---
title: "Spiritual Rationality (minimal edition), part 4 of 8"
canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org"
pages: 4
---

*Part 4 of 8, minimal (headings, emphasis and prose only) edition — “Culture, Taboo, and Trauma” through “Spiritual Practice”. Previous: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min-3.txt. Next: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min-5.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt*

# Culture, Taboo, and Trauma

Human cultures in general transmit memetic packets to their members, including patterns which might be called traumatic, or which at least *smell* like trauma.

First, regarding the term *cultural trauma*: I often find this term distasteful, and it's especially often deployed politically by factions I dislike, and to make arguments I don't endorse. For anyone reading who has similar reflexes, I'd ask that you assume I'm trying to be precise, and making do with a word that's *good enough* for a moderately subtle concept.

In the extremes, most people are basically sympathetic to a notion of a diseased and traumatized culture which is able to perpetuate itself, the example par excellence perhaps being endemic patterns of violence (and very saliently, sexual violence) in prisons. Not to try to generalize inappropriately from that case, I think that there are many patterns of (less extreme) cultural trauma which are pervasive in extant cultures.

There are three main clusters here that I'll discuss:

- **Taboo** as a highly general pattern, and often functioning as a kind of "cultural traumatic payload"
- **Adaptation** to traumatic environmental conditions
- **Self-traumatization**, that is, of a culture upon its members

## Three main clusters

### Taboo and superstition

I'll use the word *taboo* to refer to a broad cluster of patterns in human cultures which I suspect rely on the same or overlapping psychological mechanisms. This includes a lot of what might be included as norms, superstitions, or sometimes generically just "cultural practices."

Taboo in this sense forms a kind of primal human social technology, which provides a distributed mechanism to "succinctly" communicate information about low probability negative events. In some modern theories, taboo is seen as a low-resolution cultural pattern which encodes knowledge about danger or risk, but perhaps distorted or over-reified. Salient examples here might be taboos against incest, or different kinds of taboos around cleanliness, feces, etc.

Let's say: human children come with very little knowledge, and our species is specifically adapted for long childhoods rich with learning. Children are both vulnerable and quickly become capable of exposing themselves to risk that outstrips their understanding of the world. There's often a steep tradeoff between capability/curiosity/intelligence on one hand, and sensitivity to risk on the other. In a species like ours, cultures need to be able to transmit *densely* the risk associated with various strategies or behaviors, and in a general way which can be applied to a wide range of dangers in the environment.

(Note that people feel that children and especially adolescents are too risk-taking, and this is somewhat true but it's not quite what I'm talking about—I mean things like, small children don't yet understand that stoves or knives or busy streets are dangerous.)

Under such a regime, the packets communicating different kinds of dangers have to a. *strongly* convey some danger, even at risk of exaggerating it, b. be very likely to be kept and transmitted to the next generation, and c. be understood by both children and unsophisticated adults. The tendency then is for such packets to be very simple, sharp, and often indeed to be exaggerated over time.

Note the claim here is not "taboo is meaningless and only harmful" but rather just, "taboo looks to be the mechanism of a very low-entropy communication system, both very valuable, but often resulting in goofy or problematic output."

Broadly speaking, there are many systems of taboo (as understood above) which have shapes in common with what I've referred to as trauma smells: sub-clinical patterns of behavior, perception, and experience which *appear* to be caused by unmetabolized adverse experiences. Some examples:

- Taboos against sexual contact between young people, or contact at all between the sexes
- Taboos against emotional expression, eg. weakness, fear, sadness, etc., and especially crying
- Taboos against specific words or specific kinds of expression (loudness, anger, etc.)
- Taboos against specific foods, or specific rules about when food becomes impure
- Taboos against specific eye contact patterns (eg. avoiding direct gaze with authority figures)
- Sexual shame, body-shame, taboos against nudity, etc.
- Menstruation taboos, virginity/purity taboos
- Taboos around feces that regard it as disgusting or shameful to be heard to fart, or especially to be seen defecating
- Perhaps, face and honor as reified constructs

To be clear, there are structurally pretty similar patterns which are functional, and there's lots of overlap between functional and "superstitious" patterns. I'm sympathetic to theories that these are something like "holdovers" or "overreaches" from functional patterns in a given time or place, compare with eg. proscriptions against drinking cold (ie., unboiled, disease-ridden) water.

