Ecstatic Trance E-Book

Nana Nauwald

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 271

Beschreibung

The Groundwork to the Ritual Body Postures and the Trance-Experience Ritual Body Postures combined with sound and rhythm are door openers to manifold worlds of consciousness. The anthropologist Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman (1914-2005) came to this insight through more than 20 years of research work. Nana Nauwald carries on this research for 25 years. By combining a quick rhythm with special body postures found in different cultures and ages, reaching back up to 40,000 years, body and mind are stimulated to a conscious and creative interplay that leads into a heightened alert state of consciousness. The experience in the intentional induced state of trance can be a path to gain healthful insights. They can also open the doors to the potential of one's own creativity, one's own inner wisdom and strength and stimulate self-healing processes. This workbook and reference book contains 65 Ritual Body Postures with extensive descriptions to take up a posture. It also includes pictures of ancient statues from which these postures originate and their historical and cultural background. Detailed drawings and photographs of the postures complete the practical instructions.

Leseprobe

Note

Many people of the Felicitas Goodman Institute, Germany, are involved in the research of Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance. The articles in the book, which have been researched by friends (f/m) of this work are assigned by name. All other text is written by Nana Nauwald. In Germany, Austria, Russia the method "Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance by Dr. F. Goodman" is protected by Trade Mark.

The Felicitas-Goodman-Institut Germany offers a training program. The attendance at this is a precondition for the public activity as a seminar leader. www.felicitas-goodman-institute.de

This book is a completely revised, actualized and developed further as the book with the same title of 2003 published by Binkey Kok Publications, Netherlands.

Cover picture and all illustrations and photographs in the book are from the archives of the authors. "The Lion Man from the Lonetal" photo (c) by Wulf Hein, printed with kindly permission. The printing permission of the photograph of the figure "The Moche Diviner Woman" is from Ulrich Hoffmann, Galerie Alt-Amerika, Stuttgart, also with kindly permission.

Contents

Foreword by Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman

Foreword by Nana Nauwald

Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance- A New Way based on old knowledge

Crazy, Delightful Recognition of the World

Shamanism and the Experience of the Soul

The Door to Paradise Opens Again

In which case can a Body Posture hold up to be a Ritual Body Posture?

About our Research.

A Bear is a Bear - or is he more?About the Interpretation of a Trance Experience

Trance and Brain Waves -Physiological Effects of Trance

Hypnosis, Meditation, Trance -

An Investigation of Wakefulness and Consciousness

_Hypnosis

_Meditation

_Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance

_Brain Mapping of Trance States in a Ritual Setting

_Possession Trance – Channeling

_New EEG Measurements by the Research project Well...come 21The Edge between Art and Science

_Physiological Effects in the State of Ecstatic Trance

_Trance – Contact with the True Reality

The Practice of Ritual Body Postures

The Core of Shamanic Rituals

Expecting the Unexpected

_Before the Trance

_During the Trance

_After Trance

_The Healing Sound of Drum and Rattle

_Sound of Rattles

_Sound of Drums

_Ritual Accessories for Trance Postures

_ Ritual Attributes

_Plan to Work from for Accessories and Painting

Ritual Body Postures

Background, Illustration, Description

Introduction

__Sequential Order of the Body Postures

Body Postures from different Regions and Times

__

From the Younger Stone Age of Europe and Russia

__From Different Old Cultures

__From Northern Europe

__From the Area of the Mediterranean

__From North America

__From Central America

__From South America

Words of Gratitude

Authors

Bibliography

Rhythms to the Ritual Body Postures

Index of the Body Postures

Foreword by Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman

Today, in the year 2004, 27 years have passed since I experienced the first enchantment of the trance induced by a ritual body posture together with my students. This enchantment still hasn't faded.

I'm very grateful to all the visible and invisible companions, that enabled ways into "other realities" in all these years. Today, blessed with ninety rich years of my life, I can notice with great joy that the spirit of the Ritual Body Postures is ever more weaving into the "ordinary reality" of many people in my old homeland Europe. The summarized experience and research of the past years in this "newborn" book carries the richness of many realities and spaces of consciousness into the hearts of the people who are always open-minded and ready to gain some new insight into the infinite worlds of consciousness.

May we all walk on this beautiful path!

