So, how does trance relate to dance?
You have felt more than you have stressed. You feel more than you enact or dramatize. You are conscious of feeling only what you resist in your thinking. Most people feel by contrast to thought, not because of thought. The trance can bring down your resistance to the rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of the world beat, of the life pace and movement. Trance can make you sensitive to life steps, and it can reshape how you direct your attention. This is why modern neuroscience is so amazed at the impact of magic mushrooms right now.
A Buddhist teacher said that every thought you have is to avoid a feeling. It doesn’t have to be that way though.
Maybe I should go into what trance is. Those in power would seek to monopolize trance. It’s the key to their power. Nations that cannot foster it in their soldiers will fail to field a strong military. Corporations that cannot induce and continue to entrain / entrance their following will lose business to those who can.
You are constantly in a trance. Even when it feels like you are not, the theta rhythm (scientists even speculate that it is the signal that sets up our capacity to encode new memories) lies at the heart of our hypo-campus’ function, and you can easily be put in a state of distress and disorientation by disrupting that rhythm through stimuli. Discordant noise is enough to do it as well as disgusting smells. Disgusting smells are especially strong. You need trance even if you don’t want to work with it, but if you refuse to work with it you will continue to miss a sense of free will.
The hypo-campus has two functional modes, one where its signalling is irregular, busy but seemingly noisy, erratic, and the other where it is perfectly rhythmic, like a drum, dancing. Your theta rhythm is more often entrained than not. It only becomes distributed when you are actively thinking or when you are really bored. The reason, your theta rhythm gravitates to the rhythmic state so strongly, is things like your heart rate (and all the rest of your autonomic functions) depend on it. It is even proving to have an impact on genetic behaviour.
When you are comfortably concentrated, you are in trance. Your free will is in the distributed state of consciousness, not in the entranced state. The reason the actively thinking state does not allow you to exercise free will is you continue to process the same content of thought as you do in the entranced state and it will fail to offer choices / solutions either way.
How is it different than entranced? The distributed state differs in that you cannot be at rest. You cannot be comfortable. When entranced you can, but the two distributed states… There are two things that move us into the distributed, non-trance state: disturbance of our mind and disturbance of our senses. We can become engaged with something for either reason, and we can become disengaged or bored with something for either reason. The two paths are functionally very different though, and one is a false echo of the other in that it does not reciprocate the other.
Normally, when in problem solving… Well, conventional problem solving is disturbance of the mind as we attempt to line up strategies for dealing with whatever we think we perceive, and since that doesn’t work well, it either works well enough to drop us back into trance as we come to some conclusion that reassures us that everything is still normal, or we go even further and lapse into a disturbance of the senses, and really we can do both after a long bout of mind disturbance. To me, it’s like the backwash in the arteries of an obstructed heart that in time can lead to heart attack. Same recursive cycle over and over again allowing for little adaption let alone growth.
The other channel works like this. The senses disturb you from trance, and your awareness is filled with the information being provided by whatever was attention getting. Now this phase by itself alters the trance state. Sensory signals are neural signals and new neural signals shift synapse connections. This can’t happen if the senses have to contend with the noise of conventional thinking, and on the other pole of sensory disturbance, you have the potential to lapse into self awareness. In the relaxed or disengaged state the body and brain process information that disturbed it, got and held its attention, and this is integrated into the patterns of memory that were laid down by previous sensory disturbances. The self exists as the nexus in which experience occurs, and from which expression can be initiated. Can this occur in the other path?
In our efforts to be mentally active, we lock ourselves into a reactive and ultimately passive state, and we dance in lock-step to whatever program scarred us emotionally enough to monopolize our defensive instincts. With the other path we are presented with a wider variety of experience, stimuli. We integrate things like pleasant smells, or the reassuring sound of a partners voice, as well as whatever experience may have disturbed us positively or negatively, and then when we lapse back into the self reflective state, digesting our sensory experience. Whatever event may have gotten our attention presents itself in holistic terms inclusive of both positive and negative information, and ultimately only good or bad to the degree that it impeded our ability to survive and grow. Would the conclusion derived from either path be equally restrictive?
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~