by Christina Leimer | Researching Consciousness for Social Change
Throw a great big wrench into global society and the world slows down. With less human activity, wildlife is returning to cities and the air is cleaner. The earth is even vibrating less. What will we do with this slower pace?
Some are pushing to get the race pumped up again. And there are a lot of real problems people have to figure out how to deal with now and for the future since COVID-19 isn’t likely to be the last world-stopping event. But, rather than hurry past this time, why not use it to create new possibilities?
Photo by Christina Leimer
New ideas come out of a quieter time and pace. Stillness is the home of the imagination. Science and spiritual traditions agree. The Harvard Business Review encourages business leaders to play, to allow themselves and employees time to reflect to help possibilities emerge. Imagination, they say, is needed to shape the new environment. Shamans agree.
In American culture, it’s difficult to slow down and back off trying to fix a problem or come up with a solution. We believe it takes great effort and will. We have to “do” something. All the time. That’s a cultural bias that has far-reaching effects. Like so much human activity that the planet vibrates more.
In his book Courageous Dreaming, anthropologist, shaman and teacher Alberto Villoldo distinguishes between will and intent. Will is what we use “to try to force the world to conform to the way we think things should be, while intent is the mechanism by which we dream creatively and courageously.” (p. 67) “Will corrects and fixes things after they’ve manifested, but intent shapes things before they’re even born.” Both intent and will are needed—but at the right time.
With intent, we ask a broad question or hold a desire without specifying a particular tactic and then let the answer or condition unfold in its own time and its own way. Villoldo gives as an example the shamans he trained with in Peru. Their intent was to disseminate their teachings to the West. They didn’t develop a plan for how to do it, seek and evaluate potential messengers, or decide how they’d measure their success.
Instead, they took advantage of opportunities as they came. Villoldo was there doing research for his dissertation. He didn’t see himself as a potential shaman, spiritual tour guide or teacher. But the shamans saw him, and others, as a potential spokesman and nurtured it. They didn’t pressure, always leaving the decision—the will—and the way up to Villoldo.
When shamans say “dream the world into being” I take it as a more poetic way of saying let’s allow time for imagining and let our actions grow out of that receptive state. Lighten up, instead of bearing down. Can we?
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
by Christina Leimer | Researching Consciousness for Social Change
In mainstream Western culture, if we give credence to dreams it’s usually for personal guidance, healing and insight. In many other cultures, especially shamanic ones, dreams can serve the collective as well. Neuroanthropologist Charles Laughlin (Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain) says dreams play a role in producing social and cultural change. He goes on to say dreams “might be crucial in ameliorating the pernicious effects of materialism upon what is arguably an un-sane post-industrial society.” (p. 26).
Mudflats at Sunset Photo by Christina Leimer
Great! That’s what I think too. But how?
Here are a few examples of dreams as the impetus for large-scale change.
- Harriet Tubman’s dreams helped her free slaves through the Underground Railroad. They showed her ways to cross rivers and safe house locations she didn’t know before.
- Mahatma Ghandi’s idea for a general hunger strike as a form of nonviolent resistance to the British Raj in India came to him in a dream and it led to the independence movement.
- Frederick Kekule discovered the structure of benzene when he saw a snake biting its tail while he was dozing. That dream image led to understanding chemical bonding and organic chemistry.
- Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed part of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while sick and sleeping. The book struck such a deep chord that it became a modern myth—human’s dual nature or the public and private self. It has carried along in Western culture as an idiom that refers to a person who’s both good and evil.
- Paul McCartney heard the melody to what became the song Yesterday so clearly in a dream that he thought someone must have recorded it and he was just remembering it from somewhere in waking life.Yesterday became one the most popular songs of the 20th Century.
- Larry Page received the basis for what became the Google search engine in a dream, though he had to work out the specifics in waking life. It seems to be common that dreams point the direction or give clues then leave the details to the dreamer or community. According to anthropologist and shaman Michael Harner (The Way of the Shaman), dreams can be literal though, especially visionary dreams, and require no interpretation or extending. They may be prophetic.
There are usually dream specialists of some sort in cultures that recognize dreams for the collective. Shamans are an example. Dream specialists develop expertise and guide people to share, understand and even interact with dreams. Sometimes the dream specialists interact with dreams on others’ behalf or on behalf of their community. But, in these cultures, most people are socialized to the importance of dreams. They grow up talking about their dreams and their meaning. Physical places and ways to share dreams with others in wake life exist too. It’s not about saying, wow, that’s bizarre! The sharing is to help people understand the dream’s meaning and co-create it or validate it, especially when the dream is a “visionary” dream.
