Have you lost someone to a cult lately? Has a charismatic personality swooped you or someone you know into their bosom – perhaps literally? Was the occult involved? Did the participants seem to be in a trance? Cults have a lot to do with trance. Cults are often responsible for giving the word trance a bad connotation. In this paper we will explore the question of trance from the point of cult phenomena, and, importantly, how so-called 'occult' phenomena are connected to trance and cults.

No one joins a cult in order to be exploited or sexually or psychologically abused. But this can happen when a charismatic leader takes control of your physical, spiritual, economic and sexual life. There is a connection between love seductions, addictions and trance abuse.

A trance, as you might know from other papers, begins with a cognitive loop - something you say to yourself, think to yourself or remember or feel over and over, a repeating set of cognitive objects. The trance starts because of energy saving reasons. You learn for the same cognitive reasons. You abstract for the same cognitive reasons. And you dissociate for the same cognitive reasons. It just becomes so easy to be in the cognitive loop that you begin to be bored or think about something else. At that point, you are in the beginning of a trance! Yes, and in your boredom there may be the sense that one part of you is repeating the loop, but another part is free to think about something else. The part that is bored is not truly free. It thinks with some disabled cognitive functions. Dissociated always implies the existence of one or more disabled cognitive functions. One cognitive function nearly always disabled is critical judgment. Another one is short-term memory. Another one is body awareness.

Now, what are some of the cognitive loops? If you meditate, your attention may be on your breathing. Or it may be on the repetition of a mantra, a prayer, a zikhr or a sutra. You may be singing or chanting in repetitive hypnotic rhythms. There may be someone nearby, a helper, master, priest or guru, who – as you sing your song of devotion – tells you what you must do next. Or he tells you what to pray about. Or he tells you what to imagine. What you are told, may be in some sense altruistic or harmless. For example, what harm is there is praying for world peace? Wishing for an end to world hunger. Or praying for the divine guidance of our political leaders. The harm is that these repetitive loops induce a mental process in which your critical judgment is disabled. When your critical judgment is disabled, it becomes very easy to believe, to have faith, to really believe that your prayers or devotions will be answered by God. There are other effects which are not so obvious. Your blessed cult leader gets to have an 'in' to your mind. He can tell you things, and you believe.

He's not the only one to engage in trance abuse. Sales people also do this. My father – a master salesman – used to tell me that he would slightly nod his head up and down while asking 'yes' questions to his client, and when his client would start to nod his head, he could go into the sales close immediately. He would nearly always close the sale. So, the trance phenomenon is well known to sales people as well as gurus.

Now you are sitting quietly in meditation, part of you is fondly remembering sitting at the feet of your guru, and perhaps he lovingly touches your feet. Or perhaps he strokes your hair, very much as your mother did to comfort you when you were very young. Perhaps he gives you some suggestions to improve your work, to improve your appearance. Maybe you are dressed in the 'uniform' of the ashram. All this is very benevolent, except that nearly all the time you are in the ashram, meditating while you work, while you sleep, while you sing devotional songs, you are developing multiple trances. Each loop creates a single trance, but there is no reason at all you can't start a loop while you are in a trance. For example, maybe you are singing kirtans and get bored, so you begin to meditate. Yes, you can meditate while you sing. You can clap your hands rhythmically while you sing, and meditate too. And how spacey are you at the end of the time of devotion? Are you so spaced out that you will do anything the guru suggests? Probably.

There are other things that go on in a cult or in a prayer group or devotional living situation. You may be encouraged to give up your personal responsibility. “Let go, and Let God” may be the refrain. In this kind of trance loop, you can give up a lot. No matter what pain it causes you personally or pain to your family or friends, what a pleasure you get by simply letting go and letting God take over your life. How wonderful to be free of responsibility. Of course, it may mean that your bank accounts become overdrawn. Important meeting or phone calls don't get made. But you can always go back into your meditation and forget the consequences. This creates a secondary trance loop characteristic of addiction. When you decide with what little critical judgment you have left, to meditate instead of dealing with the world, it means that there is a disconnect between action and consequences. In a way, this is similar to decreased body awareness in trance. I can put as many needles into your arm as I want, and you wont feel a thing. You can have as many desperate phone calls from your father or your lover or your bank and you wont feel a thing. How much better just to meditate in the ideal of an ashram, and place all cares at the feet of the guru. Well, and I better place all my money there too. And, why not, all my sexual favors too.

What is described above is what often happens in a cult. First there is a simple loop, then multiple loops, dissociation, disabling of critical judgment, short term memory and body awareness and subsequent abandonment of personal responsibility. There is pain or embarrassment from the outside world which is not very nice and makes one very uncomfortable, but the secondary loop to go from an uncomfortable social situation to the bliss of meditation creates the addictive form of trance. This same double trance form is what describes many other trance addictions such as alcohol, performance, sex and love, and other addictions. So now you are addicted to a cult, so what?

Some Long Term Effects of Addictive Trance

If the addictive trance process continues for a long time – years perhaps – then interesting trance phenomena start to occur.

Of course you have forgotten about your family, and there are many things you don't remember any longer, but you do begin to remember things which never happened. Perhaps it all starts with a dream, a very intense dream almost seeming real. Were you ever really at that place? Was it a vision of heaven? Did you ever meet that person – that saint? Did you ever do those things? Can you really fly? Memory starts to play funny tricks. Trance produces amnesia in very many cases. And it also alters ones sense of reality. Is it true that your father said that to you? Really? Or are you only imagining it? Did the guru really say that? Was the guru really reaching out to you telepathically, or is this merely another trance phenomenon in which you visually or aurally hallucinate a communication? You remember that it happened? Or was it a dream?