Felicitas D. Goodman, July 2004

Foreword by Nana Nauwald

I am deeply grateful for the fertile work of my dear friend and teacher Dr. Felicitas Goodman. Her research-work of the ritual body postures opened numerous doors to fields of non-ordinary states of consciousness and created pathways to understanding the essence of life: We are part of the first spirit of creation, carrying the wisdom of life inside of us. Her work weaves together human beings worldwide seeking to get in contact with their own spirit by their own experiences with body, mind, and soul. This way of perception doesn't depend on dogma or religion. It can connect us with the intelligence of nature, of all beings - seen or unseen. The experiences in a ritual body posture can inspire our life-creativity and can activate our healing-and inner energies to our own well-being and to the well-being of our community.

Emerging from long years of research and experiences of students and teachers worldwide, this workbook can be a companion for you.

I wish you healthful, strengthening, and perceptive experiences through ritual body postures. I would like to encourage you to wake up your inner wisdom and power with the help of this method grounded in old shamanic traditions!

Nana Nauwald, January 2021

Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance A New Way based on Old Knowledge

"The state of trance is an inborn potential for experience of every human

being. Trance is the biological door to another, holy reality.

The body experience alone is no enhancement of consciousness.

With a Ritual Body Posture and the connected intention

it is possible to experience ecstasy."

Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman

Crazy, Delightful Recognition of the World

"The natural state of a human being is the ecstatic amazement,

we shouldn't be satisfied with less."

Midpeninsula Free University, Bulletin, California 1969

For more than 30 years my travels into inner and outer worlds of consciousness of shamanic cultures imbue my life in every nuance. I was able to experience wonders, unbelievable, and explainable things and events in these worlds with all my senses.

For a long time, I tried to explain and justify these experiences with my familiar models of thinking. Trying to understand these events rationally failed because I tried to "think" about things you only can experience and believe. The living shamanism of indigenous cultures can only be understood if you take part in everything instead of observing from the outside.

During a shamanic healing ritual in the night at the Amazon river in Peru, I got the insight and clarity that shamanism in its manifold appearances could certainly be explained, but there is only one way to understand it: It has to be experienced. But even intense experiences do not have any beneficial quality if you are not able to integrate them by conscious deeds into your daily life.

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” Aldous Huxley

I had already traveled through multicolored and sometimes confusing shamanic worlds when I set off in 1991 on my way to the desert of New Mexico. My mental baggage contained a suitcase full of questions about classical shamanism and the feasibility of shamanic techniques in our modern urbanized society.

It really hasn't been a usual trip that brought me into the "non-ordinary" world of Felicitas D. Goodman in Cuyamungue near the New-Age center of Santa Fe. In the soft hills of the meager desert of this highlands, she was standing in front of her little one-room adobe house. Behind her big glasses, alert eyes were glancing at me. I have already visited several of her seminars in Germany, but regardless of this, I was standing before her with an inner mixture of expectation and insecurity. For a long time, I was looking for an elder woman, who would teach me, and challenge me on a path of learning. And now she did stand before me, this remarkable woman! Remarkable in the clarity of her words and deeds, impressive with her fine interconnection of science, knowledge, awareness, and modesty.

I got her pupil for 13 years until she went back into her spiritual homeland.

After some years we became familiar friends who experienced the "alternate realities" with their colorful swarm of spirits. We also researched Ritual Body Postures and their effects on body and mind. We laughed a lot and often drank some Tequilas together: Cheers to the health of this so unfathomable manifold mysterious life in all shades of the reality.

This is where the journey of experiencing different fields of realities with the help of a body posture combined with a certain rhythm started: The summoning beats of a drum pound through the clear, burning hot air of the New Mexican desert. With her knowing, impish grin, Felicitas Goodman stands before the entrance to the kiva with the unshakable composure of her old age, calling us to a trance posture session with her drumming. The door of the round, underground kiva which was placed in the middle of the property in Cuyamungue, closes. A new experience in the adventure of ritual trance awaits us. Felicitas performs the purification ritual with sage, offering cornmeal to the rattle and the spirits of this area, and greets the seven directions: the east and the north, the west and the south, the lower, the middle, and the upper world. We spend a short time breathing slowly and rhythmically, then take the posture that Felicitas shows us and close our eyes.

The steady beat of the shaken rattle (210 beats per minute) becomes the"horse" which we ride into an alternate reality the ritual body posture forms the "door" into a specific area of this reality.