Relatedly, this still runs into the same questions I discussed in the section on trauma smells, that identifying something as traumatic is nebulous and ambiguous, because indeed lots of things are dangerous or harmful and *should* be avoided. For what it's worth, there are spiritual traditions which see even eg. taboos around feces as a kind of burden, ignorance, or confusion, and some hypermodern western schools with similar spins on taboo in general.

### Adaptation to exogenous conditions

Premodern agriculture probably fits nicely as a mostly exogenous social configuration which would have been traumatic for its members: people often went hungry or at least under-nourished for substantial portions of the year, they lived in fear of bad harvests and famine, and they were conscripted into an intensity and monotony of labor that excluded most of the breadth of human flourishing.

Two caveats: obviously such societies were *practicing* agriculture, and so this isn't quite an exogenous cause, but generally agricultural societies couldn't really just choose to move to another form of economy. Also, some of the burden of premechanized agriculture would have been due to theft and waste by feudal elites, but my impression is that wasn't quite *most* of the problem.

Depending on how we draw the boundary of "one" society, another relatively exogenous pattern might be equilibria of violence between groups. This might include retaliatory personal violence like blood feuds, but also recurring war, as has been endemic in our species for at least thousands of years. In the epicenters of wars, we can probably reasonably assume clinical levels of trauma in all parts of society. Both direct exposure to violence, and the threat of violent disruption to one's livelihood, of one's land being taken as spoils, etc., should likely have been traumatic for most people. Such societies are likely to reify eg. martial virtue or submission to violent cultural imposition like forced religious conversion.

One more: coal mining communities adapt to the unhealthy and unsafe conditions that men working in mines are subject to, and to their likely early deaths, whether from collapses, explosions, or black lung. This affects both the psychologies of actual miners, but also their families and the communities as a whole, who understand that at least the lives of men will likely be harsh and short. Similarly, such communities will likely reify this as good or at least unavoidable.

### Self-traumatization

"Exogenous" above is nebulous but at least worth contrasting with relatively more "endogenous" patterns, which are much more like *culturally specific* and *contingent*.

On the far end, the prototypical cases would probably be Female Genital Mutilation and Chinese foot binding. The basic shape here is that a society something like "actively" embodies a pattern which traumatizes its members, and especially that they see this as good, desirable, virtuous, etc. My understanding is that adult women saw these practices as good, so it's not quite *simply* a matter of eg. men directly and knowingly subjugating women.

These are some of the most extreme cases, but I'm more interested in the less glaring ones. Broadly speaking I'm interested in circumstances where normative socialization in a culture involves techniques, experiences, etc. that we would at a personal level call "abuse" or "neglect" and whose effects parallel those of trauma smells when observed at a personal level. I'm especially interested in contexts where that's still the case in our culture today.

It's salient here to look at changing cultural standards of abuse over time. Restricting it to American culture, as recently as 70 years ago it was commonplace to hit children, and *my sense*(?) is that it was more common to verbally abuse children, to compel them with threat of force to all kinds of activities, etc.

I don't have definitive evidence here, but it should be at minimum *plausible* to say, "well, when people are subject to these experiences as individuals, at least in our modern culture, on average they get trauma or at least subclinical trauma-like effects, so it's reasonable to suppose that those effects should also apply when people in a culture as a whole have them, and vice versa for the absence of those experiences."

On vibes, collected anecdotes, and based on some sparse data I've seen, if you look at cultures that are more openly abusive by contemporary Western standards, they indeed look more traumatized by the criteria I describe as trauma smells! The most salient example to me here is East Asian culture (very broadly), which seems pretty obviously more dissociated and rigid than Western culture, on average.

(Obviously, aggregating over large and diverse groups, etc., but the point still stands, assuming my sense is correct. Also, see below re my take on cross-anthropological considerations for this question.)

