ABOUT THE TRANCE STATE
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May I revise what I say above about the meaning of trance by adding: It is often said of people in riots: The mob was so angry, they seemed beside themselves, so out of their minds with anger that they acted as though they were crazy. Armed with nothing more than sticks and stones, willingly it seems they faced fully armed soldiers at the ready to shoot them dead. Blood flowed in the streets.
This is an emotional state you are describing, and typical of what some call trance or zombie like, or hypnotic such as in a science fiction or horror movie. Not typical of a spiritual meditative state described as the trance states in scripture.
But a large group of people singing and dancing can also be out of their minds, with joy. The trance state itself, therefore, is neutral. What makes it good or evil is what we do with it.
You are speaking of apples and oranges. If one is out of their mind in joy, the inference is that when one is
in their mind they are not in joy. (Being that everything of the mind/ego is relative to everything that is subjective, and joy being an objective detached state of awareness where both thoughts and emotions are witnessed and the Self is recognized as other than an emotion or a thought). Joy in the spiritual sense then is not an emotion, but rather freedom from the attachment to emotions according to scripture and achieved in the meditative state of prayer or spiritual trance.
It is probably because of the dictionary meaning that the word has such a bad rap.
That and the fact that those who speak of joy and trance states have no idea of what they are speaking of if they have not experienced other than their personal opinion or definitions of either, while living in a box having been brain fed by teachers and preachers who know nothing of God, trance, or meditation and write definitions of God, trance, and other spiritual experiences in dictionaries. Ignorance is taught and absorbed while living in a box, it is not inherent.
Obviously, in the trance it is possible to tap into powerful emotions which can be harnessed for good of ill, for better or for worse.
Only if one experiences the trance state as an emotional state and one filled with conditions of self measure. In a true meditative state there is only awareness of awareness, and emotions are experienced as the stress of attachment leaving the body at a cellular level, leaving the mind more relaxed and calm. Without the emotional influences of attachment to good and evil as a subjective and emotionally driven ideal one can be objective rather than subjective in their approach to the world. This allows one to focus without being distracted or to achieve goals without the baggage of emotional attachment to distractions.
In the 1960's, like many before us no doubt, this is what a group of us set out to do. What follows are some stories, anecdotes of what happened--and is still happening.
In the '60's many were emotionally driven to change the world because of the judgment that prevailed in suppressing emotions and desire. It created an emotional and sexual revolution where reason was replaced with a new idealism based on freedom from the oppression of subjective belief systems or dogma. The western idealisms were being exposed to some of the Eastern spiritual traditions regarding spiritual inquiry and peace of mind as the point of reference for action rather than the belief and the emotional attachments to beliefs.
That was twisted into many ideas based on projections of the dictionary like interpretations of people who were raised in an environment filled with definition and reason.
The typical choice was to replace the attachment of one emotion with another and another idea for one that was emotionally restrictive to freedom of expression and the ego that wanted recognition and control where it had been stifled or repressed. This is similar to hypnotism where you direct the mind to focus on an idea and to ignore another which is still physically implanted within the nervous system. This temporarily relieves the mind from its attachment to the negative but doesn't remove it. Instead it lay buried in the subconscious only to resurface either in the current lifetime or another to be dealt with at a greater level of intellectual approach than that of relative and emotional judgments while standing outside of the experience of reality in the delusions of personal idealisms and or opinion.
