Transpersonal

Anthropology

Anthropologists have long known that alternative states of consciousness (ASC;

see Tart, 1975; Zinberg, 1977; Laughlin, McManus & dAquili, 1990; Cardena,
Lynn & Krippner, 2000) are an important factor in the lives of peoples all over
the planet. For instance, during the latter 1960s, Erika Bourguignon (1973,
Bourguignon & Evascu, 1977), an anthropologist at Ohio State University,
completed a number of holocultural studies of ASC using samples of cultures
drawn from George Peter Murdocks Ethnographic Atlas (1967). In these
studies she found that roughly 90% of the 488 societies sampled exhibit
institutionalized techniques for evoking trance states of various kinds. In
virtually all of these cases, alternative states of consciousness were considered
by peoples to be both positive and sacred in nature. These data are so
impressive that it has lead scholars to suggest that our species seems to have an
inherent drive to alter its state of consciousness in often extraordinary ways (see
e.g., Young & Goulet, 1994, Forman, 1998). Biogenetic structuralism has been
involved for decades in developing an explanation for the ubiquity and
importance of culturally prescribed ASC and certain common trans-cultural
elements of traditional cosmologies related to ASC. We have taken the
view that all religions are grounded to some extent in reality. That is why many
structural elements of traditional cosmologies are similar and why the ritual
induction of culturally sanctioned ASC is often able to bring individual
experiences into greater accord with transculturally shared elements of an eidetic
cosmology by way of a sociocultural feedback loop we have modeled as a "cycle
of meaning." We have shown how experiences generated during alternative
states of consciousness may help to maintain a minimal level of realism in the
interests of socio-physiological adaptation to what is otherwise a transcendental
reality.
Monophasic and Polyphasic Cultures
There is a distinction that is very important for us to make, and to keep
in mind when dealing with indigenous peoples--the difference
between monophasic and polyphasic cultures. In modern materialist Western
cultures, children are typically taught to disattend alternative states such as their
dreams and to focus on adaptational interactions with the external physical
world. Children are taught from infancy that dreams are not real (Its just a
dream, dear, go back to sleep), and thus they just happen and can be
ignored. Elementary schools typically do not address ones dream life, and
information obtained in dreams, if any, bears little or no relevance to the waking
world. Taking psychotropic substances is proscribed, and participation in ritual
activities designed to alter consciousness are limited to sports and
dances. Dreams and other ASC, therefore, tend not to inform culture all that
much, especially with respect to spiritual issues. These Western societies
exhibit what we call monophasic cultures (Laughlin, McManus and dAquili
1990:293; Laughlin and Throop 2001; McManus, Laughlin and Shearer 1993;
LaHood 2007; Saniotis 2010; Rodd 2006) which tend to skew the development
of consciousness away from ASC and toward perceptual and cognitive processes
oriented outward to the external world.[1] Tara Lumkin (2001) has argued that
monophasic societies operate to limit perceptual diversity among its members:
In the same way, I see monophasic consciousness as one part of perceptual
diversitythe part based on waking rational thought and the scientific method.
But the entire system of consciousness is far more complex and, in breaking it
down and valuing only one of its parts, waking rational consciousness, one loses
the value of the whole. I propose that in disavowing polyphasic consciousness
(perceptual diversity), we may be losing the emergent properties of polyphasic
consciousness. Coming from developed Western cultures, which highly value
monophasic consciousness and the scientific method, we may not even be aware
of what we are losing. And it is altered states of consciousness, which speak
through symbols and intuition such as dreaming, imagining, and meditating, that
often allow us to grasp the whole in a way that the scientific method can never
provide.
The implication here is that by developing a monophasic culture, as society is in
effect reducing its adaptational viability.
Monophasic orientation towards dreaming leaves its mark on the
research and accounts of Western anthropologists for whom dreams must often
be demythologized in order for them to become meaningful that is, the dream
must make sense to rational thought in the waking state to make any sense at
all.[2] I think this fact in part explains much of the attraction of Freudian dream
analysis, because one need not pay serious attention to the manifest content of
dreams, or to the sociocultural repercussion of dreams. Yet so extreme is the
disattention to ASC in our Western European societies that complementary
spiritual movements have arisen over time to assuage the sense of spiritual
poverty felt by many movements that include those focused on dreaming and
other alternative states.
The state of affairs among modern, industrial, Western European
societies stands in sharp contrast to both our own pre-industrial history and the
pre-industrial histories of other modern, industrial societies such as Japan, China
and Brazil during which dreaming and other ASC were highly valued. People
in the medieval and early modern period often saw dreams as communications
from God or from the Devil. For the ancients, dreams were perhaps more like
visitations. Dreams might predict the future or carry messages (Pick and Roper
2004:3; see also Parman 1991:Chap. 2 and 3; Kruger 2005). Aside from
Western European societies, there are in excess of 4,000 cultures on the planet
today, and roughly 90% of them seek out and value experiences had in ASC, and
especially in dreams (Bourguignon 1973; Bourguignon and Evascu 1977).
We call these polyphasic cultures, meaning that they value experiences
had in the dream-life, as well as those had in trance states, meditation states,
drug- and ordeal-driven visions, etc. (see Locke and Kelly 1985). I am not
imposing a logical-type distinction between monophasic and polyphasic cultures
here I wish to imply rather that there are also societies whose dream cultures
are intermediate between extreme monophasic and polyphasic systems, and that
societies do, in fact, range from no interest in dreaming to intense interest in
dreaming with every combination in between. What I do wish to show is that
there exists a kind of watershed between the two extremes where disattention to
ASC altogether will produce an extremely monophasic standpoint, identity and
culture conjoined to an extremely materialistic political economy.
I also recognize that there are individuals, indeed groups and professions,
within Western society that are into their dreams or practice drug and non-
drug methods of altering their consciousness to some extent. But polyphasic
cultures are quite different from the one to which most of us Westerners are
familiar. These are societies in which dream and other extraordinary
experiences are often conceived by most people as different aspects of
reality, not unreality (indeed, most people on the planet, even those in
monophasic cultures, rarely if ever make a distinction between experienced
reality and extramental reality). Their sense of identity incorporates memories
of experiences had in dreams and other ASC, as well as had in waking
life. Indeed, the people may not have a word in their native tongue that exactly
glosses dream in the precise Indo-European sense (Basso 1992; Merrill
1992:199). What we call a dream may be considered by others to be
the polyphasic ego (soul, spirit, shadow, etc.) of a person experiencing another
domain of reality (e.g., Herr 1981:334 on fuzzy boundaries among Fijians
between what we call dream, hallucination and vision; Merrill 1992 on this issue
among the Rammiru of Mexico). Dream experiences, just as waking
experiences, inform the society's general system of knowledge about the self and
the world, as well as the development of a persons identity (see Ridington and
Ridington 1970). One can thus understand why ethnographer Jean-Guy
Goulets Guajiro (a South American people) hosts would not allow him to live
with them unless he knew how to dream (1994:22). One may also understand
why the anthropology of dreaming has for generations focused upon polyphasic
cultures, perhaps because they are so at-odds with our Western everyday and
materialist expectations (see Lang 1897; Kennedy and Langness 1981; Lincoln
1935; ONell 1976; Shulman and Stroumsa 1999b; Tedlock 1992a, 2003; von
Grunebaum 1966; Lohmann 2003a; Mageo 2003a; Stewart 2004a, 2004b;
Woods and Greenhouse 1974).