There are theories which suggest that trauma is less about the specific content of an adverse experience, as much as rejection and isolation in that experience. In these theories, having a traumatic but *normative* socialization results in better outcomes on average than trauma *while isolated*, which is very often reported in Western clinical psychology. I think this is probably moderately true, but I still think my claim is broadly correct, that classically traumatic adverse experiences, when practiced by a culture in general, result in trauma smells.

Besides patterns of overt *abuse*, I'm especially interested in ways that cultures transmit baseline trauma-smelly affective and relational stances. In particular: a. there are patterns of basic affective/dispositional transmission, and b. there are patterns of social shaming, rejection, and exclusion which can be extremely steep, enough that I'm inclined to refer to them as a kind of cultural trauma.

#### Affective cultural transmission

Cultures seem to be able to transmit, besides specific practices and institutions, also (in the aggregate) baseline affect and disposition. Eg., high social trust, optimism or pessimism, tendency towards depression and neuroticism, conscientiousness, or availability of intimacy and vulnerability. In the subtlest cases I'm not mostly inclined to call this trauma, but the more intense cases have pretty characteristic trauma smells. In addition, while not really trauma smells, baseline optimism, felt-social-safety, etc. obviously contribute to some broader skewedness of a given culture, on average.

Some obvious extreme cases here would be eg. patterns of pessimism and neuroticism among Ashkenazi Jews, Puritan theology of original sin and suspicion of pleasure, and pervasive fear and self-censorship in the former Soviet Union.

Even more relevant here are patterns of negative trauma: trauma incurred in the *absence* of a developmentally "necessary" input, eg. parental warmth and affection, safety, play, etc. Again on vibes, collected anecdotes, and some sparse data, there seem to be in the aggregate broad cultural patterns of atrophy or at least diminished sensitivity to a variety of ways of being, in culturally distinctive shapes.

#### Shame and social rejection patterns

Firstly, my sense is that there's a basic fear of social rejection in humans, which in productive cases leads to conformity and prosociality, and in more neurotic cases leads to anxiety and paranoia. Sometimes people will argue that this is a kind of "fundamental human trauma"—I'm open to this perspective but that's not quite what I'm getting at here.

Beyond that kind of baseline prosocial conformism, some cultures have constructed patterns of intense shame and rejection. In extreme cases, this can incentivize and valorize suicide or intra-familial murder, ie. *Seppuku* and honor killing, to restore honor. It feels to me... mostly unreasonable to even have to defend a position that this is a kind of cultural trauma. More specifically, I want to say that the culture (and therefore its members) carry a traumatic and exaggerated fear of, *and* inclination for, social rejection.

Another angle on this pattern would be eg. (relatively) high rates of suicide in elite schools, attributed to stress and overwork, and both fear of, and actual academic failure. Again it feels reasonable to assume that the differential rates of suicide signal an underlying hightened fear of failure and rejection in that cohort as whole, which is an indicative trauma smell.

Again here there are much less extreme cases which are more interesting. Even if they don't lead to murder or suicide, there are patterns in many cultures of greatly elevated inclination for, and fear of, social rejection, and associated patterns of anxiety and rigidity. My sense is broadly that a. the propensity of a society to deploy shame and rejection, b. the intensity of conformism and social rigidity, and c. corresponding trauma smells, are all fairly strongly correlated. Examples that come to mind are the modern culture of Korea, elite society in Britain historically and perhaps still, or stereotypically, modern American corporate culture.

## WEIRD, developmental psychology otherwise

So there's an obvious critique of this perspective, that a. in principle this is culturally *chauvanist* or maybe "myopic" (prioritizing culturally specific notions of health and especially "spiritual health") and b. more specifically that results from Western psychology don't generalize outside of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies.

I think this critique is basically correct as far as it goes, but I still stand by my schtick as mostly directionally correct, and pointing to a real cluster.

Re a., my perspective is certaintly different from lots of traditional and culturally specific conceptions of "spiritual health," and it's at least partially aligned with the contemporary liberal zeitgeist, but I don't feel like I'm aping the Western dogma here.

