The Waking Trance

Human consciousness is an odd pickle. We all experience it every waking day, but no one understands it well enough to build a good imitation. What are we missing?

Quite a lot, actually. For example, why are we so changeable from day to day or moment to moment? Is it possible that much of what we call ordinary consciousness is simply the slipping from one state of automatic trance into another?

Let's try to define "trance:"

To many psychologists a trance is a state of limited awareness. Some psychologists would also characterize trance as a form of sleep, or dreamlike awareness or a kind of altered state of consciousness.

... it is relatively easy to hypnotize a person and to keep that person in a trance state without their being aware that they are in fact in a trance. The technique of pacing and leading a subject from a rich or varied set of thoughts to a limited or impoverished set of thoughts is a technique used consciously by hypnotists, advertisers, sales people, preachers and politicians.

...how can you tell if you are in one of these ordinary, unconscious trances? You are in a trance when your attention is limited and there is a certain repetition of thoughts. In an extreme case, your attention is so limited that it feels like "tunnel vision."... Concentration, when the mind is focused on a specific problem or thought, is also a form of trance. You could characterize trance cybernetically as an awareness loop, or a circular flow of consciousness. _Unconscious Trance

Most of us spend most of our time in one type of trance or another. Even the experience of unconscious mastery is a type of trance.

In general this is fine, if we are in control of which trance we choose to be immersed within -- and if we can exit the trance whenever we wanted.

Almost every human being on Earth will revert back to what is known as "the consensual trance," the limited world of the particular social consensus within which the person happens to be immersed. It is a trance into which we are born and to which we are conditioned. Later, when we enter -- or are close to -- adulthood, we may be presented with a choice as to whether we wish to move into a different consensual trance. Very few discover the ability to experience large portions of their lives outside of the consensual trance. Even fewer make the choice to step outside the consensual trance into a greater freedom of the mind.


It is possible to move other persons into a trance, shift them from one trance state to another, or to help them emerge -- temporarily -- from a typical trance state. It is worth learning how to manipulate other persons' trance experiences in order to better apprehend when someone is attempting to do the same to you, typically in an attempt to enlist you into some kind of mass movement or ideology:

1. Build Rapport with the Listener

Your first task is to gain rapport with the listener. Rapport is simply put that feeling of connection and trust between two people. It doesn’t have to be too deep. You already have a rapport with your friends, parents and others. You can easily gain rapport with other people just by making compliment, laughing at their jokes etc.

2. Switch off the Critical Mind

After building rapport, you can now use covert hypnosis techniques to switch off the critical mind of the listener.

One of the ways to do this is to use the words “Imagine”, “What if” etc. When you use these words, the critical mind immediately shuts off, thus making the imagination work. This is very important, because we are only doing the things that we could imagine before, so invoking the mind’s eye of the listener will help you to send commands to his (her) subconscious.

3. Make Irresistible Hypnotic Commands

After bypassing the critical mind of the listener, you can now make your irresistible commands and describe the things you want a person to do.

Covert hypnosis is that simple. In covert hypnosis, your success will depend on the depth of rapport, your hypnotic language and how you follow the covert hypnosis technology. _Covert Hypnosis

It is no accident that these are simultaneously the tools of sexual seduction, religious conversion, and political enlistment and indoctrination. These are tools that are used in government and religious school classes, sports team pep talks, pick-up bars, cathedrals and mosques, clubs, associations, gangs, and mass movements of all kinds.

The tools of conversational trance manipulation have been perfected by ethical persons such as Milton Erickson, and by unethical persons such as your charismatic politician of choice.

But no one needs to put you into a trance. You do that every day, all by yourself. It is possible to go through days, weeks, months, and years without ever truly emerging from the waking trance, the consensual trance. In general, the possibility that one may emerge from such a trance is so disturbing that it can lead to psychic trauma, drug addiction, membership in a cult, or worse.

But just in case one wished to experience a different state of existence, how would he go about emerging from the waking, consensual trance?

How can anybody distinguish, then, between dream, hypnotic trance, and reality? Dehypnotization, the procedure of breaking out of the normal human state of awareness, according to both mystics and hypnotists, is a matter of direct mental experience. The method can be learned... _Howard Rheingold on Charles Tart

Maybe, maybe not. A lot depends upon the person's experience up to the point when he tries to break free. If the person were raised to be a dangerous child, he will likely have already learned ways of breaking out of the consensual trance -- at least temporarily, for specific purposes. But if the person were raised to be a psychological neotenate -- like most modern children -- his chances of learning to break free of the waking consensus will depend upon his strength of character and his motivation.

Human societies are moving toward a point where it becomes more crucial for persons to wake up. Whether this will involve waking up into yet a higher trance, or waking up outside of trance altogether, may be more a matter of semantics than we would like to think.