"Still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate; and though I oft have passed them by, a day will come at last when I shall take the hidden paths that run west of the moon, east of the sun."

J.R.R.Tolkien.

In order to keep from drifting off into everyday thoughts, I concentrate on the rattle. It changes its tone and begins to sing. I could swear that there are now more rattles in the room and they are dancing around me. Waves of heat roll through my body; I lose myself in a flood of blue tones which change into a glaring orange hue. I don't hear the rattle at all anymore. With my total awareness, I become turquoise-colored water which flows through a hollow tree trunk towards a light. Then I am water gleaming with all the colors of the rainbow and I'm so high up in the sky that I see the earth underneath me, by day and by night. I transform again and become a yellow drum dancing in a spiral with brightly-colored geometrical forms circling around me. The rattle stops and slowly I am able to ease myself away1 from this "alternate reality"; however, the warm, pleasant feeling in my body stays with me for a long time. The rattle stops and it is only slowly that I can ease myself away from this "alternate reality"; however, the warm, pleasant feeling in my body stays with me for a long time.

It is a healing posture in which Felicitas Goodman has led us, known as the Chiltan posture. One of about ninety ritual body postures which have been researched by Dr. Felicitas Goodman, Nana Nauwald, and her team, which lead into an alternate reality - or a different field of consciousness - when performed in connection with the proper rhythmic accompaniment of ca. 210 bpm. The different ritual body postures lead to distinctive areas of an alternate reality.

How come a venerable Doctor of Anthropology began to research trance states?

The starting point for Felicitas Goodman had been her anthropological research on glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in a Pentecostal community in Mexico. Glossolalia is a form of possession trance, practiced in Brazilian Candomblé.

Further research about the interconnection of sound, rhythm, and trance states in religious communities Felicitas Goodman found body postures that have survived over thousands of years in the form of small statues or cave drawings and which represent probably selfcontained religious rituals.

But did these strange postures or gestures show people in a state of trance? By coincidence, she found a drawing of a drumming shaman who sat beside a man lying in a special position on the ground - and in addition to this, she was familiar with the dances of the pueblo folks in New Mexico which got into a trance with a quick rhythm of their rattles. She discovered this quick rhythm again in many other indigenous folks.

Saami in trance. Woodcarving by J. Schefferus, 1673

Studying the body postures further, Dr. Goodman came to the conclusion that one's state of consciousness is changed in a remarkable way when added a rhythmic stimulus, for example, the rattle or drum: one enters a state of visionary trance. The trance creates a gateway into the realm of ecstasy. The 210 bpm rhythm helps to overcome a strategic barrier of the nervous system and makes it possible to achieve a change in the state of consciousness, a state in which we can undergo a ritual experience, and have visions.2 The saying: "He who sees only with his eyes sees only the shadows of the world" reflects the wisdom that is deeply anchored in many indigenous cultures.

Most of the investigated trance postures come from the hunter-gatherers and the horticulturalists. They did not separate the "ordinary reality" and the "non-ordinary reality" like we do today. The state of the trance was socially acknowledged and accepted as a method to balance the body, mind, and soul, and to bring back harmony.

The term "trance" in the work of Felicitas Goodman can be understood as a state of transition. This word comes from the Latin transire - to cross over. This "cross over" indicates a conscious change from the "ordinary" into an altered state of consciousness, in which it is possible to perceive areas of the field of consciousness, which we only can realize with a changed gaze. This experience is characterized by a state of joyful feeling of life free from fear. It creates a feeling of sweetness, which at the same time is a feeling of security. It also enhances the feeling of being connected with everything without the boundaries of time and space.

The term "ecstasy" goes back to the Greek word ékstasis, which means to step outside of oneself or being out of oneself. It also means rapture, bliss, and the highest dedication.

Ecstasy is something higher, or further out, than ordinary pleasure. It can only be learned by nothing else but by a special discipline and skillfulness." Alan W. Watts

The achievement of this state is possible through an extreme constraint of sensory stimulus as to fast, isolation, asceticism, or in opposite by musical rhythm, dance, singing, breathing techniques, psychoactive substance, or even pain. Ecstatic experiences are able to stimulate healing processes and change people, their perspectives, values, and the purpose of life.