[More to come]

We were unaware of psychologist, J.S. Szymanskis use of the terms

[1]

monophasic and polyphasic sleep when we coined the terms in the 80s.
[2]
Demythologization is a tip-off to the monophasic conditioning of the
researcher who feels the necessity to impose an etic analysis to tease out the
dreams significance. Typical of such analyses is the distinction between the
manifest content of the dream (the dream as experienced by the dreamer) and
the latent content of the dream (the supposed unconscious motivation
underlying the dream). Monophasic dream analysis generally requires the
imposition of a Western theory of dreaming, identity and self for the meaning to
become clear. This is not to say that there may not be unconscious processes
going on in the dream indeed there probably are such processes operating in
every dream but the methods used by ethnologists have frequently masked the
natives own dream theory. Moreover, if the people are routinely lucid in their
dreaming, the experiences will be inherently meaningful because working
memory and thought are incorporated in the process. My own bias is a more
transpersonal one that embraces the fact that in many societies ones identity is
essentially polyphasic that ones identity transcends the limits of the waking
ego structure (Laughlin 1989, 1994a; Laughlin, McManus and Shearer 1983,
1993; Walsh and Vaughan 1980), and that the natives understanding of
dreaming may be couched in transpersonal terms (see Obeyesekere 1990:65-68;
Ewing 1994 on this issue).