🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (16 tweets)
"There are consequences when a society has no context in which to address the human need for trance - a society in which one of the fundamental states that has made humans human, becomes taboo. What consequences? Well, on the one hand, trance itself becomes untethered.
There are no protocols around it, so anyone can call themselves an intuitive. Everyone's a shaman - even, apparently, the guy in buffalo horns prancing about the US Capitol. There's no accountability, so you get spiritual movements that are unanchored from contextual reality.
This looks like people trusting their intuition without a lineage, or tribe, or circle to smack them down when they go astray or drift into deep delusion. This phenomenon is deeply evident in the new age embrace of QAnon.
But on the other hand, the blanket dismissal of all mystic state - the deriding of intuitive and intuitive means of interacting with the world as "less than" or "pathological" or "dangerous" - this doesn't work out very well either.
For to dismiss mystic experience is to dismiss humanity itself. The longing we have for trance is deep, and when we pathologize trance states, ecstatic states, intuitive states, we play into a fractured and fraught history that is deeply intertwined with colonialism.
As Barbara Ehrenreich expresses in her book Dancing In The Streets, trance tends to be populist. Trance tends to be what the folk are up to, and the collective unifying power of trance tends to be threatening to colonial power structures.
In many cultures, trance tends to be the domain of women. And the pathologizing of trance in the West follows a long line of pathologizing intuition, ecstasy and rapture as female flaws. Yet trance always finds ways to express.
The question isn't "should we eliminate trance," or somehow get beyond, it or file it under "all things superstitious," or label it as some type of trauma-induced coping mechanism. The question is: how we ritualize it? Where do we find it? Where does it lead us?
When we understand trance as a central human drive, we can start to regularize and ritualize our own longings for trance. We can maybe notice why we're reaching for the luminous screen at that moment, or why the news anchor has spellbound.
We can understand why that one site on the internet keeps us in rapt attention, or why the charismatic spiritual leaders voice soothes us. And instead, we can seek the state of flow in ways that reinforce interconnectedness.
We can look deeper at the precious place that rituals holds our lives, and how that ritual can connect us to our communities, to the world at large, and to our own minds." - Josh Schrei, The Emerald Podcast, "How Trance States Shape The World" 18m-mark-ish