Trance corresponds to the Arabic word wajd, which means "finding". Actually, the goal of a trance is to find insight, not to look for it. The precondition to achieve this healing state of insight is deeply rooted in every human being - maybe also in animals, because it is known that many animals enjoy eating psychoactive plants if available. All that we need to recognize the variety of realities and the perception of the living net of consciousness we carry in our wonderfully equipped body.

The state of trance was and still is an accepted method in some few cultures, to keep body, soul, and spirit in a healthy balance in case it is disturbed. A comparative study of Erika Bourgignon (1973, see bibliography) shows that of 488 ethnic societies of different parts of the earth about 437 do have a culturally accepted way to experience different states of consciousness.

The handling of invisible realities, powers, and also experiences of trance and ecstasy is a very delicate theme in our Western societies. In many ways, it is occupied with diffuse anxiety and preconceptions. It seems that societies focused on material achievements and values with regulated systems of religious and social beliefs are afraid of people who lookout for an experience of connectedness with forms of appearance of life, which cannot be described only experienced. This experience can lead to freedom and it has the ability to create independence of imitating order and bring about responsible actions.

Everybody who has experienced that their own inner essence is independent of material appearances, of space and time, is able to live more intense and is free from ordinary patterns of living.

It would be a "wise" society in which it would be possible to introduce young people to non-ordinary states of consciousness with the help of experienced guidance in a safe space without any psychoactive substances.

This guided experience intentionally induced changes of perception help to perceive, to realize the variety and the potential of one's own life force and can encourage to live one's life in a creative and responsible way - for oneself and others.

This alone is not sufficient to explain why in spite of all changes in the form of society, language, and culture the knowledge of shamanic practices and the interest in these have not vanished. How come that in our time which is full of stimulation of the senses and has all kinds of self-experience practices more and more people are looking for the shamanic experience and techniques? Why do people search for the experience of not visible worlds of consciousness, looking for the experience of flying without wings, changing form, and getting insights by their own experience and not only by faith? Don't we have enough possibilities of "real" traveling and flying to open up for many different experiences?

What can shamanic techniques like the ritual body postures and ecstatic trance offer us which the "real" outer travels cannot?

Intentional effected shamanic experiences of non ordinary states of consciousness can be full of lust (pleasure is too weak), they can be healing and insightful, can bring about the experience of being oneself and the whole at the same time. These experiences are accessible after a little training for everybody who dares. They are without dogma and preconceived dependence on gurus, enlightened people, or masters.

Embedding of the shamanic methods into rituals teaches awe for nature, of the soulfulness of existence.

Today mainly women try to open these old entries into the "other world". It is a growing band of women, knowing a lot about herbs and animal helpers, who are feasting the circles of the wheel of the year, do shamanic travels into the field of consciousness by trance, sound, dance. Intentionally they vivify the fine net of all life powers and get inspired from insights that help to be healthy to themselves and other people.

This way of a conscious perception embedded in the living field of resonance of all life can open the possibilities of inner changes for one's own well-being and the lives of others. Interestingly many therapists and coaches try to use healing shamanic methods.

But working with these methods doesn't make you a shaman. A shaman is embedded in a community of people. One precondition for being a shaman is the "gift to be able to see". You cannot learn this special gift, because it is "sent by the spirits".

Mircea Eliade, a researcher of shamanism, says: "Shamanism isn't a religion - it is a bunch of ecstatic and therapeutically methods which all have the goal, to make contact with this other parallel existing but invisible spirits to obtain the support for human concern."

As an answer to the question if she were a shaman Felicitas Goodman always laughed and said: "Shamans (female and male) only exist in communities that are living in the spiritual world view of shamanism. I am only able to find one of many possible entries into the spaces of alternate realities."

It requires experience, creativity, and courage to enfold and to explore grounds of this old wisdom without imitating shamanic traditions. We should learn to integrate this wisdom into our lives and make it effective.

The old cultures from where these body postures come from which we are using and researched for their effect as a "trance posture" did leave us with their artifacts, pictures, and symbols as material carriers of their spiritual world. In many ways, they show us the richness and variety of ceremonial life.

The body postures we use now are rituals in themselves and help to get into a receiving state to connect oneself with one's own creativity. Each intentional connection with these impersonal fields of consciousness lets us recognize the unseen possibilities to design our lives. The method of the "Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance" is one spiritual path developed from the roots of the shamanic wisdom of our ancestors so we can resonate with the appearances of the living nature.

