on, all represent habits that are so
cially or economically supported in most countries of this world. Often the individual effort needed to break such trances is more than is possible to do.
Such social habits or trances represent deep trances with trance force components and secondary order constructive trance generating loops.
To break such trances increases the awareness of in
dividual chaos, uncertainty, and pain. The sense of chaos, or fear, uncertainty and pain is the reaction that is caused by attempting to change or modify the trance force.
One could characterize this situation as an entrance
ment by magic.
One must be quite courageous to attempt to modify a trance force. In addition, the trance analysis needed to break a trance is often a complicated and difficult undertaking. There is also no guarantee that even if the underlying trance generating loops were known it would be possible to break the trance easily.