Conference Report: Altered Consciousness 1918 - 1980 (Day One - 16/11/2013))
Altered Consciousness is a great title for a conference. Its cross disciplinary nature means you might end up talking to a parapsychologist, a literary scholar, a theatre director, an art student or a scholar of Christian mystical poetry - as I did over the course of the one day I was there (it went on for two days but sadly I had to miss the very interesting talks on day 2).
It is a certain lens through which to see many different facets of human experience and creativity. It meant that the while the papers presented ranged in subject from Aldous Huxley to pregnant embodiment in 1960s American cinema, they were united by a certain thread, a certain way of approaching the subject matter at hand.
Itâs a thread I found very compelling, and I had a great day. What follows are my impressions of what was said, as much as for my own reference as anyone elseâs. Apparently videos of talks should be up on the website in the new year, and right now you can see the full abstract of each paper there - which is recommended if you find anyone particularly interesting. Any mistakes in what is rendered below are more than likely my own.
The day began with an introduction from main organiser Katy Price, a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London, where the conference was held. She said the conference was resulted from the experiment of putting the title âaltered consciousnessâ out there and seeing what stuck - and that she was surprised with the large response she received.
Then it was straight into a paper reading Walter Mathiesonâs novel What Dreams May Come through near death experience (NDE) narratives of the 1970s, presented by American Literature lecturer Jennie Chapman.
The book is about one manâs experiences in the afterlife (âSummerlandâ) after his death in a car crash, and his subsequent journey to the âlower realmsâ to rescue his wife who, unable to cope with his death, has killed herself. This is no ordinary fantasy novel; the introduction states âthat only one aspect of it is fictional: the characters and their relationshipsâ. The rest is as informed by esoteric lore on the after death experience as it the research carried out at the time by the likes of Raymond Moody, who in his 1975 book Life After Life documented dozens of such experiences.
Iâve only seen the sentimentalised film adaptation of What Dreams May Come, which stars a furiously emoting Robin Williams whose character is in a constant state of either sobbing anguish, giddy euphoria or pissed off righteousness and is certainly worth a watch as a curio and for its big budget depiction of the afterlife. Chapman didnât mention the film (she wisely hasnât seen it) but instead gave an interesting insight into NDE research around that time and how it was being approached in a clinical setting from a more scientific paradigm.
The ability to study this kind of experience in this way had only relatively recently been made possible by advances in technology which could monitor brain activity and more reliably bring people back from the brink. Research also relied on the subjective accounts of the experiencers, and these began conforming to a series or pattern documented here.
Chapman warned that some researchers would ask leading questions in their interviews (e.g. âdid you see a tunnel?â) and so perpetuate what was becoming a familiar narrative structure. She reckoned that it is important to remember that what these accounts are not exploring death itself (as in Mathesonâs novel). Rather they are exploring the boundary between life and death, the place just before the point of no return.
By definition, she said, the only way we can talk about what happens when we die is if we have died. This provoked a lively debate in the audience about the philosophy and definition of death: how do we know that someone wonât come back to life at some point in the far future, how do we know for sure they are permanently dead?
Philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark spoke about Colin Wilson and his novel 1967 the Mind Parasites. For the uninitiated, the multi-talented and iconoclastic Wilson has written many a novel with lurid title but uses them to explore philosophical ideas and different states of consciousness within a page-turning narrative.
Apparently Mind Parasites is one of the books he wrote after somehow mildly insulting HP Lovecraft and being challenged to do something better if he was so smart. It consequently is set within the Cthulhu mythos of old gods who created the world and want it back, but with a Wilson-ian spin.
Some blurb: âFor over 200 years, mind parasites have been lurking in the deepest layers of human consciousness, feeding on human life force and steadily gaining a foothold on the planet. Now they threaten humanity's extinction. They can be fought with one weapon only: the mind, pushed to--and beyond--its limits.â
Clark expertly evoked the central issues in the text, bringing the audience into a confrontation with âobjective existenceâ - a kind of consciousness of the vastness of the universe and our insignificance within it.
He explained that it was perhaps bad enough that the universe could be seen as indifferent, but for it to be actively malevolent as in Lovecraftâs view was true terror. He also compared the mind parasitesâ malevolent but hidden influence to that of a bottle of Laphroig whiskey - a brand he enjoyed but which made him unaccountably angry whenever he drank it.
It reminded me how much of an interesting writer Wilson is - able to grapple with existential philosophy, altered states of consciousness, and literary theory and place them into a sprawling and diverse body of work. The core of his philosophy is not pessimistic but strangely joyful - an embracing of objective reality and a taking of sustenance from it. This site has a good introduction to his oeuvre.
Fernando Vidal and Vincent Barras spoke about HĂŠlène Smith, a medium who was studied by Swiss psychologist Flournoy and later by Waldemar Deonna. The paper focused on Deonnaâs book From the Planet Mars to the Holy Land. Art and the Subconscious. A Painter Medium HĂŠlène Smith, and specifically paintings of scenes and characters from the Holy Land during the time of Christ that she was prompted to paint by her spirit guide.