Mask dance, old scratching

1 Picture: Noide (northic shaman) with drum. Old stone engraving

2 Further information on the measurements of physiological effects in chapter "Trance and Brain Waves", pages 35 f.

Shamanism and the Experience of the Soul

Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman

"In reality shamans aren't sorcerers first, but soul guides, healer, and artists."

Hans Findeisen

The term shamanism derives from a word of the Tungus, hunters and reindeer herders of northern Siberia. It was originally designated to a religious practitioner who was in command of the entire body of his tribe's oral literature. He had total command of religious rituals. He was a healer and used "archaic techniques of ecstasy"3 (Mircea Eliade ´s term) he could contact the spirit world and was able to undertake extensive spiritualism. In the course of the twentieth century, his definition of the term shamanism became expanded, principally due to Eliade's influence, and was increasingly covered by the religious systems of the non-western world, having no ties to agriculture. One of the prominent characteristics of these so-called shamanic religious systems is the fact that their practitioners, either individually or collectively, report the experience of either one or several in-dwelling, detachable entities called the soul.

Cave drawing of the body posture "Calling of the Spirits"

If multiple souls are experienced—for example, some Inuit tribes speak of five souls for the man and five souls for the woman—there is a well-established division of labor. One soul might provide or be the energy of movement, another one exits into the realm of dreams, and still, another undertakes a spiritual journey into an alternate reality.

The soul is not experienced as distinct from the individual. In fact, it is identical to the individual being. However, if it exists in response to the proper ritual, it assumes distinctly divergent properties. It does not underlay the laws of gravity, thus it can instantly journey or transpose itself to distant places. Neither is it tied to the dimension of time. It can visit the present event as easily as a past one, although the future is not accessible. It has no dimension, comparable to a dot that originates when two lines cross. This non-dimensionality makes it possible for the soul to slip into another being (e. g., animal, bird, or plant), an ability described in myths and tales across all cultures. If a soul is immortal we don't know.

Yet, holographically, it contains such capabilities as the perception and decision-making of its individual. It is a conscious observer. Yet, it is not perfect. It can, for instance, can go astray. If it does not return to its human individual, its absence will sicken the respective person; another shaman or healer then needs to undertake a soul retrieval. If a child is startled, its soul may slip out accidentally and its mother or the whole family will have to undertake extensive rituals to coax it back and thus heal the child.

Everywhere in the shamanic world, the rituals that loosen the soul from its moorings and sent on its journey, involve rhythmic stimulation, such as rattling or drumming. Such activity alters the biological substrate, resulting in „boiling energy", as the Bushmen of the Kalahari call it (Richard Katz, 1982). We call this change the "Ritual Trance".

In a religious setting, the principal element is always the ritual which is part and parcel of the culture or the respective group. This might be a dance, the wearing of masks, the reciting or singing of sacred texts, or other similar activities.

In the course of our research, however, we discovered a variety of rituals which was not in this way tied to tribal culture. We found that non-ordinary body postures represented in non-western art for millennia were, in fact, capable of supplying the experiential factor needed to complement the neurophysiological changes and provided an entrance into an alternate reality. In anthropological terms, we might say that we found a way to practice participant observation.

These non-ordinary, ritual body postures facilitate experiences such as spirit journeys to the so-called lower, middle and upper world, shape-shifting into animal form, and calling up healing spirits and other inhabitants of an alternate reality. Anthropological field observations discovered, in fact, indicate that such non-ordinary ritual body postures are incorporated into many religious rituals.

It should be obvious that the experience of the soul is accessible also to modern westerners. There are many reasons why current westerners are oblivious to the experience of the soul. One reason is without doubt the fact that by the time the Greeks of antiquity developed their writing systems, their economic activity had switched to agriculture and animal administration. Comparative studies of religion clearly demonstrate that when this type of cultural dislocation takes place the soul is no longer free to roam. Traditions about the various possibilities of the soul were relegated to mythology and fiction because the cultural context no longer has been present. Among the writers of the so-called classical Greek mystical school, there were speculations about the soul created in the absence of actual experience. There were speculations, for instance, that the soul consisted of a dust-like substance. The understanding of its qualities and heroic activities was lost.

The traditions of the Greek horticulturalists did not survive in classical times. Had they been available to the humanists, the attitude of western conquerors ravaging the non-western world during the era of colonization might have been more respectful toward the experience of the soul - Although given the western arrogance and greed I would not bet on it.