Dream-teacher, shaman and author Robert Moss teaches people what he calls “active dreaming.” It’s not dream interpretation, analysis or decoding—he wants to make clear. Active dreaming is a journey “to reclaim ways of seeing and knowing and healing that were known to our early ancestors. … It is a way of remembering and embodying what the soul knows about essential things.” (Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom, p. 3)
Moss believes Western culture is in dire need of re-connecting to our dreams and the deeper levels of knowledge and existence dreams provide us. That’s why he teaches people to become dream-teachers. He also teaches co-dreaming, or creating a group vision and jointly dreaming it into existence.
Some of these teachers-in-training are interested in how dreams can be used to change society. In one of his sessions, they suggested curing disease, bringing dreamwork into healthcare, healing the oceans and fish, electing a woman president of the U.S., healing the rage and violence that brings war and terrorism, world peace and creating a dreaming society. (p. 204)
Guess I’m not the only one searching for ways that alternative states of consciousness can help us create a more humane and nourishing world for people, planet and all life.
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
by Christina Leimer | Researching Consciousness for Social Change
What consciousness is and how much we can know are two of the most important unanswered questions in science (Scientific American, 2018). The questions aren’t new. Philosophers and theologians have thought about who we are and the nature of reality for eons. Psychologists explore behavior, perception and how we make meaning. Neuroscientists have joined the game too. They’re interested in what produces consciousness and how, the assumption being that its origin is the brain.
As a sociologist, I’m interested in the ways who we are affect our human systems, and conversely, how those systems influence who we are. What can we know about the world from various states of consciousness (SOC), how do we experience these states, and how can they be used?
Photo by Christina Leimer
The imminent late 19th century psychologist William James, founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, believed thinkers from a wide range of fields would be necessary to crack this enigma.
James thought that the brain’s role in consciousness isn’t as a producer but more of a transmitter, admitting and transferring information (Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the NDE, pg. 289). In her book Infinite Mind: Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness, UCLA physiologist Valerie Hunt agreed, saying “the brain has been studied in an airtight glass jar, a closed system, while we have tried to deduct from it an open system—the mind.” (pg. 87) Shamans, across the wide range of cultures and traditions, experience alternate states of consciousness, dreams and visions as real places we can go to and information that exists independently of individual human brains.
In my own experience, watching my different SOCs, it appears that consciousness is a non-linear spectrum with states shading into other states. (Hunt believes too that consciousness is a continuum. p. 91). If we can balance ourselves in the mixing zones, we can operate from multiple SOCs simultaneously. The place in the spectrum that my brain produces seems to be the analytical. When I’m thinking, reasoning, that process feels solidly centered in my brain. If I’m obsessing, churning over thoughts and worries, that too feels rooted in brain and nervous system functioning.
Most often, when original ideas occur to me, I’m not thinking about it at all. I might be riding my bike, or working around the house or in the tub. The thought or image or words just appear in my awareness whole. If I don’t act on the idea—write about it, let’s say—then I sometimes see it start showing up elsewhere. Others are writing about it. It’s as if the idea is in the air for anyone who can tune into it.
Recently, I’ve experienced sensation that felt like it was behind me, outside of my physical body, but that entered my body and appeared to me as song or images. In the case of the music, my brain must have been involved somehow, but the tones felt like they were moving from behind my shoulder blades through my chest and I simply allowed them to flow through me, singing them. In the case of the image, it seemed to originate from behind—in the region of the visual cortex—while near-simultaneously emerging from my chest where I could see it as a vision in front of me. Again, my brain didn’t seem to be the producer.
Another SOC that may involve the brain and its interaction with something else—whatever mind turns out to be, or whatever we would call those places, those realities, shamans visit—is in dreams. For me, it’s common to simultaneously experience the I that’s observing my dream and the I that’s in the dream. I know while dreaming that I’m dreaming.
My own experience makes me believe, like William James, that only open-minded, multidisciplinary exploration and willingness to accept unusual, extraordinary or exceptional human experiences—as parapsychologist Rhea White called them—rather than explain them away will get us to answers to this puzzle.