More interestingly re b.: it sure *seems like* the basic shape of trauma in general happens across all human cultures, though some seem to be either more susceptible to it or (more sympathetically) at least more *forthcoming* about it. Obviously, different cultures relate to and cope with their cultural trauma differently, and it also seems like cultures can express and *foster* neurotic and traumatized patterns in very specific ways. See later on culture-bound disorders.

Again, the specifics matter: my claim here is moderately sparse, namely that there seems to be cultural trauma in broad strokes, but is mostly agnostic with respect to any specific psychological model, like popular schticks based on developmental psychology, or especially "childhood developmental trauma" as the source of most of abnormal psychology.

(It seems like the exciting claims of developmental psychology mostly haven't been borne out in the data even for Western culture, and almost certainly not cross-anthropologically. I'll add that I still think that something in the direction of negative trauma should apply in general across human cultures, and I would be very surprised if this were actually *just* a cultural pattern.)

I'm less clear if trauma smells all line up, and I expect those to be more culturally specific. Still, based on my understanding I'm quite confident that there have to be behavioral and energetic consequences of trauma etc., and my depiction of "trauma smells" basically just tries to gesticulate at a bunch of clusters of those.

# Burdens of Meaning

Meanings and views can be harmful or at least burdensome to those receiving them. People, overwhelmingly in my circles, but perhaps very broadly in modern culture, are carrying a bewildering tangle of competing views, motivations, and felt responsibilities.

Memes are subject to selection pressures which are decorrelated with human flourishing and spiritual integrity. Cultures can become diseased, and perpetuate their disease indefinitely, or carry harmful patterns which are only partially functional. That said, it's not clear what "functional patterns" would mean in this context, in particular, there are many configurations of culture which are functional in the sense that they stably perpetuate a relatively robust society, even if they are needlessly costly to their members, or otherwise spiritually corrupted.

Indeed, this is part of the question which this book poses: what patterns, practices, and views are oriented towards truly wholesome and spiritually upright lives and cultures?

Sometimes these harmful patterns are deeply structural, but some are relatively coincidental, and decay or fizzle out given enough time, or contact with another culture. Eg., many cultures have beliefs about cleanliness re food, excrement, or especially sex and menstruation which are lost relatively rapidly upon contact with western norms (though often displaced by other harmful norms about cleanliness from western culture.) Often cultural contact stresses many of the basic patterns of social organization, so very saliently there are often major changes in the structure of family, economy, and political power during periods of intense cultural contact, both, yes, in the context of western colonialism but also otherwise.

Spiritual practice, especially in styles adjacent to the trauma-healing-and-personal-growth memeplex, often has a very intense relationship with this dynamic. Sometimes practice and community are seen as explicitly oriented toward cultural change (whether insular or global), and very often they're seen as oriented towards personal freedom from dysfunctional, harmful, or spiritually depraved patterns culturally. These have various antecedents historically across cultures, and even the "shedding the insanity of the default culture" schtick seems to have been present well before the modern period, saliently in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra.

Practices and systems of belief which are meant to be comforting and liberating often transmit a memetic packet of very mixed spiritual integrity, at least from my perspective, and in general pairwise between most perspectives and any other. Often these are some coincidental hodgepodge which happens to have been reified by the tradition, but often the helpful and harmful qualities are interlocking, or two sides of one coin. Eg., many traditions of faith and devotion can provide both clarity of purpose and a relaxation of fear and anxiety, *in the same motion* as infantilizing their members and diminishing their capacity to think critically and with autonomy. Similarly, views meant to inspire discipline, rigor, and uprightness often use patterns of shame and internal self-abuse to achieve them, resulting in an obvious kind of lopsidedness among their practitioners.

Worse, from my perspective, many memes explicitly intended to be empowering or healing on net mostly just tangle a person further, rather than assisting them in untangling thoroughly. (I discuss this dynamic in much more detail in a later chapter.)