3 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Bollinger Series 76 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

The Door Paradise Opens Again . . .

Dr. Felicitas D. to Goodman

"In each cases in shamanism is mirrored the activity of psychic region which especially are sources of artistic creativity, and so called occult abilities.

Hans Findeisen, Heino Gehrts

In 1966 we had come together in the living room of my modest home in Ohio. Eight experimental subjects and I gathered, to find an answer to a special question, which emerged from my research. For quite some time we knew that dramatic changes occurred in the body after specific rhythmic stimulation. Moreover, it had been confirmed again and again that generally, the experiences remained neutral. We now wanted to determine whether the picture would change if we added one of the many postures depicted in non-western art.

Several times I have described the overwhelming results of these experiments. Suddenly and unexpectedly the door swung open to a realm of mysterious depth and expanse, far beyond what we could have envisioned at that time. Initially, the sequence 4 included merely six postures but meanwhile it rose to eighty.In this workbook, all those ritual postures which we experienced as powerfully trance-inducing are described and illustrated. Postures which we researched but experienced as too weak, are not mentioned here and all new postures are described with their cultural background. Two questions surfaced. Firstly, what drives us to continue to search, and study for new postures? Secondly, why do we feel the urge to experience the ritual postures and the ecstatic trance over and over?

The search for an answer to the first question leads us into prehistoric times to the roots of humanity. As is commonly known, the precursors of our human species appeared approximately four and a half million years ago in Africa. The history, however, is full of gaps, again, and again many millennia are jumped simply because we can't find enough skeletons. Still, a picture of gradual progress emerges in so far as the limbs become longer and the head slightly bigger.

Then all of a sudden, about 100,000 years ago, something completely new appears in the picture of our ancestors. They create something that we modern people call art. What had happened? Everywhere in the world, we find traces of this new leap in human development. The findings prove it but hardly anybody asks why. A possible answer unexpectedly came from an entirely different field of research. About half a year ago American researchers at the University of California in Santiago reported an experiment with epileptics. Epileptics often spontaneously speak of religious experiences, and those researchers wanted to find out, whether one could detect something in the brain that could be described as the point of origin for these experiences. They unanimously found a place in the brain, in the right frontal lobe, which especially reacts to religious content. This remarkable discovery may explain, why all known human societies always had a religion.

Now the question is: Is there a special kind of connection between the brain cells, something unknown until now, that enables humans to experience religious contents? Of course we cannot ascertain whether at the time when the first evidence of art in the prehistory of humankind appears, simultaneously such a change in the structure of the human brain occurs. We only have sculls, not their content, the brains. However, we can easily speculate that the sudden appearance of art, which originally was always a religiously determined human experience, originated with a simultaneous change of the brain.

I'd like to add further speculation: in its origin, art as an expression of religion is always based on an altered state of consciousness. Therefore we can claim that the development inside the brain, which suddenly occurred amongst our ancestors, has prepared the possibility of a leap into another layer of consciousness.

The development of human beings is related to that of animals and thus humans always had access to certain altered states of consciousness, e. g. sleep. Mammals sleep – humans sleep. Sleep is an extraordinary and complex state of consciousness. Many animals have the capacity to feign death when they are attacked. It was thought that this was simply a matter of role-playing because some species know from experience that attacking wolves or tigers would not eat dead animals. However, this is not a matter of role-playing. Some animals, for e. g. the skunk, indeed experience an event, which is an altered state of consciousness – they even smell like a dead animal. During their development humans too have undoubtedly included similar altered states of consciousness into their humanness. However, I believe that a special kind of state of consciousness was added at the time when art appeared in the early history of the human species.

This special state of consciousness is not a complete turning away such as the simulated death of a skunk, but an altered state of awake consciousness. Today various kinds of non-ordinary states are summarized under the term "trance". This includes everything from meditation to Stan Grof's hyperventilation - a breathing technique like the Indian pranayama - and the techno trance of the youth culture. However, the trance that occurred for the first time in connection with the ability of a religious experience has a different quality. It presented the awakening humankind with the capacity to willfully leave the common reality and to enter another reality, the abode of spirits. To distinguish this from other states of trance, we call this special altered state of waking consciousness "ecstatic trance". This kind of consciousness enables us to enter a different reality, the second or sacred part of reality, in which the spirits live. The contact with this part of reality is the religious experience in its purest sense.