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Rick,
No disrespect taken ... it's a HUGE subject and we are all but
proverbial blind men describing the proverbial elephant.
So I dive in ...
On 5/1/08, Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:
> thanks for your insight, Dennis.
> I respect your knowledge on this subject but my own experience doesn't
> agree entirely with your conclusions (it's okay to agree to disagree,
>here, I
> think and I want to let you know that I respect your research and
>personal
> experiences)
>
> The only thing I can say is that after having done a tradtional Peyote
> sweat lodge ritual with completely non-syncopated rhythms
> and having watched a Haitian Vodun ceremony where people were
> 'possessed' by the Orishas after the famous 'crack in the universe'
> polyrhythmic breaks were played that disrupted the trance inducing
> polyrhythmic drumming of the three drummers, the quality of
> trance was vastly different in form and energy.
Actually, this is exactly my point (reread carefully what I said about
cultural "set" differences accounting for the vary differences you
point out). The research I wsa readign at the time was pretty clear
that it wasn't syncopation or lack of syncopation that was
instrumental in induction; rather it was the appropriate inclusion of
the right audio frequency (just the right touch of those bass notes)
and the "speed" with which those sounds were produced (non-synopated
works fine you're hitting the drumhead fast/slow enough, or syncopated
works so long as that same rhythm is included in the overall picture).
And let's not forget that acoustic trance induction can also be
enhanced through any number of psycotropic and entheogens, depending
(again) on your cultural perspectives on the use of such things.
Shoot, you can even do it by suggestion (we call that hypnosis in the
West).
> I do believe that it's all down to brain rhythms and certain
>entrainments
> as you say, but I think there are lots of different mental states
> that can be achieved by different methods which may differ radically
>from
> each other, both in their triggers and in their manifestations.
> These all are 'altered states'.
Yep. That was what got me looking into it initially. The whole
question of what are "altered states". And how does culture structure
and determine the content of those altered states, as well as what are
the appropriate social responses to them and the participants.
Which of these experiences is likely to incur less social opprobium:
1. Getting really drunk in public and watching a sports event
2. Getting really wasted on ('shrooms, blotter, weed, etc) inpublic
and watching a sports event
Social control of ecstatic states? Sure, you betcha!
> I am not, however, an expert, and I'd love to learn more about this
> subject. I"m only working from what I know and the intellectual
>paradigm
> that came from the the information theory garnered from studying with
> Gregory Bateson and, to a lesser extent, John Grinder.
Bateson was looking at this from a more psychological bent and the
perspective of how shamanic healing practices might impact on
psychotherapy. Don't know how much of that to attribute to his being
married to Margaret Mead for all those years ... The whole area of
trance and psychotheray were big topics when in the late 60's and 70's
(well, like DUH!) and more than a few of us studying anthropology got
sucked into studying this and related fields. (I was looking at
ethnobotany, religious history, musicology, psychotherapy ... all from
the point of view of an anthro student who was a musician who grew up
in an almost-Fundamentalist household with more than a little exposure
to glossalalia and , er, uhm, could address altered states from first
person observer perspective.)
One of the early observations was that some epileptics were subject to
seizures when exposed to certain frequencies and rhythm combinations.
This led to more research into the effcts of acoustic on brain states
(which, of course, led to the researching trance induction in
non-epileptics).
> It's rather difficult to strap electrodes onto trance participants
> (unless someone has perveresely accomplished this without my
>knowledge---> do you know more about this, Dennis?)
> so it would be difficult to really solve this dialectic from a Western
> scientific pardagimatic approach
> but I would be flabbergasted if the brain is doing the same to both
>sets of
> trancees in this case.
Not as hard as you'd think, dependingon your definiton of trance. Most
of THAT work has been done in the areas of sleep studies (dream
states, esp.)and meditation. The subjects in those studies are a
little more malleable, vis-a-vis attaching electrodes, and it has
yielded a fair bit of literature. Ditto with the research on hypnotic
states, which are a bit more analogous to the brain states that we
percieve as "trance"-like.
I seem to remember some studies in the 70's that used controlled
reproduction of audio triggers on subject who WERE hooked up, in order
to develop some of the baseline measurements as to what could be used
to trigger things. And I recall that there were also some alpha wave
behaviors, not just the theta wave ones, that were an important part
of the behavior.
> What else can you add to this, Dennis? I"m curious to know more about
>the
> depth of your knowledge.
It's been over 30 years since I looked deeply at the literature and
I'm not certain where my own notes are now. One thing that struck me
at the end of the roughly 4 years of researching this was that the
cultural value of the altered state experience varied wildly across
the world; that the brain was doing pretty much the same things, but
we interpeted it in radically different manners. And THAT was
something that was pretty much expected, given the history of
religious experience, cross-culturally.
I don't talk it about it much because it is difficult for many folks
to talk rationally about religious experience as being an irrational,
but natural phenomena. There has been a sudden outburst of research
into the physiological (brain) basis of religious experience and its'
development into "religion", so I do have hope that these things will
become easier to discuss outside of academic circles.
> respectfully Rick
>
> PS only one thing really bothers me about your post, I have to admit,
> though:
> why on earth did you stop drumming?
> It seems to be one of the very quickest way to get people to entrain
>that I
> know of.
Uh, yeah. Actually that's pretty much the root of it right there. I'm
ethically opposed to any form of entrainment without informed consent.
Does it happen? All the time. But I make no claims to being
responsible for it and I don't go out of my way to talk it about it
(except inthe context of my own personal experiences, when asked).
And actually, you can creat a self-hypnotic suggestion that will the
trick even more quickly. And then there is the whole field of
Neuro-linguistic Programming ... can you say "Speed Seduction"? sure
you can ...
> Last night I played with the Akron Family (and the DoDos) at an amazing
>gig
> where
> we just played the simplest rhythms in the world and the capacity crowd
> went ape shit crazy.
> There was definitely trance action happening. I was aware of it in my
> self..........in the musicians
> on the stage and definitely in the crazed dancing crowd by looking in
>their
> ectstatic faces.
Living in times when the propaganda machiens have been running
non-stop for years, I am constantly reminded that "Fame is but the
breath of the masses, and that oft unwholesome."
There is tremendous power over others in the sounds we create and
share. Consider the marching band at a high-school or college football
game. Or, better still, a military marching band (ever wonder why they
call it a "fight song"?). One of the problems with inducing altered
states is in their control; ours is not a culture (in the West) that
understands, appreciates, or encourages the arbitrary seeking out of
visions by individuals. We have several thousand years of developing
social control mechanisms to deal with truth-seekers, etc., and most
of them have been negative (unfortunately).
There are as many different altered states and visions as there are
human beings ... but which one is "True"? <GRIN>
Dennis "what was that middle part?"