Memes don't necessarily form a coherent ecosystem. This is both because a culture's collection of memes isn't particularly well optimized, even in very small traditional cultures, and because in the modern memetic environment our minds are the competitive battlegrounds for many egregores and orphaned memes, which are not selected for being cooperative with one another *inside* of their hosts.

So, people end up with an incoherent mess of beliefs and feelings which are often tugging in every direction, and which may not admit any clear way to synthesize across them, to try to become sane, etc.

Many cultures have something to the effect of a "memetic immune system," which can help keep the roiling mess in check. However, most such immune systems, besides being only partially effective, are basically just conservative—the point here being that they are structured to protect the existing equilibrum, and are not oriented towards truth, wholesomeness, integration, etc. I discuss what I see as a desirable goal for practice in a later chapter as well.

By default however, with the weak and incomplete kinds of immune systems that most people learn, one ends up vulnerable to infectious agents which implant desires, prescriptions, and anxieties, without concern for their effects on their hosts or the hosts' communities. (Keep in mind of course that memes, like viruses, are incapable of malevolence, which of course doesn't render them harmless.)

There's a kind of sensitivity and care that's possible here, which, *I'll claim*, it's good to cultivate in interacting with others. While I think *information* per se is much more neutral (eg. just learning that a perspective exists, etc.), in general my stance is to try to track what the effects will be on a given person of some memetic packet I might send, and to try to be careful to what their goals and constraints are, even interacting casually.

I want to mark this claim explicitly, and I strongly endorse that you, dear reader, should do your own discernment here. To be clear, both this whole section and really the whole book are in some ways an intense memetic object, but, hopefully, they're oriented towards helping people unravel, and empowering their autonomy and discernment, on the whole.

# Spirituality, Phenomenology, and Practice

*In this chapter:*

"Spiritual" practice in broad strokes, and some important related phenomenology:
- Spiritual Practice
- Somatic Phenomenology
- Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices

Meditation, introspection, and healing, each intertwined and often laden as concepts:
- Meditation
- Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice")
- Content, Healing, and Integration
- Criticizing Somatics-and-Trauma Models
- Other Models of Healing

*Awakening*, mysticism, and "the spiritual path":
- Mysticism and Awakening
- Paths and "The Path"

Lastly, contextualizing transformative practice in modern secular culture more broadly:
- Transformative Practice

# Spiritual Practice

I broadly speaking agree with the take that "religion," "spirituality," and "spiritual practice" are not really natural kinds anthropologically or psychologically, and that the modern Western conception is contingent on the specific history of the western church, its relationship with European states, etc. More specifically, my sense is that various societies have constructed a boundary between "religion" and the rest of society in different ways, or not at all, and that the underlying patterns of human behavior and experience seem much messier, and overlapping with politics, philosophy, "science," etc.

Nonetheless I'll at least want to make some kinds of distinctions, so I'll refer to a few broad clusters here, with quite a lot of overlap. These definitions aren't unusual but are slightly idiosyncratic:

**Religion**: the practices and beliefs of organized spiritual communities, usually as part of a larger organization, and especially those with organizational hierarchies and explicit dogma.

**Spirituality**: the domains of meaning relating to the sacred, devotional practices, mysticism, and ultimate existential meaning.

**Mysticism**: the practice and experience of non-mundane reality, altered states, theophany, and transcendence. Sometimes also includes **esotericism**, which usually refers to mystical symbolic systems, especially when culturally marginal or restricted only to those initiated.

**Transformative practice**: practices and theories of psychological and spiritual *development*, inclusive of eg. prayer, Western therapy, often "mystical" practices, rites of passage, and sometimes even secular training regimes like those used by militaries.

I'll describe each of these in a little more detail as I conceive of them, how they relate, and what claims various traditions of each of them make.

## Religion

Religious traditions, moreso those larger and more organized, and especially the so-called "world religions," generally consist of a. dogma and a community of believers; b. sacraments, and often initiation; and c. communal rites.

(As it happens, Buddhism doesn't really fit this mold, especially b. and c., but it's so anodyne even in Asia, and irrelevant politically everywhere else, so this is often ignored. Hinduism at least historically is also much messier or leakier with respect to the identified community of believers, since there was no such thing as "Hinduism" until the British Raj, and smaller sects were sometimes porous.)