If a person wants you to "wake up" to his way of thinking, that is a clue that he wants you to share his trance. This is a typical experience for university students in the modern classroom of indoctrination, and for consumers of mainstream media news and commentary.

But if you want to wake up outside the consensual trance -- and perhaps into your own trance -- you will need to do some creative thinking and experimenting.

If it seems like I am trying to "dumb down" and generalise the definition of trance to the point that it encompasses all experience and consciousness, that is not my intent. I am leaving room for several types of consciousness outside of trance states.

But it takes work to reach them, and even more work to stay in them for any appreciable period of time.

Most people will never wake from the consensual trance, and that is just how they want it. But as push comes to shove, and shove comes to strike, someone will have to devise some workable alternatives. Hopefully, at least some of these alternatives will involve a larger scale emergence from the limited consensus.

Climatology: A Textbook Example of Groupthink

In groupthink, organizations value consensus more than free thought. The emphasis on consensus leads to group polarization, in which a group’s positions become more extreme than any individual would come up with. Alarmist climate science is a textbook example of groupthink in action.

...The groupthink syndrome...

This consists of three main categories of symptoms:

1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.”

2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]

3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]

_Paul McRae...in_WUWT

A description of "the groupthink syndrome" also happens to be a good description of the current state of climate scientology science. Particularly troubling is the lack of sceptical doubt among climate orthodoxy insiders. Without scientific scepticism and critical self-monitoring, the climate orthodoxy becomes indistinguishable from a religious belief.

Instead of a healthy scepticism, orthodox climate science and a suspiciously compliant mainstream press attempt to block all thoughtful consideration of the deeper issues involved in climate -- which go far beyond concerns about greenhouse gases such as CO2. But it is only through consideration of the deeper issues that a true scientific examination of climate can be carried out.

Here are a few of the current debates and theories which are being blocked by the orthodoxy:

Total Cloud Cover from Satellite Observations and Climate Models

How Stratospheric Temperature is Decoupled from Surface Temperatures

Levitus on Ocean Forcing

etc etc etc

The astoundingly insular nature of modern climate science would not be particularly important, if it were not for the political, economic, and industrial implications for modern societies. Modern societies would be ruined -- bankrupted -- if they were to take the policy recommendations of the climate orthodoxy seriously. Such societies would be left without reliable energy supplies, starving industry and commerce. Trillions of dollars in redistribution payments from the first world to the third world would drive modern nations even more deeply into debt than at present -- and for no good reason at all. Perhaps worst of all, the barrage of propaganda directed at modern societies to keep them compliant with the "greenhouse agenda" would create generations of schoolchildren and adults incapable of thinking logically, beyond their groupthink greenhouse programming.

And yet that is precisely what orthodox politicians such as Barack Obama, Al Gore, and other fringe greens currently and formerly in power want to do.

Groupthink is toxic to the ability of the human mind to think clearly and independently. It is destructive of creativity and productive imagination. It is destructive of any hopeful or livable future for the majority of humans -- those living outside the inner circles of power.

Unless the voters of the western democracies wake up to the nightmare of groupthink conformity which is being forced on them by the climatological - political - faux environmental complex, it will be too late for them to stop the top-down steamroller of hopelessness and opportunity destruction.

At that point, alternative plans would have to be called upon.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

More: The Shocking Rise of Eco-Fascism

Cost of Consensus: Overconfidence in Group Decisions

When decisions and policies are made in collaborative groups, an overconfidence in group accuracy develops. Groups are less willing to accept external input, and tend to make mistakes in judgment which individuals would be less likely to make -- due to most individuals' greater willingness to consider alternative viewpoints. (Minson and Mueller APS 2012 PDF)

There is a curious confidence in the power of consensus in bureaucracies and institutions -- including institutions of government and inter-government which increasingly set limits on the future of humans. And yet consensual decision-making is rarely put to the test, to assess its weaknesses and how it might be radically improved.

We demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually also contributes to such myopic underweighting of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to numerical judgments made by peers gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals working alone. This difference in willingness to use peer input was mediated by the greater confidence that the dyad members reported in the accuracy of their own estimates. Furthermore, dyads were no better at judging the relative accuracy of their own estimates and the advisor’s estimates than individuals were. Our analyses demonstrate that, relative to individuals, dyads suffered an accuracy cost. Specifically, if dyad members had given as much weight to peer input as individuals working alone did, then their revised estimates would have been significantly more accurate. _Minson and Mueller 2012 Abstract

The researchers discovered that the larger the number of the collaborative consensus group, the greater the danger of this overconfident refusal to entertain outside input.