These scenes would appear in her mind and she would faithfully recreate what she saw in 15 - 30 minute painting sessions. The pictures, which in their rendering bear the influence of Byzantine art, were thus formed after a sequence of these sessions. There were over 60 for her painting of Judas standing on a mountainside, which were carefully documented and related to Deonna
Smithâs ambiguous relationship to the medium of photography was explored in the session. She used it to document how her paintings developed, which was often from a set of eyes floating in the centre of the page and then working outwards from there. She would also spend time filling in the intricate backgrounds that were presented to her in vision - backgrounds that would at times be mostly obscured by figures in the foreground that later appeared.
Photographs also served to document the strange threads of energy or âfluidic bloomsâ that would appear in the room just before the commencement of a session, and remain there to its end - though the examples presented didnât have any obvious ectoplasmic or other activity occurring in them. However she was also opposed to reproduction of her works and guarded them closely against photography and unscrupulous distribution.
After lunch (provided) and a wander past the Jewish graveyard that lies within the Queen Mary University campus, its cracked grey Hebrew etchings incongruously surrounded on all sides by squat university blocks, there was a choice of sessions. I spurned the subject of Aldous Huxley for an intriguing sounding set of talks that combined surrealism and mysticism - disparate in their focus but again united in their altered states.
Gavin Parkinson took an interesting look at the uneasy relationship between Surrealism and parapsychology. This was all fairly new to me, but two very familiar faces were Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier the authors of hugely successful French tome of âfantastic realismâ the Morning of the Magicicans.
Andre Breton in particular as keen to look more into what seemed like paranormal occurrences in his life by getting contemporary parapsychologists involved. His interest in the paranormal was also evinced by the intriguing sounding text Magie Quotidienne which outlined a series of strange coincidences in his life .
Yiyi LĂłpez GĂĄndara took on British Surrealist Mark Gascoyne - not a well known figure but a very interesting one who developed ânew and radical methods of poetic creation in British literatureâ.
Gascoye subscribed to the Surreaist credo of âliberating the repressed drives through liberation of the unconsciousâ and, as I understand it, had a dissatisfaction with the feeling of âsomething missing in existenceâ - perhaps a common complaint for people who are interested in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
He wasnât completely satisfied by the ideologies of Marxism or Freudianism where other artists of the time found succour, and rather had faith in the art of the poet: âthe possibility of redeeming existence through the secret power of the Word.â We were left with an image of Gascoyne grappling with the a absent God and the absurdity of existence, not willing to buy into anything any system in particular but using the methods and techniques of surrealism to find or render something to make him whole.
Jamie Callison did a fascinating talk on approaches to Christian mysticism with particular relevance to Evelyn Underhill and her classic work Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, which, it should be noted, has a more engaged, practical slant rather than being the detached historical overview you might think it is.
From Callisonâs abstract:
"The use the theorist of mysticism Evelyn Underhill makes of a term taken from the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, the âgroundâ or âspark of the soul,â will be carefully assessed and placed in the context of critical debate in the period as to whether the âsparkâ should be construed as a faculty created within a soul or something that remained with God. Underhill, it will be argued, interpreted the âsparkâ as a created faculty in order to counter Jamesian understandings of mysticism. This was achieved through construing the âsparkâ as a psychological component and focusing on the importance of redirecting psychical energy in a manner which evinces a debt to F. W. H. Myers."
Underhill wanted to recover the potential of human spiritual qualities below the the threshold of consciousness - an opposing view to that of God somehow âcoming inâ from outside. Callison was asked about a feminist take on Underhillâs work, and he gave an interesting answer that Underhillâs approach - an individualist one, sort of like a mystical self help manual, played against the typical patriarchal power of the church. An interior interpretation versus the more established penetration - I suppose - by the divine from without.
I didnât know that May Sinclair was the first person to use a stream of consciousness technique in her writing. I didnât know much about her at all in fact, but Leslie de Bont gave an insightful talk on how altered consciousness and indeed her particular mysticism played out in her writing.
âShe was also a psychology and philosophy scholar, and her essays reveal her peculiar idiosyncratic positions on what she calls âthe ultimate realityâ, which draws on Spinozaâs notion of God, Bradley and Greenâs conceptions of the Absolute, Schopenhauerâs will-to-live, Freudâs Nirvana principles and Jungâs concept of Libido as well as his comparative studies of mythology.â
A big part of it is the sublimation of the libido. By sublimating it into something like art, religion, or science one contributes to the eventual evolution of humanity and in some way makes room for the divine.
This sublimation can also have its downsides and result in pathological altered states. Sinclair is on the look out for âfailed mysticsâ and found more in the West than the East, due perhaps in part to their reliance on conventional notions of morality and intellectual structures. I liked how Sinclair looked for these moments of divine revelation, which sounded much like what Maslow would come to term peak experiences, but didnât shy away how they werenât always all love and light.