Religious dogmas (again at least among "world religions") almost invariably define a metaphysics, defining an axiology with respect to a particular cosmology and ontology, generally featuring some kind of life after death, a God or gods, angels and spirits, and supernatural abilities or miracles. They very often feature a soteriology, seeing the current world as incomplete or fallen, and either having a heaven, salvation, or an escape from this world. They also generally prescribe practices, covenants, and social structures for upright communities to maintain, lest a bad outcome occur, usually in whatever life is to come after this one.

Those traditions most importantly revolve around devotional practice: practices which involve scripted or spontaneous performance of submission, devotion, and adoration to a deity, spirit, or saint. These practices are generally meant to be imaginally rich, bringing a person into a way of seeing in which they feel they *are really* communing with a spirit or deity. Often, the sense of the Sacred includes religious paraphernalia or specific holy sites, but most importantly includes the communal-imaginal space created by a religious community. Devotional practice often involves an important aspect of *faith*, or what's sometimes called "hyperstition."

On the gentler side, these practices can range from personal prayer, communal devotional rites (often surprisingly similar, in the broadest outlines, to familiar Western Christian church services), to Jihad, religious crusades, matyrdom, or extreme acts of pious self denial.

Reports from practitioners in these traditions almost all describe them as ecstatic, joyous, deeply heartfelt, and profoundly meaningful. More specifically, devotional practices are often an overwhelming part of how religious people apprehend goodness, often acutely being some of the most important experiences of people's lives, or a steady source of positive emotion throughout theis lives. (Obviously, many religious people, especially in modern times, experience their religion more as a very socially important institution, but not quite as "the basis of their apprehension of all meaning" or whatever.)

Some religious traditions nominally view devotional practice as a kind of duty, hopefully joyous, but that knowledge of goodness comes through the dogma itself, whereas many others view spiritual practice as *the gateway* to knowledge of ultimate meaning, and often to direct communion with God. The latter stance shades into or whole-hog becomes mysticism (see below). See also later on gnosis.

"World religions" are generally the output of a process of memetic evolution, and the most fecund religious memes have tended toward these features, generally prioritizing legibility and transmissibility, usually in the form of universalism.

On the other hand, so-called "folk religions" and sometimes "shamanic traditions" are much less systematized if at all, this group is such a various and riotous mess that it's hard to say much about in general. Anyway, my impression is that veneration, obeisance, and appeasement of spirits are very common features, while dogma is much weaker if present, and stories of ultimate existential meaning are often absent. Broadly it seems like "world religions" didn't invent the sacred, but probably *did* invent (or they might prefer "received") universalist religious cosmology.

## Spirituality

There's fairly little that's *in* "spirituality" that's not in religion, but spirituality is a particular angle on the same broader cluster, which excludes many structural features of religions as institutions.

One take here might be that spirituality is the personal, relational aspect of this cluster, whereas "religion" makes salient the structural and institutional features that are present in the spiritualities of most humans alive today. More generally, 'spirituality' usually has the connotation of "sacralized transformative practice" or "sacralized / magicalized practices of connection with self and mundane meaning." Often, in the modern California style, one can be "spiritual but not religious," but also even a devout religious person's spirituality isn't necessarily coterminous with the orthodox view in their religious tradition.

Moreover, if we widen spirituality, as some anthropologist and sociologists do, to mean just practices of private and communal creation of spaces of sacredness and devotion, then we end up including practices and communities structured around national or ethnic identity, brotherhood, civic responsibility, and definitely stories about the long term future of our species, whether good or bad. These often evoke similar emotions and imaginal-relational stances as more stereotypically "religious" practices. I'm in this case basically down with the Durkheimian hypothesis, that religion, spirituality, and the Sacred exist more as stories that allow human communities to coordinate and trust each other, basically orthogonally to their being *true*, or the specific claims they make.

