Chapter 4
a. Examples of a neural basis (and bias) underlying cross-cultural experiences are “neurognostic structures”—genetically prepared neural pathways primed to process information and shape experience in specific directions.208
Chapter 5
b. This common end stage via multiple pathways is what systems theorists call “equifinality.”
c. This section draws on my paper “Asian Contemplative Traditions” in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 32(2), 38–108, 1999, and on my book Essential Spirituality.
d. There is probably a relationship between practice and maturity that we might formulate as follows: The practice-maturation hypothesis suggests that the amount of practitioners’ maturation is a function of the extent to which they do the seven central practices.
Chapter 6
e. The process of detribalization is part of the larger process of maturation from conventional to post-conventional and personal to transpersonal stages, and it is reflected in multiple aspects of the personality or “lines of development.” For ego development, it is the shift from conformist to individualistic and autonomous stages;216 for moral development, it reflects conventional to post-conventional maturation;197 for faith, it is the movement from synthetic-conventional to individuative-reflective and conjunctive stages;100 for the spiral dynamics of Clare Graves and Don Beck,409 it is the leap from first-tier (blue and orange) to second-tier (yellow and turquoise) thinking, and in Ken Wilber’s410 wide-ranging synthesis, it is, among other things, a shift in orientation from sociocentric to worldcentric.
f. A fuller discussion of conventionality, and the factors that make the call and post-conventional growth so challenging, is available in my chapter, “Authenticity, Conventionality, and Angst.”393
Chapter 7
g. Moreover, random reinforcement of behavior makes it particularly resistant to unlearning, which explains, in part, the remarkable persistence of many superstitions and taboos.
h. There are, of course, many different explanations of the origins and maintenance of taboos in addition to the primarily psychological ones offered here. For a good, brief review of anthropological explanations, see Slater’s “Taboo.”343
Chapter 10
i. In Piagetian terms, the death-rebirth process would be a particularly dramatic—perhaps the most dramatic—example of “accommodation.” Piaget suggested that experiences are usually “assimilated” into preexisting psychological structures. However, if the experiences are especially novel or dramatic, the psychological structures may have to change, i.e., accommodate, to encompass and integrate the experiences.97 During death-rebirth, some structures would not only change, but presumably would collapse and then, guided by the psyche’s innate holotropic or equilibrative (Piaget) tendencies, would equilibrate to a new, more functional, accommodated form.
j. This actualizing drive of mind is crucial to understanding much of psychological and spiritual growth in general and of the death-rebirth process in particular. It can be strikingly evident in psychedelic therapy, and in the concluding chapter of Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics, Charles Grob and I summarized relevant discoveries by the early researchers as follows:
A further common conclusion concerned a fundamental capacity and drive of mind. The mind increasingly came to be seen as a self-organizing, self-optimizing system. The researchers concluded that, given supportive conditions, the mind tends to be self-healing, self-integrating, self-individuating, self-actualizing, self-transcending, and self-awakening.
These innate tendencies for the mind to flower, unfold, and develop its potentials had been recognized before in both East and West, psychology and philosophy. Long ago Plato spoke of Eros and Tibetan Buddhism of the self-liberating nature of mind. More recent recognitions include neuroanatomist Kurt Goldstein’s “actualization,” Carl Rogers’ “formative tendency,” Carl Jung’s “individuation urge,” Abraham Maslow’s “self-transcendence,” Erik Erikson’s “self-perfectibility,” philosopher Ken Wilber’s “eros,” and Aldous Huxley’s “moksha drive.”396
To these I would also add developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s “equilibration” and the spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas’s “optimizing force.”
The mind’s innate drive to heal and transcend itself may be one of its most important properties and one of the most important contemplative and psychological discoveries.
Chapter 11
k. The term authentic is being used here in the technical sense suggested by Ken Wilber in A Sociable God. Wilber describes a religious-spiritual discipline as authentic to the extent to which it aims for higher transpersonal developmental stages and for the ASCs that are their usual precursors. Altered states, when experienced repetitively, tend to stabilize into altered traits and facilitate higher stages.
l. Most researchers agree that ASCs are crucial to shamanism. The venerable Swedish scholar Ake Hultkrantz concluded “...if we want to retain the concept of shamanism as a scholarly instrument we must continue to stress its ecstatic character.”
The opposing view has been vociferously championed by the French anthropologist Roberte Hamayon who tellingly titled one of her lectures, “To put an end to the use of ‘trance’ and ‘ecstasy’ in the study of shamanism.”141 Hamayon rightly raises concerns about the vagueness of terms such as trance and the methodologically sloppy ways by which it has sometimes been inferred, concerns to which we will return later. However, her commitment to a purely objective social anthropology, and apparent unwillingness to consider verbal reports from shamans, pretty much precludes the possibility of recognizing or studying subjective experiences, including ASCs. But those who have had direct experience of shamanic ASCs report that they can be extremely potent and important. Indeed, it would probably be hard to find a researcher trained in shamanism who would deny the importance of ASCs.
