Getting High with Trance
Dennis R. Wier
Director, The Trance Institute, Bruetten, Switzerland

Probably one of the most fascinating promises of trance theory is to finally be able to design our own trances.

The title of this article is not misleading, but if one only wants to get high from trance one is certainly using only a small fraction of the potential magic of the mind. But the idea of using trance as an escape from painful reality rather than a powerful tool for inner exploration does reflect the most popular utilization of this interesting and magical cognitive phenomenon called trance.

For thousands of years trance has been designed somewhat intuitively. These intuitively designed trances for the most part have been effective. Many of them still are. But often they required great personal or financial sacrifice. Sometimes, too, the designers of trance didn't know why a particular practice or ritual was effective. They just knew that it worked.

One of the problems in letting yourself be programmed by someone who doesn't really know what they are doing or who has a misguided or nefarious agenda is that you can be programmed wrongly. You can be programmed to self-destruct, for example.

Many people like to get high with trance. They are tired of drugs and alcohol and the dangers those bring. But trance is interesting only if you can control it yourself. Anyway, just getting high with trance is useful mostly as an escape. Used with careful precision trance can also be used as a powerful tool for exploring different and exotic states of consciousness including what Jung termed the shadow self.

In every area where there is repeated cognitive looping there will be a trance, according to my model, with consequent disabling of cognitive function. It is the disabled cognitive functions which are popularly identified as 'being in a trance'. What is an error is to identify a specific disabled cognitive function as a 'trance.' The trance comes from the looping and dissociating. The dissociation phenomena is a cognitive energy saving phenomena, but the loop structure of the thought objects is the necessary and sufficient condition for trance. Once this is clear then it is necessary to chase down and flesh out all of the implications and to verify it with experimental evidence. I have my own empirical evidence from 35 years of meditation, but, that does not mean that the scientific community would accept my evidence as their own. The scientific community must verify it independently. Until now there has not been (to my knowledge) a model for trance which did not depend on the social-psychological 'belief and compliance' model of Wagstaff and others. I still get into arguments with the social-psychological types, and no doubt you would too if you work with my model. However, I think there would be support from the cognitive behaviorists. The problem there is that they are more concerned with pathologies and treatment strategies, and to my knowledge they have not investigated 'trance' as a subject.

If you only want to escape for a short time, TV, movies, music all induce hypnotic trances. The problem there is that while in the hypnotic trance you become suggestible and open to the subtle and not-very-subtle suggestions of advertisers and even script-writers with moral or political agendas. If you don't trust advertisers and the producers of TV programs to manipulate your soul, then there are the religious trances conducted by other experts.

Some people get high by hanging out with charismatic cults, singing hypnotic songs, worshiping the dead and sometimes wishing they were dead too. In a cult a hypnotic song is a song that is sung over and over. A hypnotic trance is created by any prayer that is repeated with a charismatic leader. Meditating silently or reciting a mantra mentally is a bit better, but often cult meditations are led by a charismatic leader who talks during these meditations and can insert subtle embedded commands. Disabling instructions such as "Before you do anything on your own, ask God for permission" have the damaging effect of encouraging you to give your personal responsibility to others.

What is also important to realize about trance is that unless the trance is clearly terminated, it can persist for some time after the cognitive loop has stopped. Thus, after a period of meditation some people will still be partially in a trance, and consequently some of their cognitive functions will be disabled. Sometimes this is subjectively felt as being "spaced out" because of the meditation. However, some disabled cognitive functions, such as judgement and volition, can open you to the suggestions of others. When a charismatic leader speaks after a meditation some people will accept his suggestions without question or full awareness.

These repeated thought objects encourage dissociated trance, which can be subjectively felt as a boredom, or as a propensity to daydream, etc. with consequent loss of attention, judgement, volition, etc.

Over a period of time, and depending on what other loops exist either in the environment or prior trances, and the order in which disabled cognitive functions occur, more bizarre behaviors can manifest and be positively reinforced. Trigger words can access prior trances and can kick them off and produce trance states.

