segunda-feira, 14 de novembro de 2011

"Trance-portation: Learning to Navigate the Inner World" - Diana L. Paxson




Today, every city has a metaphysical bookstore, and "New Age" is a publishing category. In the sixties, when researchers such as Charles Tart were just beginning to explore consciousness, books imported
from England, the already venerable Weiser Books, and the newly founded Llewellyn were the only sources for material on the esoteric.

Those who wanted to learn trance work haunted used bookstores, hoping that some dusty volume by Dion Fortune or W. E. Butler would turn up in the bin. But the times were changing, and from the sixties to the
present an ever-increasing flood of material from a wide variety of traditions (and varying widely in value) has filled booksellers' shelves.

Just as the writings that came out of the Western Mystery Tradition from the thirties through the fifties tried to incorporate into their explanations of occult phenomena the new theories of psychology that were becoming popular, in the sixties, Timothy Leary's experiments with LSD inspired research (with or without drugs) into what scientists like Tart called "Altered State of Consciousness," or ASCs. This was a term for all those states of mind in which one feels not merely a quantitative change or shift in degree of alertness or other awareness, but also " ... that some quality or qualities of his mental process are different. Mental functions operate that do not operate at all ordinarily, perceptual qualities appear that have no normal counterparts, and so forth" (Tart, 1969). As he observed, Western culture has tended to view non-ordinary states as undesirable, if not downright pathological.

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