The situation is reminiscent of research on psychedelics. Infatuated with objective measures, many investigators fell into what Abraham Maslow called “means centered” as opposed to “problem centered” research.226 In their “methodolatry,” investigators emphasized the method or means (objective measurement) rather than the problem (understanding what is most central). The result, as Charles Tart famously pointed out, was that if we were to believe the researchers, millions of people were smoking marijuana to increase their heart rate and redden their eyes.361 When subjective experience is overlooked, so too are meaning and significance.
Chapter 12
m. What then are the possible causes of shamanic “fits”? Possible diagnoses include various types of epilepsy, but also hysterical seizures and emotional agitation. Possible types of epilepsy include generalized and temporal lobe varieties.
Generalized or grand mal epilepsy is the classic form of convulsion. Here the patient loses consciousness and falls to the ground. After a few seconds, generalized muscle contractions occur, followed by intense jerking movements of the whole body. The movements gradually become less frequent and finally cease, leaving the patient comatose and flaccid. Consciousness then gradually returns, though the patient often remains confused and drowsy and has no memory of the attack.
Temporal lobe epilepsy is a particularly intriguing possibility because it elicits not only changes in behavior, but also dramatic and unusual experiences. During an attack, patients may experience hallucinations, intense emotions ranging from fear to ecstasy, and feelings of unreality; they may also display unconscious automatic movements.
Both generalized and temporal lobe attacks are forms of organic epilepsy. That is, they are due to underlying brain pathology and as such tend to recur over long periods of time. However, accounts of shamanic “fits” usually imply that attacks occurred only during the initial crises and then disappeared spontaneously. This suggests that the fits were not organic in origin and hence were neither generalized nor temporal lobe epilepsy.
This leaves two other possibilities: hysterical epilepsy or emotional agitation. “Hysterical” epilepsy is an old term for a form of conversion disorder. Here psychological conflict is expressed as, or converted to, behavior that mimics an epileptic attack. Some shamanic fits may well be of this kind. The fact that the fits occur during times of psychological stress, disappear afterward, and are expected of would-be shamans, all suggest a psychological cause. Another possibility is that some “fits” are simply episodes of intense emotional agitation.
n. In fact, the “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, specifically excludes from dissociative trance disorders those trance experiences that are “a normal part of a broadly accepted collective cultural or religious practice.”8 Dissociative trance disorders are a culturally specific subset of “Dissociative Disorders Not Otherwise Specified.”
o. It is quite possible that the psychological process of dissociation may play a role in the shamanic journey. However, it is important to distinguish dissociative processes—where certain psychological functions appear to operate autonomously outside awareness and, especially in the case of shamans, where they are deliberately induced for personal and social benefit—from dissociative disorders, which seem involuntary and to lead to dysfunction.
p. If a psychotic episode does occur during the initiation crisis, then there seem to be four possible diagnoses. The first is “Brief Psychotic Disorder.” As the name suggests, this is a brief episode lasting from a day to a month, often marked by considerable emotional turmoil, yet with eventual full recovery.8 It is most common in adolescence or early adulthood, which is consistent with the timing of the initiation crisis.
Other possible diagnoses would be schizophrenia or its short-lived variant, schizophreniform disorder. Current diagnostic practices require continuous signs of psychological disturbances for at least six months before a diagnosis of schizophrenia can be made. Where disturbances are shorter but the clinical picture is still consistent with schizophrenia, then the diagnosis of schizophreniform disorder is made.
The fourth possibility would be “Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.” This diagnosis is given when a psychotic episode does not meet the diagnostic criteria for specific disorders such as schizophrenia or when there is inadequate information to make a specific diagnosis.
If a psychotic episode does indeed occur during initiation crises, then its differential diagnosis includes these four categories. What is the evidence for and against each of them? Given how limited and unreliable the clinical data is, it will obviously be impossible to make a definitive diagnosis. However, we can consider the possibilities as follows:
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual suggests that the diagnosis of “psychotic disorder not otherwise specified,” should be used for psychosis “…about which there is inadequate information to make a specific diagnosis…”8 This certainly fits the shamanic situation.
Therefore, either this diagnosis or brief psychotic disorder might be appropriate diagnoses. However, it is schizophrenia that has been the most common diagnosis. This may partly reflect a lack of psychiatric sophistication among researchers. Nonpsychiatrists are often unaware of the many varieties of psychosis and therefore assume that all psychoses are schizophrenia.