I'll add that maybe on average, spirituality is more likely than "religion" to include things like mundane beauty, family life, food-as-spiritual-practice, etc. etc.

In any case, I don't think there's a *fundamental* distinction here. I should say also that both the word, etymologically, and the concept of 'spirituality' as distinct from 'religion' are pretty modern (maybe 16th century), and *quite* modern in the "spiritual but not religious" sense. Still, it's useful to be able to refer to this concept and distinguish it from religion, when that's meaningful.

## Mysticism

Mysticism is yet more nebulous and yet more varied than the dogmas of "world religions." Very broadly mysticism is concerned with experiences of self-and-world which are very different from ordinary daily experience. Maybe a good definition would be the mystician is about gnosis of "spiritual reality."

Reports from what I would categorize as mystical traditions and practitioners, often include (hardly exhaustive):
- Visions (usually experienced as intense and phenomenologically encompassing) of angels, hell, other planets, the far future, etc.
- Extremely altered states of attention and perception, sometimes leading to very strange experiences of self-and-world
- The body as unreal, paper-thin, jumbled, or absent
- Same, for the world
- Same, for "the self," "me," etc. Sometimes also appearing to be contiguous with the external world
- This one people have a big hardon for, and it's often reported as an utterly profound change in their life, and even the most important experience in their life.
- Speaking to or witnessing God, gods, spirits, "entities," etc.
- I would regard these experiences as distinct from visions, they're broadly usually crisp, vivid, often interactive, and "live," rather than reported as more timeless, recollected, or "futuresight."
- "Union with" God or the universe
- Knowledge of the ultimate truths of reality, meaning, or value
- Eg. knowledge of past lives and the cycle of rebirth
- Intense bliss states, sometimes bliss-beyond-pleasure, leading into dissolution and transcendence
- Intensely hellish states, including images of horrors, sometimes seemingly contentless intense pain, etc.

Common techniques used to achieve these experiences include:

- """Meditation"""
- We might include under this physically active but "meditative" practices, eg. Tai chi or Asana Yoga.
- """Prayer"""
- Fasting, deprivation, intense sensory experiences otherwise (usually unpleasant but sometimes pleasant), sometimes called "shamanic ordeal"
- Deliberate alteration of the breath, often extremely fast or slow, sometimes more precise control interacting with somatic phenomena
- Psychoactive drugs, obviously including traditional and modern psychedelics, but also sometimes marijuana or even some forms of tobacco
- Rhythmic and hypnotic practices, eg. mantra, drumming, chanting, or some kinds of dance

There are also many reports of mystical experiences occurring spontaneously, with no prior practice or experience, as well as after many years of practice but during downtime, on a walk, or in response to some utterance from a teacher. There are also many reports of these experiences or qualities of perception creeping up on a person over a long period, eg "one day noticing that there just isn't much self around," etc.

## Transformative practice

Lots of traditions and communities are concerned with the development and transformation of their members' attitudes, perception, experience, behavior, etc. This includes of course institutional religion, but also of course modern psychotherapy, militaries, penal systems, marginally (but in a real way) educational systems, and much weirder more culturally marginal groups otherwise.

The goals, techniques, and outcomes of these groups are so varied that it's also hard to say much in general here. Still, these often include:

- Most of the practices described under religion and mysticism above
- Ordeals which are meant to arouse more capacity, bravery, or intensity from a person than they were previously capable of
- Practices and experiences meant to lead to changes in values or orientation, eg. "scared straight" type of stuff, but also intense positive experiences, eg. some kinds of outdoor education for delinquent teenagers, or some kinds of communal religious practices; perhaps some aspects of hazing and military training
- Explicitly trying to counter or cover over undesired mental qualities, eg. many things that describe "changing one's thinking," but also eg. most of the techniques of Alcoholic's Anonymous
- """Introspection"""
- Various angles intending explicit catharsis, whether "structural" (that is, introspective), "purely somatic," or more unusual variations

Modern Western schools of transformative practice often have a priority on introspection, or sometimes a kind of, er, "extrospection" aided by a therapist, oriented specifically towards what's often called "insight" (not that this is really one thing).