The funny thing about trance is that if you stay in a trance for a good number of years without knowing what you are doing, you will begin to believe that many imaginings are true.

Now here is another funny thing about trance. There are situations in which clairvoyance and telepathy seem to work and they are based on such trances. But what is occult and what is real when your sense of reality is modified by trance? When you begin to have amnesia for experiences you really had and begin to remember experiences you only had in the trance universe, are you going crazy finally? Is what they said true? “She joined a cult and eventually went crazy.”

When people do not understand what trance can do, they often believe that they are going crazy. Of course, your reality changes. You believe things which you experienced in the trance world, but the cognitive function which says that an experience is real is telling you that a dream is real. This modification of your reality comes from trance. If you are not aware of the mechanism of trance, and lacking other information you might indeed begin to feel you are going crazy. It is well-known that hypnotists can create a reality which seems real enough. Why not meditators? Why not the religious? And psychotherapists who are unfamiliar with trance may decide that a course of psychotropic drugs should be prescribed. It may be that it is the psychotherapists inability to really understand and handle the trance phenomena which alter the reality sense which motivates them to prescribe drugs which alters the reality sense in a pharmacological way. Is it fear of the occult, maybe?

Alternate Realities and Religious Belief

How much of religious belief is based on trance phenomena? I believe that a great deal is trance dependent. But for many thousands of years the experienced reality altering phenomenon of trance was not known, so, meditation produced many who had visions more intense than this reality itself. Millions of people still believe that those visions are a reality, if not this one. They may be a reality, but not this one.

Altering a cognitive function can also be done with drugs. Is the drug experience real? It may seem real, but it is not of this reality.

Now what is occult? If we look at trance in general, what a trance can produce and how it is done, we have explained away a lot of the hocus pocus, a lot of the b---s--- that is in cults and religions. Do we need to explain then, what is occult if most of it can be explained as trance? I know, I ask too many questions. But I want you to think about it yourself.

I know that meditation produces short term memory disfunction, and hypnosis can do it as well. I know that trance in general causes critical judgement to be suspended as well. I know that trance alters the sense of reality to the extent that one might not know if the perceived ordinary reality is really real anymore. Religious books talk about 'other realities', but I can get other realities by long term meditating. They even feel real. I can produce false memories. I remember places I never visited. I am convinced that I am in contact with other entities. But part of this phenomena can be explained by the suspension of critical judgement and memory. One of the interesting experiments I did was to try to figure out – when I was dissociated – 'which' of the dissociated realities was the real one. I felt very strongly that where my ego was – that was the 'real' one, and the other one – generally, the cognitive loop – was the 'other'. However, the 'real' one wasn't doing all the cognitive processing with a full complement of cognitive functions. Neither was the 'other'. If I stayed in the trance for awhile, and added a few more interesting loops, I could create other realities which seemed to be 'real', yet not my ego. I could say to myself: “I did not create these; they exist outside of myself. They are the Other. They are Mystical Communications from the Other World” With a few affirmations like that, I could create a whole pantheon of gods and truths and universes. Is this occult? If I didn't know what I was doing, and was haphazard in my practice, I might be considered 'crazy', especially if I presented the contents of these Other Worlds as my bone fides experiences. People who believed me might think that I was really 'Mystical' and 'Occult' and maybe what I was doing was 'Magic'.

In spite of what you might consider to be my negativity about spirituality, religion and magic, I should assure you that I really have not been able to find out which reality is the real reality. And although I feel perfectly comfortable chatting with other entities in another reality I can't really know independently if that other reality is also real or if it is merely the product of too much meditation, too much trance work.

People who practice yoga, long-term meditation, who live like hermits, or who are long-term members of cults also experience this kind of reality confusion. In addition, these side-effects of long-term trance become commonly referred to among the religious as ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. The ‘other-worldly’ types of phenomena start to become more frequent and strong, especially as short-term memory fails and the alternate ‘realities’ start to kick in. No drugs are needed! Such people in these kinds of trance argue that it ‘is’ a reality. They are absolutely convinced. They ‘do’ communicate with the angels, God ‘does’ hear their prayers and responds. They ‘do’ experience telepathy, seeing the future, and so on.

Another explanation may be that long-term trance which has addictive and charismatic trance structure creates very strong trance wyrds and it is the operation of the trance wyrd force which changes ‘destiny’ in the sense that the normal and habitual ways that thoughts, neurons, energies are processed or transformed do so in other ways, ways which give potential to seemingly ‘magical’ phenomena. This is also the explanation for the hypnotic phenomenon that warts can be suggested away: strong trance generates strong wyrds. It is the wyrd force which alters the way things work.

It is normal for people to want to have magical powers, to want to be able to change their own destiny, or the destinies of others, people they love. This is one motivation for joining a cult, becoming a yogi or hermit. After all, the world does need to change the path that it is on. But what I advocate is studying trance phenomena in a more scientific way. There is a better way to understand.

References:

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Wier, Dennis R., Trance: from magic to technology. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Trans Media, 1996. ISBN: 1-888428-38-4

About the Author:

Dennis R. Wier is the Director of The Trance Research Foundation. He is available for telephone and email trance analysis consultations. He may be reached by email using the form below. See also www.trance.edu and www.tranceresearch.org