In fact, although schizophrenia has been the most common diagnosis, it seems the least likely for several reasons. Many shamans have seemed not at all schizophrenic to anthropologists. Likewise, native peoples often make sharp distinctions between shamanic crises and mental illness. Moreover, the initial crisis is brief, and shamans often seem to end up not only psychologically healthy, but even exceptionally so. This is in marked contrast to schizophrenics, of whom about one-third tend to deteriorate progressively over the years. Indeed, this exceptional psychological well-being of shamans also argues against most of the other diagnoses that have been made, e.g., epilepsy and “hysteria.” While some patients may spontaneously recover from any of these, one would hardly expect them to end up as the most able members of society.
Chapter 13
q. Limitations of the study include the fact that testing was done under poor conditions, scoring was apparently not blind, and many differences were not significantly different. Other problems with the study are described by Fabrega and Silver.89
Chapter 16
r. There may be a crucial exception in the case of experiences of pure consciousness such as occur in causal states,99 but that is not central to shamanism, which does not focus on such experiences.
Chapter 18
s. Of the many books on mediumship, three thorough yet readable ones are Channeling,195With the Tongues of Men and Angels,158 and The Channeling Zone.35
t. For those who would like to explore A Course in Miracles, excellent accounts of it are available in Patrick Miller’s The Complete Story of the Course,241 Robert Perry’s Path of Light,279and Robert Skutch’s Journey Without Distance.342 Collections of poetic excerpts can be found in the book and CD Gifts from A Course in Miracles381 and on the CD Choose One Again.358
u. There is a useful division to be made between shallow and deep skeptics.
Shallow skeptics are skeptical about all things that do not fit into their belief system (which itself goes unquestioned).
Deep skeptics are skeptical about all things, including their belief system (which they are willing to subject to rigorous questioning).
As Zen says, “Little doubt creates little awakening; great doubt creates great awakening.”
Chapter 19
v. The principle of underdetermination of theory by data is also called “model agnosticism” by physicists. The principle is taken to its logical extreme in the Mach-Duhem-Poincare theorem, which argues that we can create an indefinite number of theories to fit any given set of observations.
w. These are examples of philosophical stances:
1) Reductive materialism holds that each mental event is not only type-identical to a neural event, but is in fact nothing but a neural event.
2) Eliminative materialism holds that accounts of mental entities, as usually described, should be eliminated in favor of only neural ones.
x. It is also consistent with a contemporary post-Kantian, post-metaphysical epistemology that acknowledges our inherent epistemological limitations and “the death of metaphysics.”411
Chapter 24
y. I suspect that it will not be long before there is an analogous awakening to the distinction between multistage and unistage cultures, differentiating those cultures that recognize multiple potential psychological and spiritual stages of adult development and those that do not.
Chapter 26
z. Whether different traditions can induce identical internal breakthroughs and in what ways they may differ is a long and complex debate. For arguments that the experiences of different traditions are necessarily different, see Katz.192 For arguments that they can overlap, see Forman,98 Walsh and Vaughan,399 and Wilber.409 Clearly there are multiple kinds of religiously induced mystical experiences, just as there are multiple kinds of psychedelic experiences. Fortunately we don’t need to go into these complexities to investigate whether some psychedelic experiences may overlap some mystical experiences.
aa. This chapter draws from The Spirit of Shamanism390 and from a paper, “Entheogens: True or False?”395
Chapter 30
ab. Examples of comprehensive, informed reviews of psi can be found in Dean Radin’s291 book The Conscious Universe and the special issue “Psi Wars: Parapsychology” of The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2003, 10(6–7). Examples of bad reviews that display an astounding ignorance of the research include Charpak & Broch’s Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudo-science,51 as well as the review of this book by Freeman Dyson,78 “One in a Million,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books, 2004, March 25. A review of theories of psi is available in Dean Radin’s Entangled Minds.292
ac.Researchers have studied several capacities that astrologers claim to possess or that are implied by their claims. All of these capacities are essential if astrology is to be considered legitimate, but astrologers display none of them. Five crucial capacities are:
1) Do astrologers agree when judging the same birth chart? The short answer is “No.” There is virtually no agreement whatsoever between different astrologers’ interpretations of the same chart. Correlations average about 0.1 (when 1.0 is perfect correlation and 0 is no correlation). By contrast, this was marginally worse than for practitioners of palmistry and vastly worse than the 0.8 that is demanded of valid psychological tests. This lack of agreement was a consistent finding across all studies, including those using expert astrologers, those run by astrologers themselves, and those run by astrologers and scientists in collaboration.193 This finding is devastating. It destroys any claim for reliability or validity of astrological readings, because it means that there are almost as many astrologies as there are astrologers, and they agree not at all.