The next two talks specifically explored embodiment from two very different perspectives. Tanojiri Tetsuro had come from Japan to talk about Japanese bodywork system Noguchi-Seitai and in particular its Tenshin (âmind of the universe conceptâ). It is a complex system which was created in 1927 and uses movement, breathing and posture to facilitate release and full engagment with Ki or life energy - âthere is no longer the presence of mind and body, only the presence of the kiâ he explained.
Tetsuro outlined the strong influence of theosophy on the system, brought in to strengthen it against the state sponsored religion of the time. Along with other influences, it became a true hybrid of Japanese and Western thought.
Most exciting to watch were Tetsuroâs videos of Noguchi-Seitai in action. They began with preparatory exercises, moved to a solo practice and then work in a pair. I was struck by the how controlled slow movement and breathing was contrasted with sudden spasming release - the practitioner would slowly breath in and twist her spine (lumbar release is very important in the system) before suddenly spinning herself back.
There was a sense of controlled chaos in the moves, and it was interesting to hear that the moves were only to be done to a backdrop of classical music. This apparently has the requisite structure and balance needed for this particular system, though Tetsuro hinted that the steady beat of rock music could be used in a related, seemingly more Dionysian, system.
Witnessing his wife giving birth changed American filmmaker Stan Brakhageâs consciousness, said Sophie Jones in her paper on pregnant embodiment in 1960s cinema. I keep running into Brakhage so it was good to get some insight into his work and notions of âpre cultural closed eye visionâ - a way of seeing that we have lost thanks to the vision-rules that have been imposed upon us by our immersion in culture.
We heard about two of his films on the subject. The first, Window Water Baby Moving (1959) consists of quickly intercut scenes of his wife alternately heavily pregnant and then giving birth. The second more explicitly displayed the altered state of consciousness, or âcrisis consciousnessâ he experienced by working directly with the film and inscribing the impressionistic patterns he is famous for - patterns like those he experienced moving âout through the mind via the optic nerves.â
And finally, Jeffery Kripal. He is the âJ. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he chaired the Department of Religious Studies for nine years and helped create the GEM Program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism that is among the largest program of its kind in the world.â
He also did the keynote at the event. His position was a reimagining of the imagination. His focus was around alien abduction experiences - a topic that he has turned to in recent years and one he believes is valid for a scholar of religion. As he points out, the ambiguity of the experiences - traumatising and enlightening - reflects the ambiguous nature of an earlier conception of sacredness and its power. A sacredness so powerful that a temple was built to protect the people from it as much as to protect it from the people.
Kripal knows Whitley Strieber, author of the wildly successful 1987 abduction memoir Communion (it had a âgreyâ on the cover and solidified this alien in popular consciousness). Streiberâs told him that his experiences had been deeply informed by the science fiction movies heâd seen as a youth.
Hereâs the key thing: Kripal doesnât use this as evidence to dismiss Streiberâs account as therefore an unreliable fiction. He stays with the subjectivity and explores the notion that something was âcoming throughâ but that it was using that which was available to it - a store of sci fi movies - to make itself known.
Once details of it were recalled under hypnosis, the experience was revealed to be a violent and and unpleasant one So, said Streiber to Kripal: âwe should make better science fiction movies so that people have better abduction experiences in the futureâ. Or, the religious imagination shapes religion.
His wide ranging talk drew on the work of Frederic Myers, Theodore Flournoy, C. G. Jung, and Henri Corbin, and seemed to claim paranormal experiences as the domain of the developing human being - possibly the evolution of ourselves. It took in everything from Mark Twainâs precognitive dream about the death of his brother to an explanation of why telepathy doesnât work in the lab (it needs heightened emotion for it to work).
Kripal reminded us that the visual quality of a mystical or alien abduction experience is already at one remove from its reality. Our perception of our visual field is already a layer of interpretation. Itâs worth remembering that altered states also manifest as embodied sensations, very often a vibration, or even an activation of the human sexual circuit. This is an interaction directly with the human sensory experience, perhaps requiring a lower level of mediation than the imagination.
The imaginal is also the adult stage of an insect; a stage characterised by being very different from its larval form - e.g. a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. To a caterpillar on a leaf, the butterfly landing by it may seem alien in its structure and transitory in its nature, as it quickly flutters off again. Can parallels be drawn between this and the human alien abduction experience/encounter with the sacred? Are these encounters the result of humans experiencing the âfaceâ of evolution, and is evolution in fact a âmachine for the making of godsâ?
As you can see, Kripalâs paper took in some pretty far out stuff. However as both my impression of him as a person and his academic credentials testify, he is not someone who has somehow âgone off the deep endâ and got lost in a particular belief system or structure. Rather he is someone who is brave enough to explore what could be possible.
Like the conference itself he draws links between disparate academic disciplines to open up new ways of seeing long established topics, and by doing so throws fresh light on them. He rightly complains that often in academia itâs seemingly the most âdepressingâ theories that are respected and seen as professional, while a more positive slant is derided (which makes me think again of Colin Wilson and the short shrift he received for moving from existentialism to a study of the occult, though he would later unite the two in his Beyond the Occult book).
As Kripal says, something is happening to us. A door seems to be opening. But is it us who are moving through it, or are we opening it up for something else to enter?
