Contact Highs
and Shared
Experience
Milton Erickson was once asked if he went into trance as well when he induced trance in a client. He responded that he went into trance first and then took the client with him. As with many of Erickson’s techniques, he was capitalizing on a natural tendency of human consciousness. We are often influenced, subtly or overtly, by the people around us. This is something natural that we’ve all experienced. Think about that wet blanket friend whose sullen demeanor brings down the whole room or that upbeat person who brightens a room when they enter.
An extreme version of this phenomenon is called shaktipat by the yogis. This is when the mere presence of a guru or enlightened person confers enlightenment on someone else. It can also be used to describe spontaneous kundalini experiences that are stimulated by the presence of someone with aroused kundalini.
And this kind of experience-sharing happens among cannabis users. Friends who have not consumed any herb will act high, silly, humorous, or philosophical when hanging around with their pothead buddies. Of course, it can happen with other substances, too, especially the psychedelics; a few people on LSD or MDMA can change the consciousness of an entire crowd at a concert or rave. Nor is it strictly limited to drug experiences—as Dr. Erickson suggested, almost any state can be conveyed nonverbally, either spontaneously or by intent.
Becoming aware of this process can be useful in a variety of ways. If you have the ability to shift the consciousness of others, you can help them get out of stuck or unpleasant states. You can get a group of ritual participants into the same headspace. And you can also protect yourself from inadvertently taking on the negative states and feelings of others.
When we do this kind of thing intentionally, the process is called pacing and leading and relies on the brain’s mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons are motor neurons that respond not only when we decide to make a movement but when we observe (or hear, feel, or even think about) someone else moving. When the mirror neuron system registers sentient activity that we are familiar with—movements that we have made ourselves or are presently making—it responds more strongly. For instance, if a couch potato watches a martial arts film, s/he can experience some of the action and may be moved to imitate some of the techniques, however ineptly—but if an experienced martial artist watches the same film, her mirror neurons respond more strongly and any internal or external imitation will be much more detailed. Likewise if an untrained rock ‘n’ roll fan hears a great guitar riff, he might be moved to play some air guitar, but if an experienced guitarist hears the same riff, her air guitar will include more accurate finger and hand movements and more nuances of hearing.
When we see, hear, or feel others who are behaving like us, we experience greater empathy and rapport. Rapport, on the most obvious level, is a feeling of comfort or trust that we have while communicating with other humans. An easy way to think of rapport is as a kind of resonance. We fall in step with each other, harmonize, see eye-to-eye. Neurolinguistic programming (NLP)techniques to develop and maintain rapport include a process of matching or mirroring behavioral cues. You have undoubtedly noticed how this can happen spontaneously: one person yawns, so does her friend; in a classroom of silent test-takers, one person coughs and it spreads around the room; when friends hang out together, one person laughing can infect the others with giggles. The matching and mirroring, called pacing, tends to develop both comfort and trust.100
There are a lot of subtleties to pacing and leading, in fact the more subtle, the more effective. Matching obvious movements can be fairly effective (especially if you’re doing something like dancing or making love); however, matching unconscious movements can be even more effective. That is, if you can identify some movements or behaviors that are outside of someone’s awareness and match or mirror them, your rapport may develop even more rapidly and deeply. Some unconscious behaviors are easy to observe like breathing, eye movements, and facial expressions.
Once you feel that you have some measure of rapport, you can then change your behavior to lead into a new state or movement. If the shifts are smaller, natural, relaxed, and within the person’s normal range of behavior, they tend to compel more than abrupt and unusual behaviors.
While this process can seem awkward when we first attempt to practice it intentionally, it is the same process that happens naturally and outside of awareness in cases of contact high and in many other situations. At least a little bit of dishabituation may be necessary to move these very habitual and unconscious behaviors into consciousness. A good way to start is by observing others. Notice how good friends tend to fall into the same postures and movements when they are hanging out together. Notice how it sometimes takes one willful person to change their behavior to motivate a group of people who are in deep rapport (for instance, the first friend to stand up and say, “Hey, we’d better get going if we want to make it to the movie on time!”). Also notice how people who are in the same state of consciousness, like those getting high together, tend to find rapport more easily and naturally.
Intentional Contact High
Find a friend who may need a little relaxation, pain relief, euphoria, or a case of the munchies. Get high and then go sit or stand with your friend. Without drawing attention to what you are doing (that is, do what you normally do in a similar situation—chat, eat, watch TV, or whatever), match your friend’s breathing and some aspects of posture and facial expression. Take at least a few minutes and notice when it starts to feel comfortable, then relax and start to explore your high. Go with the feeling of being high and allow your muscles to soften, your breathing to change, and your mood to lift (or whatever really characterizes the high for you). Enhance the experience by using the Enhancing a High exercise from the previous chapter, if necessary. Notice whether your friend is following you into the state (that is, observe any changes in breathing, posture, facial expression, behavior). If you need to, return to pacing to deepen rapport, then lead some more, until you’ve transmitted a nice contact high.