2) Astrologers are unable to pick the owners of birth charts.66
3) Likewise, subjects of astrological readings are unable to pick their own readings from other people’s profiles. In other words, subjects are just as likely to think that another person’s—in fact, any person’s—profile is as accurate a description of them as their own. The tendency for people to agree enthusiastically with false personality readings has been named the “Barnum effect,” in honor of P. T. Barnum’s famous line that “there’s a sucker born every minute.” One amusing demonstration of the Barnum effect was offered by Michel Gauquelin, who placed an advertisement in a Paris newspaper generously offering a free personal horoscope. Of those who received one, 94 percent subsequently rated it as accurate. Yet each and every person had received the same horoscope: that of Dr. Petiot, one of France’s most notorious mass murderers.251 A similar study in the United States (using a different mass murderer) yielded similarly satisfied customers.65
4) Astrological predictions fare no better than chance. In fact, earthquake predictions fared worse than chance.
5) Astrologers’ readings show no correlation with well-validated psychological tests of personality. These failures held up even when the astrologers were highly esteemed experts, helped design the study, regarded the study as a good measure of their skills, and felt confident of their readings.234
ad. There is, however, one body of research much cited by astrologers: the studies of Michel Gauquelin. Unfortunately, it is clear these astrologers have either not read, or else have not understood, Gauquelin. Closely examined, Gauquelin’s findings offer no support for conventional astrological claims.
Gauquelin labored mightily for decades searching for astrological correlations. From his massive statistical database he concluded that “all the results remained negative. There seemed to be no truth in the idea that signs of the zodiac determined anything or that horoscopes could be used to predict the future.”113
However, to his surprise, analysis did reveal very small but significant correlations between eminence in various professional fields and the position of certain planets at birth. For example, eminent scientists, soldiers, and athletes were likely to have the planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, respectively, just over the horizon or at the zenith of the sky at the time of their birth.
Not surprisingly, these claims met with enormous skepticism. However, independent reanalyses have generally been confirmatory, despite a scandalous attempt by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) to discredit it.300 CSICOP is, for the most part, a good example of shallow skepticism.
Gauquelin’s research deserves further study, even though it is probably an artifact of nineteenth-century parents changing their children’s birth dates to favorable days.65 However, contrary to claims by astrologers,353 there are several reasons why it offers no support for traditional astrology. To briefly summarize these reasons:
• Gauquelin’s patterns do not fit traditional astrological patterns.
• Gauquelin’s findings apply only to eminent people: an elite 0.005 percent of the population. People who do not attain eminence show no correlation with planetary birth position. In other words, for 99.995 percent of the population, the vast majority of us, Gauquelin’s data offers no support for astrology whatsoever.
• Analysis of Gauquelin’s data suggests that the effect may be due to parents’ changing the reported time of birth. Most of his subjects were from the nineteenth century when superstitions abounded and when, for example, there was a dramatic deficit of births reported on the thirteenth of each month.65
The effects are extremely small, in fact far, far too small to be of any value whatsoever in making astrological predictions.
In summary, Gauquelin’s findings are fascinating but offer no support for traditional astrological claims and are of no value in making astrological predictions.
Chapter 32
ae. In the technical terms of yoga, this is the practice of pratyāhāra (sense withdrawal) and dhyāna (meditation) to produce samādhi (enstasy). This arises first as savikalpa samādhi (samādhi with form) and then as nirvikalpa samādhi (samādhi without form), in which only consciousness remains as sac-cid-ananda (infinite being—consciousness—bliss).
af. This experience of constant flux is most evident in the Vipassana state-stage of “arising and passing away,” when the reality of annica (the impermanence and unceasing change of all experience) is deeply realized. Given that there are about a dozen major state-stages in Vipassana meditation, the complexities of comparing different practices becomes obvious.
Chapter 33
ag. Without direct experience, descriptions remain what Immanuel Kant called “empty,” and we may lack adequatio: the capacity to comprehend their deeper meaning and “grades of significance.”327 Aldous Huxley171 summarized this as “knowledge is a function of being.”
These limitations on understanding meditative experiences, especially advanced ones, without direct personal experience of them, can be conceived of in several ways. They can be considered in terms of states of consciousness as reflecting the limits of state-specific knowledge and cross-state transfer,208, 359 developmentally as stage-specific understanding, in classical epistemological terms as the necessity of opening the eye of contemplation, and linguistically as the difficulty of understanding the signifier (word or term) without having known the relevant signified experience.410
ah. I have personally heard two accounts of union. These were of union with the universe rather than with a deity. This points to the fact that there are actually different types of mystical union. Union with the physical universe is an example of gross state “nature mysticism.”
Union with a deity figure is subtle-state deity or theistic mysticism. Union with formless consciousness or void is causal-state formless mysticism, while union with the phenomena of all states is nondual mysticism.413