For example, in a Christian cult, repeating words like Father or Mother which in the cult associates with aspects of the divine can also trigger personal family memories and result in inadvertent trance. The intense emotional absorption in personal family love stories and dramas will appreciably produce loss of attention, etc. and these disabled cognitive features are recognized as indicating a trance.

But, the problem with cult trances is that although the hypnotic trances induced may make you feel good for awhile, the leader just might convince you to eat strychnine as the final solution to the woes of this world. Don't ever believe anyone who says that no one can hypnotize you to do something against your will. One of the main effects of hypnotic trance is that your will is disabled. People who eat strychnine while in a cult don't do so because of belief or compliance! They do so because they can't exercise good personal judgement and their personal will have been disabled by trance. It is for this reason that trance theory implies that you can be hypnotized to do something against your will or better judgement.

So how can you safely get high with trance? Here are some ways.

If you hang out in the woods, far away from your friends and meditate, it is possible to get pretty high. Depending on what kind of thoughts and feelings are in your brain, cooking your brain for long periods of time on the flame of meditation can produce either wonderfully high states or some real awful crazy. The nice thing about meditation is that it is not hypnotic. But it is a trance. The difficult part is staying away from friends and other well-meaning folks who disturb the tranquility. When you stop meditating be certain to end the trance.

Another nice trance is to be near some repetitive natural sound like the ocean or a river or near birds. These natural repetitions will also induce trance. Some people may suggest that freeway traffic noise heard from a distance could also work the same way as a river. This could certainly be true, since it is repetitive. But trance theory would suggest that the anger and frustration of the drivers might also be embedded in the noise. I think I personally would prefer a river of water to a river of trucks.

Shamanistic drumming will also induce trance. So long as no one is singing the praises of CocaCola or other cargo, shamanistic drumming would be a nice hypnotic trance inducer.

OK, so now I hear you complaining that these are really 'light' trances and you want to be intoxicated by trance, the heavy zonko type trance, right? OK. These so called light trances when continued for a really long time have secondary effects, mostly produced from what I call secondary trance loops. They become stabile trances and produce strong trance forces which can be detected by others. You might not be aware of them, because you are in it and some self-awareness cognitive function may be disabled. But others might comment about how enlightened you are or how peaceful, and so on. In such a condition, you are zonko but don't know it.

Now, if you want to be zonko and know it too, you have to create what I call a charismatic trance, or a centric trance. In this trance you are zonko and want others to be zonko too. For this, you must step out of your own deep trance and teach it to others or at least bring them into your trance. If you live in the woods and listen to the birds, you have to convince people to come with you.

There are a lot of variations within trance. But, basically, to answer your question, you can get quickly into various trance states by allowing yourself to be hypnotized and led into various fantasy states. But these states nearly always come at the price of your freedom or free will or money. Doing it by yourself is safer but takes longer. Becoming a trance virtuoso takes time and practice, but it is doable.

However, if you want to use either a hypnotic or meditation trance to produce an intoxicated trance state this is what you do. Touch your nose if you follow me. And, whenever you touch your nose, you follow me. And, if you are a patient somewhere you can touch your nose anytime and you get into a quick and easy intoxicated trance.

Let's look at this process from a trance theory point of view as an exercise in applying trance theory.

If a hypnotic technique is being used to produce the desired mental state, there is a hypnotist suggesting the desirable state while you engage yourself internally in a cognitive loop which focuses your attention and limits it. This cognitive loop can be anything, like, think only of your big toe. The loop is that you think about your big toe and when you don't think about your big toe, you again think about your big toe. So every thought leads to your big toe. That is the loop(1) which creates trance(1) and which produces a set of disabled cognitive functions - -- let's call this set DCF(1). Among these disabled cognitive functions that you might experience is the inability to move, inability to perform math, inability to remember anything, inability to make judgements, inability to exercise your own will. Why? Because you are only thinking about your big toe!

With me so far? I have to number these so you can follow me. In that set DCF(1) at least the critical judgement function is disabled. This will allow you to uncritically accept the suggestions of your hypnotist friend who keeps talking about this wonderful state and describing it to you in repetitive detail.