Currently, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, scientists and Buddhist monks are collaborating to find out what each can contribute to these vexing questions. Contemplatives in the Buddhist tradition, and some others, have thousands of years of experience observing the mind and states of consciousness. David Presti, University of California neurobiologist and psychologist who’s coordinating these studies, believes this collaboration could result in a revolution of understanding as big as any ever made in science (Presti, Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science and the Paranormal).
What I still see missing is social science. In Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain, neuroanthropologist Charles Laughlin points out that we don’t pay much attention to the social and cultural information in dreams. I know we’re inherently curious about ourselves. No problem. We need to be. But we don’t live in a vacuum. We’re impacted by the culture and systems we live in. They are the impetus for science disbelieving and ignoring our anomalous human experiences. Our cultural beliefs and practices are cutting us off from knowing and being all that we are. As we come to understand our new capabilities, we need to set ourselves free to use them. That means changing culture and social systems to support the new us. That’s why sociologists should be part of this revolution.
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
by Christina Leimer | Researching Consciousness for Social Change
A few people said to me recently that we need to start talking about it. By “it” they mean our experience with intuition—a type of knowing that comes in a variety of ways. It might be synchronicities, for example, or bodily sensations, a heightened sense of smell, visions, dreams or sudden insights without a known stimulus.
These are common human experiences across time and cultures. Anthropologist Charles D. Laughlin, in his book Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain, says of the approximately 4000 cultures in the world, 90% seek and value alternate states of consciousness, especially dreams (p. 64). Because intuitive experience is a normal part of life, it’s built into education, community events, ceremony and other societal practices and has uses for both individuals and the society as a whole. Even pre-industrial Western societies valued the intuitive. The ancient Greeks consulting the Oracle at Delphi is one of the most commonly known.
In industrialized, materialist Western culture though, intuition is denigrated and denied or relegated to the fringe—which is why we don’t talk about it. Some forms of intuition are used in psychotherapeutic healing or in spiritual counseling. And of course there are studies of the paranormal and groups that focus on dreams or other psi phenomena. But in the main, intuition doesn’t have an acceptable place in modern secular mainstream life.
In her book, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, psychologist Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer used the example of a world-renowned neurosurgeon whose patients never died in surgery. He stopped teaching students because he needed to keep the way he did it secret for credibility and he didn’t know how to teach his method anyway. What was his method? He sat beside his patients’ bed until he saw a white light appear around their head. That was the cue it was safe to operate.
This is what we lose because of our cultural reticence. Maybe this neurosurgeon has a gift that can’t be replicated. But how would we know if we don’t talk about it, explore it, test how it works and see if others can be taught or if it occurs naturally even if in different forms?
There’s no shortage of world-changing discoveries originating in dreams or reverie—that altered state of consciousness where logic takes a back seat. It happens by chance though—usually when the person is emotionally and intellectually engaged in a subject or relationship– and it’s not typically known about until the person’s credibility is well established—even if then. How much more power, potential and knowledge might we discover if Western culture embraced this human capability and learned to work with it?
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
by Christina Leimer | Researching Consciousness for Social Change
I’ve been interested in alternative states of consciousness, non-religious spirituality, and social justice most of my life. The first two have been inward focused, and the latter outer. So I’ve experienced and thought about them separately. In the last few years, it started feeling like they need to be brought together. They’re such different states of mind and existence though, I’ve struggled with how to do it.
covered bridge near the town where I was born
I think a lot about culture and big systems, and I notice their effects on individuals. Our political system, the economic system, healthcare, technology, education, our food and water supply, energy, social safety net. They’re so huge, it some times feels overwhelming, like we’re trapped by them. How can individuals affect those systems?
Asking that question is what connected my lifelong interests. We can’t use the same thinking that got us into this mess to get us out. Somebody who’s credible and famous said that. I don’t remember who. Probably Einstein. He gets quoted a lot.
Regardless, that led me to another question: Where do we find different ways of thinking? What I realized is, the thinking, the ways of knowing and experiencing the world that exist in dreams, imagining and intuition are definitely different than our usual methods–analytical, technical, linear, progress-at-all-costs mentality.
So, why not explore those different ways of knowing to see what they can tell us about how to change these gargantuan systems? Voilà! My research question was born.
Want to come along on this journey? I’m happy to have traveling companions.
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
