It seems to me that most of what we do with minds are the results of compliance with various forms and modes of trance. But we know so little about this that we tell every kind of strange story about it, from the intellectual to the ‘spiritual’.

Of course, there are intellectual and spiritual experiences, and some of them involve trance-like states. But I think we too often confuse forms of trance with the world, our minds, spirituality, understanding, and thinking. This is a dangerous path. It is like driving a car while hallucinating. How can we drive a vehicle we do not even know exists?

Language itself induces trance-like states, and we used trance-like forms of focused attention to acquire language as infants. So, in effect, we were given vulnerability to trance, but not the powers that it should confer. They made our wings into chains, and called it a favor, but we can learn to retrieve the assets and opportunities inherent in our human minds, and they are astonishing beyond our hopes or imaginings. First, however, we must stop selecting the other behavior; compliance with the trances induced by the various predators and parasites that largely if not completely comprise our supercultures (and most of their subcultures).

Our power is not so much the art of logical thinking, however useful or imperative this may be in contexts appropriate to it — our power is a form of focused dreaming that tends to select for possibilities more or less coherent with its goals. And the more beautiful, noble, and true to our living world, natures our purposes, the more powerful the effects of this focus.

We must retrieve the powers of trance from their current masters, and discover again what the dreaming animal is and does, together. It starts here, with recognition and agreement, and it proceeds with mutual discovery, learning, experiment and application. There is no barrier. All that is humanly possible — and more, we can do, now.