Now, there is a second loop(2) which consists of the suggestions experienced within the remaining (non-disabled) cognitive functions. Your hypnotist friend says "You are really in a wonderful state, just like that drug you like, except that you can also be normal, anytime you need to." If your friend is a good hypnotist, he will calibrate the suggestions to some somatic output of the body, such as your breath - presuming that you are still breathing. This second loop(2) produces - a la trance theory - trust me, here - another trance(2), and another set of DCF(2). Notice that every loop produces another trance and another set of DCF. Maybe we don't have a 'cool' way to denote the specific set of DCF, or to say what is disabled and what is not, but at least we can denote the second set DCF(2) specifically as being a direct result of trance(2) and loop(2).

I don't want to make this too overly complicated, but let's assume that the desirable mental state occurs when DCF(2) comes into existence. For example, he says "When you are experiencing this desired state fully you raise your finger and when your finger touches your nose as you think only of your toe you feel the desired state intensely for as long as you touch your nose and think of your big toe."

Now all we have to do is anchor it. For that there is a third trance.

If the hypnotist is very clever, he can watch or test for a characteristic within DCF(2) and when seen link these by suggestion, for example, or by anchoring kinesthetically, to ones toe or nose. It is not always the case that the anchor starts loop(1). But that is the goal of the hypnosis. To be more effective, the hypnotist would run through the links a few times so that the anchor started loop(1) -> trance(1) -> DCF(1) -> trance(2) -> DCF(2) -> loop(1). This makes another loop(3) which produces trance(3) and voila! We are done! Touch nose, have desirable trip.

You will see that the mechanism is a bit shaky without lots of practice, accuracy and precision. It is the lack of practice, accuracy and precision which causes the failure of trance(3). Each loop must continue long enough to produce a stabile trance and each stabile trance must consistently disable the same cognitive functions. You can design all kinds of strange and weird trances and really very complicated ones with multiple DCFs.

What I am doing is applying trance theory over and over again - trying to be consistent about it. There is no mumbo jumbo here. Trance theory is a specific tool and a technique for analyzing and designing trances.

It is the combination of DCFs and the order in which they are created that produces all of the strange and wild occult states. By this I mean that if you start a loop and because of this first loop you go to sleep, you can just forget about your shamanistic journey. If you want to go on a shamanistic journey you must only start loops where you do not lose consciousness.

Most of the fancy occult trance states are built up over a somewhat long period of time. First, one type of cognitive function is disabled, then perhaps another one. Then, subtle cognitive functions are enhanced or amplified by suggestion and by further disabling the perception of any distractions. Slowly, these trances are allowed to stabilize, like letting a good wine clarify. They must also be broken periodically in order that one does not lose the sense of ordinary reality.

Occult altered states are not simple to produce because each person is different. A simple trance for one person might disable the correct cognitive function, but for another person maybe the wrong cognitive function is disabled. Creating trances in a haphazard or careless way can create altered states which look very much like mental pathologies. It is possible to create addictive dissociated states that are not pleasant.

Many trances so produced are dangerous, because you can get lost in them. The reason is that the multiple trances can become fixed - relatively permanent - and one stays more or less always in a trance. That is an addictive trance.

As to mandalas and contemplation or meditation - whether Tibetan or sufi - the same analysis applies. The repetition creates a dissociated trance plane and consequent disabling of some cognitive functions. This would also be a hypnotic trance since part of the loop is 'outside'. It is only when the entire loop is 'inside' that it is a meditation trance. However - some mandalas are only used as teaching mechanisms. During the teaching process, the type of trance is hypnotic. But, after the student knows what the mandala looks like, it is visualized internally. Then it is a meditation trance and no longer a hypnotic trance.

Trance theory is rich; it is full of important implications. Not only does it explain the trances of the past, it can help us to analyze the trances of the present and design trances of the future.

I am very interested in working with serious minded people who wish to use trance theory in scientific or in personal research. I invite you to contact me personally with your questions and proposals.

References:

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Wier, Dennis R., Trance: from magic to technology. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Trans Media, 1996.

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About the Author:

Dennis R. Wier is the Director of The Trance Institute in Switzerland. He may be reached by email using the form below. See also www.trance.edu