Expanding Possibilities Within The Trance Of Life

"Like" the Patheos Pagan Page on Facebook to receive today's best commentary on Pagan issues. I have become fascinated with how much of what appears so obvious to us as not to be worth questioning actually results from growing up in a particular society at a particular time. For example, most adults continue to see their social and political world through a lens shaped by their experiences when traveling from adolescence into young maturity. But other examples are far less obvious and deeply relevant to us as Pagans. We, all of us, have grown up within a society that for roughly 1600 years has enforced a monotheistic conception of the world into every cultural, moral, and experiential sphere. Alternative views were suppressed for so long that their possibilities became inconceivable for many. When more recently many Westerners rejected religion and turned to secular points of view, they carried many of these presuppositions with them as unexamined assumptions. How important might this conditioning be in obscuring important aspects of the world around us? A fascinating experiment and an interesting encounter with a student of mine suggest it might be very important. The experiment has become fairly well known, but I'll describe it briefly. In a series of experiments subjects were shown a video of a basketball game. They were asked to count ball passes by one of the teams while watching the video. Consistently around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the court. The gorilla was visible for nine seconds and even stopped to face the camera and thump her chest. But when people were asked to simply watch the tape without counting ball passes they easily noticed the gorilla. Follow up research finds no correlation between those who saw the gorilla and any other factor other than expertise. Basketball players were more likely to notice it, and more experienced players were more likely to notice it than less experienced. Education and intelligence do not matter and only experience in the area where the unexpected happens appears to count. Beyond this, some people are simply better at noticing the unexpected than are others. But openness to the unexpected is not simply a matter of experience. Science is full of cases where patterns later found to be crucially important were either explained away or belittled by experienced experts. Expertise brings with it a far deeper understanding of what existing knowledge says should happen, and should exist, and so even if noticed, nonconforming information is often not pursued. Such people are more likely to understand more details in what they see but at the same time be more committed to the pattern those details are supposed to fit than would be a more naïve observer. My personal anecdote is this. At a university where I have taught, one of our star students was a young woman from an Eastern European country. She ultimately graduated summa cum laude with two extremely demanding majors. She had been my student her junior year. We encountered one another in a coffee house her senior year and sat down to talk. Somehow our conversation got around to the topic of social conditioning and subtle phenomena. I mentioned "energy fields" around people and other things that in my experience most people could learn to see, but until taught they did not. She replied, "I've seen them all my life. I've just learned to keep my mouth shut." (I myself had had to learn.) The Social Trance Combining these two examples together and extrapolating, a social world-view maintains itself by teaching us what to expect, which suffices for about half of us. It teaches the certified experts what they should expect to see, which is enough for many. Having recognized experts enables the established view to overawe some non-experts who notice something and encourage the others to keep their mouths shut. Of those experts who do notice anything different, many will dismiss it. In short, a social model of reality creates a network of relationships reinforcing its view, a network from which it is difficult to extract ourselves. We are entranced, hypnotized by a system. Speaking only of Euro Americans, for hundreds of years a great many sincere people believed that African Americans were in some ways inferior to White ones. It was always possible to break through this belief -- Benjamin Franklin ultimately did -- but most people did not. Yet they were in many ways good people, many of whom associated with African Americans regularly. They simply did not notice evidence they were wrong. For a very long time Euro Americans believed American Indians were savages, unfit for modern life, and doomed to eventual extinction. Many did their best to help that extinction along. Again, many of those who did were leading members of society, religious leaders, and sincere in their views. Until fairly recently a great many male Euro Americans -- and not just Euro Americans -- believed women were inferior in significant ways to men. They associated with women every day, many sincerely loved their mothers, wives, and daughters, and yet they did not see the evidence around them, so obvious to most of us today. And of course Euro Americans have no monopoly on being socially entranced. Much more recently scientists are discovering that animals have what, were we to observe the same behavior in people, we would call morality. Capuchin monkeys receiving a less desirable treat than another for having done the same thing, while seeing the other recipient getting the better goodie, have thrown the inferior food at the person who gave it, revealing a sense of justice and fair play. Some monkeys and even some rats, will not press a lever for receiving food if they see another monkey or rat getting shocked when they do. One rhesus monkey refused for twelve days to pull a chain getting it food and thereby shocking another it could see. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce's Wild Justice describing these and many other examples is an eye opener. But why did our eyes need to be opened? Our social trance clearly can override what is standing right in front of us. The Monotheistic Trance For 1600 years the West has been subjected to the politically enforced view that there is only one proper way to understand reality. With the growth of freedom what that way is has shifted over time. For many, science rather than religion is now the proper way. But the commitment to One Truth remains, an unexamined assumption. Particularly during the Enlightenment an additional presupposition became taken for granted: that we are minds radically distinct from this material world. We are souls or ghosts in the machine, or for a smaller and I believe weirder group, our minds can simply be reduced at some point to chemical reactions. In other words, the world is not alive; it and all within it are things. Connected to this view is a third presupposition: that the best way to learn about things is through measuring, predicting, or manipulating them. An added advantage to this approach is that we can then control them for our own benefit. Whether monotheist or atheist, these three assumptions are the filters through which most modern Westerners experience their world: there is One Right Way to understand it, we are ultimately not a part of this world, or if we are, we are reducible to simple chemical reactions, and finally the way of knowledge about a world of things enhances our ability to control them for our own use. For secular folks, because science has been so successful at enabling some kinds of control, science must be the One Right Way. In this way modernity even in its secular form incorporates monotheistic presuppositions that once seemed so wrong as to require the suppression and even killing of those with alternative views. Alternatives What does all this mean? Apparently we cannot learn to see the unexpected. Either we can or we can't. About 50 percent do and 50 percent don't. We can increase our ability to see the unexpected by becoming experts in a field, but that does not strengthen our capacity in other fields and our expertise creates its own set of hurdles for being able to appreciate the significance of the unexpected we do see. And this brings me to Pagan spirituality in general (knowing anything I write about us will have some who disagree). Pagans in general find some kind of presence or awareness in the world as a whole. We are not separate from it in the Christian sense, nor are we reducible to merely physical reactions and relationships as scientific reductionism would have it. Consciousness appears to Pagans to be an element of reality that spills over the narrow boundaries modern society is prepared to recognize. For some of us, such as myself, it is everywhere. To me this insight means that we are immersed within an incredible network of relationships that can be far more reciprocal than the dominant society is prepared to admit. It also means that these relationships take on an ethical dimension because we are not simply dealing with objects. There is an important subjective element as well. Further, seeing or feeling energy fields around ourselves and others means we are constantly immersed within one another's boundaries. The idea of a discrete self ultimately distinct from all around it -- a profoundly Protestant idea -- is powerfully challenged when we experience this interpenetration. If we are right about this, and I believe that we are, our view can profoundly transform Western society at a time when it really needs it. As a society we have enormous power to control and destroy, but we have little appreciation of the importance of entering into relations with others. We don't do it very well with people unlike ourselves, and we do it even less well with the world around us. Power plus blindness leads to disaster. In addition, the idea of One True Truth begins to dissolve. There is an enormous variety of Pagan practices and traditions. Very significantly they bleed over into other positions. I have met Pagan Buddhists, Pagan Christians, Pagan Jews, and Pagan atheists. I have met pantheists and panentheists, with no clear line of separation. My own approach is deeply shamanic but I have met others whose practice focuses on their community or devotional relations with their deities. In such a world what does it mean to say there is One Truth? I'm not sure. I think as we live our lives within a Pagan framework our culturally acquired trance about these matters is gradually weakened. We will be more likely to notice what others do not, not because we are better at noticing the unexpected. We probably are not. But our sense of what might be expected has grown to encompass entering into a wider range of respectful relationships with the world around and within us than has a society blinded by the trances of monotheism and scientistic modernity. We are not free from trance. I am not sure what that means. But we live within a far roomier context with far greater degrees for freedom, creativity, and love to manifest and explore.

Expanding Possibilities within the Trance of Life