The unwillingness of collaborative "insider" groups to entertain outside input is particularly dangerous when the results of the decisions made by such groups could lead to poverty and oppression for large numbers of people. One ready example of such a dangerous consensus is the IPCC collaborative of "ClimateGate" fame. An honest and thorough assessment of insider emails between IPCC insiders reveals an internal climate of hubris, overconfidence, and a willingness to suppress contradictory evidence and to ruin the careers of anyone willing to espouse other points of view.

This willingness of group members to subsume themselves within the identity and purpose of the group -- this decadent conformity of consensus with its concomitant blockheaded overconfidence -- becomes a more serious problem as more and more important decisions are being made by bureaucratic committees and collaboratives.

Individuals are not, of course, immune from this group consensus fallibility. In fact, within a single brain, decisions are made by competition between different brain-wide neuronal assemblies, which battle it out until a winner emerges. That type of decision making is a consensus of sorts, a trial by combat that takes place on a subconscious level constantly, as choices and decisions are made on a moment by moment basis.

Over time, overconfidence is possible on an individual basis, if enough subconscious decisions and choices result in success. Daniel Kahneman has studied this phenomenon of intuitive overconfidence:

"What you find is a great deal of confidence in the presence of very poor accuracy," Kahneman explained. "So the confidence people have is not a good indication of how accurate they are."

Overconfidence is accentuated by the failure of people to, in general, learn from their mistakes. "When something happens that a person has not anticipated, ... they remain convinced that what they had predicted, although it didn't happen, almost happened," he said. The overconfidence is then propagated while the accuracy remains the same, and the cycle begins again. _APS

It is not necessarily a question of whether individuals or groups are better at problem solving or decision making, although false confidence tends to grow exponentially as the numbers in the group grow. The important thing is for both individuals and groups -- no matter what the purported level of expertise -- to be relatively open to looking at alternative approaches and theories.

The modern curse of conformity in general, is a much tougher nut to crack. We will be dealing with that question both here and at Al Fin the Next Level.

A Contemptible Conformity: Humans as Hardwired Herd Beasts

Some people conform more than others. Across different contexts, this tendency is a fairly stable trait [1]. This stability suggests that the tendency to conform might have an anatomical correlate [2]. Values that one associates with available options, from foods to political candidates, help to guide choices and behaviour. These values can often be updated by the expressed preferences of other people as much as by independent experience. In this correspondence, we report a linear relationship between grey matter volume (GM) in a region of lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFCGM) and the tendency to shift reported desire for objects toward values expressed by other people. This effect was found in precisely the same region in each brain hemisphere. lOFCGM also predicted the functional hemodynamic response in the middle frontal gyrus to discovering that someone else's values contrast with one's own. These findings indicate that the tendency to conform one's values to those expressed by other people has an anatomical correlate in the human brain. _Current Biology Campbell-Meikeljohn et al

Current Biology Campbell-Meikeljohn et al
We have known for many decades that humans can be moved to behave in irrational and fanatical ways, by perceived popular or group opinions and attitudes. Following the disturbing Nazi Germany experience of WWII, psychologists attempted to determine how decent people could be led to conform to indecent behaviours. From the Asch experiments to the Milgram experiments and more, psychologists unfolded an image of human conformity to crowd pressure which is most uncomplimentary to the species.

The research cited above looked at how easily a person's opinion of a piece of music could be swayed by the opinions of "reviewers." Those subjects with larger volumes in the orbitofrontal cortex were more easily swayed by "expert opinion." Popular media article describing the research

One example of the dangers of conformity to the herd is climate activist Peter Gleick: His fraud and deception is but the latest in a series of contretemps for the "climate consensus orthodoxy." Such acts of consensus-inspired insanity force thinking persons to scratch their heads in wonder. What is it that compels nominally intelligent persons to blissfully surrender themselves into a sea of fanatical conformity, convinced that the "safety in numbers" will protect them no matter how deeply they descend into a consensual mindlessness?

But if there is something hardwired into the brains of conformists so that they truly cannot help themselves, should we deal with their contemptible behaviour differently?

Difficult to say. Although consensual herd conformists tend to behave abysmally en masse, we are required to deal with them individually, on a case by case basis. We must also admit to ourselves that the rehabilitation from herd conformity to rational, independent thinking, is not likely to be successful for most affected persons.

We would like to think that the group hysteria which brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, will not be repeated in more modern times. But we would probably be deluding ourselves by believing that, particularly in light of a declining demographic, the coming Idiocracy, and the clique-like nature of academia, media, popular culture, and politics. In light of all that, a "Lord of the Flies" future may be the best we can expect.

Here is a sad addendum, and a hint of future uses of advanced technologies which should have been used to improve the human condition.