As mentioned, there are numerous uses for this technique. If friends or ritual partners all engage in this kind of rapport-building with each other, it can be a powerful and consensual experience. Some people will think of more nefarious ways to attempt to influence others covertly. While that is possible using similar techniques, it’s not as easy as it might seem. Remember that rapport works both ways. When you develop rapport with someone, it’s not just other people feeling comfortable and trusting around you—if you’ve got a functioning set of mirror neurons, you will likely also feel that way about them! And I’ll also mention that when dealing with rapport, there is no substitute for authenticity. That is, it all works best when you are genuinely interested and well-intentioned toward the people you hope to influence.
Unusual things can happen when people are in rapport together, including the appearance of some very unordinary abilities and phenomena. In the 1950s through 1970s, research into parapsychology was a little bit more mainstream than it is today. Researchers at quite a few universities actively pursued links between hypnosis and parapsychological phenomena. While it can be argued that none of the studies could point to a conclusive and easily replicable result of ESP, in many of the studies, the subjects who were asked to make guesses scored higher after a hypnotic induction. Not for every subject or every single trial of the more successful subjects, but over dozens of studies by different researchers, the scores following trance techniques averaged out significantly higher. A meta-analysis of the numerous individual studies of hypnosis and ESP concluded that “It seems that the difference in ESP performances in the induction and control conditions is a reliable effect—it occurs more often than would be expected by chance and it does not appear to be due to faulty ESP testing or experimental design.” 101
A more recent experiment by Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger may provide a clue to the phenomena. Persinger is best known as the developer of the “God Helmet,” a device that uses mild electromagnetic stimulation to activate the temporal lobes. Most who try the helmet report an altered state and many report significant or transcendent experiences of various kinds. The use of transcranial magnetic stimulation is well-established—you can go to a neurologist’s office for TMS treatment for a variety of neurological problems, for instance. What is remarkable is one of the experiments to which Persinger applied his brain machine. He had two subjects in different rooms, each with their own helmets. They could not see or hear each other. Their only connection was the computer that controlled both helmets, so that both would be in the same state simultaneously. After both had spent some time with the helmets, Persinger came into one of the rooms with a flashlight, which he aimed at the subject’s eyes. Predictably, the subject’s eyes reacted, the pupil contracting. What is strange is that in the other room where there was no flashlight, the other subject’s pupils also contracted at the same time.102
This is more like the kind of result one sees in quantum physics, where particles that were once connected continue to influence each other instantly at a distance. Persinger has theorized that his experiment demonstrated quantum entanglement on a human scale. Fascinated with the experiment, I asked two of my online classes to see if they could develop a low-tech version of the experiment as it might relate to “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein called it. The result was an experiment that resembled the old hypnosis and ESP studies as much as it did Persinger’s helmet-entanglement project. Here are the instructions for the initial trials of one of the experimental groups:
We’ll conduct this experiment a number of times, with changes in one variable, that variable will be the state that we are in when we test. To start with, however, the first round of testing will be with NO particular state. Or rather, whatever state you are in when you come to the test, without any special preparation.
I am going to lift up one of my limbs, right arm, left arm, right leg, or left leg. I’m going to concentrate on that limb for a full minute. I will repeat this at least three times throughout the day.
Now … without any preparation, just as you are reading this now, make a guess as to which limb. There are four possible answers—right or left arm, right or left leg. Make a guess and then post it here.
When each one of us has guessed (or remote viewed, or intuited, if you prefer), then someone else will concentrate on one of their limbs and we will repeat with the same parameters until each of us has had a turn as “sender.” So … timing on this will be dependent on time zones and when people can get online to test, but let’s see if we can move through this part of the experiment quickly.
The other class used a nearly identical system but employed playing cards for the guesses. In the first trial of the arm/leg experiment there were no attempts to control state. In subsequent trials we had both senders and receivers employ the same methods for state control. The first method was to yawn ten times. And right away, our correct guess scores began to improve. The next state control method was the yoga meditation technique of square breathing and our scores shot up even higher! The playing card class also found that their guess scores increased dramatically when state control techniques were shared.
This experiment is low-tech enough that if you have access to a computer and a group of friends, colleagues, or students, you can replicate it for yourself using meditation, hypnosis techniques—or cannabis! While this is a very preliminary and homebrewed kind of experiment, it demonstrates at least the possibility that sharing states may also share other, less overt aspects of consciousness. And if that’s the case, think about what happens with a group of people getting high together. There are multiple elements of ritual that go into creating communal states—and the addition of a bit of cannabis passed around may deepen connections and depth of interaction. And the phenomenon of the contact high suggests that the joint doesn’t even have to make it all the way around the circle; a few high participants can help to develop a shared state in a larger group.
100. Carey, Benedict. “You Remind Me of Me,” The New York Times. February 12, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/health/12mimic.html?_r=1.
101. Rao, K. Ramakrishna. Basic Research in Parapsychology, 2nd ed. MacFarland, 2001.
102. Hu, H. and M. Wu. “Transatlantic Excess Brain Correlations Are Experimentally Produced by Persinger’s Group.” Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research, Volume 6, Issue 9, September 2015.