Here, we describe how Casas Grandes Medio period (AD 1200 to 1450) shamanic practices of the North American Southwest used tobacco shamanism, a ritual stance called the Tennessee Diviner (TD) posture, and cultural expectations to generate trance experiences of soul flight and divination. We introduce a conceptual model that holds that specific trance experiences are the emergent result of human minds interacting with additional factors including entheogens, cultural expectations, physiological states, postures/movement, and sound/stimulation. Experimental and ethnographic evidence indicates initiating trance (...) with either tobacco intoxication or the TD posture accompanied with a rapidly beating drum or rattle corresponds with perceptions of soul flight, transformation, and divination/information acquisition. Both have similar results but pairing them together as they were during the Medio period likely helped ensure the culturally desired trance experiences. This practice of mutually reinforcing factors was likely part of tobacco‐based shamanism found in other New World cultures as well. We suggest our general model can be applied to other contexts to examine how various aspects of trance induction interact to produce the cultural patterns (and resulting cosmological and spiritual frameworks) anthropologists have documented in other cultures. (shrink)

Although we are beginning to understand the neurocognitive processes that underlie the emergence of dreaming, what accounts for the bizarre phenomenology of dreams remains debated. I address this question by comparing dreaming with waking mind wandering and challenging previous accounts that utilize bizarreness to mark a sharp divide between conscious experiences in waking and sleeping. Instead, I propose that bizarreness is a common, non-deficient feature of spontaneous offline simulations occurring across the sleep-wake cycle and can be tied to the specific (...) characteristics of spontaneous thought as being dynamic, unconstrained, (hyper)associative and highly variable in content. Rather than misrepresenting waking reality, bizarreness can be employed to investigate the very building blocks of spontaneous cognition. The absence of bizarreness in thought processes is imposed by automatic and deliberate cognitive constraints. By contrast, thought and memory processes operating on their own without such constraints are inherently marked by different degrees and types of bizarreness. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the definitional problems of altered states of consciousness and their potential relevance in phenomenological investigation. We suggest that visionary states or visionary phantasy working induced by psychedelics, as extraordinary types of altered states, are appropriate subjects for phenomenological analysis. Naturally, visionary states are not quite ordinary workings of the human mind, however certain cognitive psychological and evolutionary epistemological investigations show that they can give new insights into the nature of consciousness. Furthermore, we suggest that contemporary (...) inquiries concerning altered states in consciousness studies give an opportunity to complete the contemporary phenomenological investigations of phantasy with the notion of visionary phantasy. Here we propose that the similarities and differences between Dieter Lohmar’s weak phantasy and Benny Shanon’s concept of vision are precisely discernible, and, consequently, it may be possible that weak phantasy and visionary phantasy are situated on the two outermost poles of the colorful spectrum of phantasy activity. (shrink)

The empirical study of consciousness is a young field still in its pre paradigmatic stage and so in need of a unifying framework. This comparative literature review examines two theories of consciousness, Thomas Metzinger’s the self-model theory of subjectivity and Antti Revonsuo’s Biological realism, theories which both try to provide such a framework for the science of consciousness. This paper gives an overview of some of the more central parts of each theory, along with criticism directed towards them. The paper (...) show that these theories, although on the surface very similar, disagree on some fundamental philosophical questions due to differences in their underlying background assumptions. The theories also slightly differ in their view on some methodological questions, as well as in their view of certain aspects on consciousness. (shrink)