8 - Religiously Interpreted States of Consciousness

The novel interpretation of resurrection introduced into scripture by Daniel 12:2-3 became justified through the atypical means whereby it was imparted, in a revelatory dream vision. The author designates Daniel’s experience as a Religiously Interpreted State of Consciousness (RISC), a commonplace phenomenon. Terms for related conditions are altered states of consciousness (ASC) and religiously altered states of consciousness (RASC). These categorizations are varieties od religious ecstasy, a type of altered state of consciousness characterized by greatly reduced external awareness and reportedly expanded interior mental and spiritual awareness, frequently accompanied by visions and emotional (and sometimes physical) euphoria. Although the experience is usually brief in time, there are records of such experiences lasting several days or even more, and of recurring experiences of ecstasy during a person's lifetime. The vision of Daniel that describes resurrection was a waking vision, a special state of consciousness that is detailed in Daniel 10:1-10:

In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters. In those days I Daniel was mourning three full weeks. I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth, neither did I anoint myself at all, till three whole weeks were fulfilled. And in the four and twentieth day of the first month, as I was by the side of the great river, which is Hiddekel; Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz:  His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in color to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude. And I Daniel alone saw the vision: for the men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves. Therefore I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground. And, behold, an hand touched me, which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands.

Using the term Religiously Interpreted State of Consciousness to describe this episode exempts researchers from having to precisely identify the precise nature of Daniel’s vision (real, imagined, hallucinatory, or false). The visionary believed in the truth of his vision. Many others have also accepted it as truth. In the Second Temple period, ecclesiastical authorities believed that prophecy was either a product of the distant past or a phenomenon that belonged to an eschatological future era. Contemporary prophets were all regarded as fakes. The sects, however, that produced the Book of Daniel, the Dead Sea scrolls, and the New Testament believed that the end of the world was imminent, so true prophets, and true prophecies would emerge. No officially sanctioned outlet existed that permitted the custodians of this new dispensation to share their insights with others. The nature of these visions is described in a passage excerpted from Elliot R. Wolfson’s study of Merkabah mysticism, “Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism.” On pages 108-109 Wolfson writes:

Bearing the inherently symbolic nature of the visionary experience in mind, we can now set out to answer another question that has been posed by scholars with regard to the visionary component of this literature. Did the Merkabah mystics actually ascend to the celestial realm and did they see something “out there,” or should these visions be read as psychological accounts of what may be considered in Freudian language as a type of self-hypnosis? Or, to suggest a third alternative, would it perhaps be more accurate to describe the heavenly journey in Jungian terms, as a descent into and a discovery of the archetypal self?

From a straightforward reading of extant sources it would appear that some texts assume a bodily ascent, a translation into the heavenly realm of the whole person with all the sensory faculties intact, whereas others assume an ascent of the soul or mind separated from the body as the result of a paranormal experience such as a trance-induced state. But even in the case of the latter explanation, typified most strikingly in “Hekhalot Rabbati” in the story concerning the recall of R. Nahuniah ben Ha-Quanah from his ecstatic trance, it is evident that the physical states are experienced in terms of tactile and kinesthetic gestures and functions appropriate to the body, such as the fiery gyrations of the eyeballs, ascending and descending, entering and exiting, standing and sitting, singing and uttering hymns, looking and hearing.

These mystical ascents upward had a salutary effect on the mystic and on whatever society they were associated with, or they would not have been practiced and supported. Wolfson points out that there is a complex relationship between texts and visionary experiences in sectarian communities. Experiences grow out of texts, and texts grow out of experiences. Visions and dreams are like the two sides of a single coin. Most people dream, but since the body does not produce hormones important for memory while asleep, what is remembered upon awakening may not be the dream itself, but a rationalized, imperfect recollection of it. In a culture that regards dreams as revelatory, however, an effort would be made to recall them more precisely.

Dreams are related to our daily experiences, a nocturnal method the brain uses to process and categorize events that occur during our waking hours. Dreamers who had devoted most of their day to the study of texts describing ascents to heaven would likely have dreams based on these texts. A few people can direct the content of a dream while it is unfolding, a phenomenon known as “lucid dreaming.” Oral or written accounts of dreams that do not precisely align with the expectations of a religious community could be modified to better conform to sectarian doctrine. Mysterious phenomena like dreams, common to all humanity, are evaluated by the religious and cultural context of the dreamer. Altered waking states, such as visions, ecstasy, or out-of-body experiences are explained by a culture by its available religious and mythological mechanisms. This criterion is used to determine if a visionary is sane, somewhat less than sane, or possibly completely insane.

A normal component of the process of dreaming for some dreamers is variously termed the “hypnagogic state” or the “hypnopompic state” depending on whether it is experienced upon entering sleep or when a sleeper first awakens. This state is susceptible to conscious suggestion. Psychoanalyst Dan Merkur used this stage of the sleep cycle as the basis for his analysis of Gnosticism entitled “Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions.” Page 52 of this work contains an extended quote by Robert Desoilles, creator of Directed Daydream therapy, who initially believed that he was the first to discover, as the result of occult practices, the phenomenon of lucid hypogogia. Desoilles writes:

The conditions for the phenomenon were two; (a) drowsiness, (b) an effort to think. The former is a condition not subject to will, the latter an active one manipulatable by the will. It is the struggle of these two antagonistic elements that elicits the experience which I call the “autosymbolic” phenomenon. It can be described as a hallucinatory experience which puts forth “automatically,” as it were, an adequate symbol for what is thought (or felt) at a given instance. The “autosymbilic” phenomenon comes about only in a transitional state between sleep and waking.

Prophetic dreams are common to every world culture but were especially significant in the ancient world, particularly for Christianity and Judaism. Late night vigils facilitated the onset of hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of consciousness. Dreams as a form of divine communication were universally accepted in the Hellenistic era. Modern appraisal of their validity, or of their worthlessness, do not negate their value to societies that existed thousands of years ago.

Visions of an ascent to the realm of the gods persist today in the guise of shamanism, which many scholars believe is the primordial religion of this planet. Professor of Comparative Religion Mircea Eliade’s studies of shamanism remain influential, even though some of his theories have not withstood the test of time. Eliade suggested that ascent and possession/trance were united with healing in shamanism. Subsequent field research demonstrated that possession, trance, ascent, and other characteristics of shamanism are independent variables, even though they may appear to correlate in various times and places. Shamanism pervades the world, but may have arisen spontaneously in distant locales, not as the result of global diffusion from a single point of origen.

The revelatory dreams of Daniel, as well as those of his client Nebuchadnezzar, are mirrored in First Enoch 14:2-3:  

I saw in my sleep what I will now say with a tongue of flesh and with the breath of my mouth: which the Great One has given to men to converse therewith and understand with the heart. As He has created and given to man the power of understanding the word of wisdom, so hath He created me also and given me the power of reprimanding the Watchers, the children of heaven.

Enoch, like Daniel, receives this vision in his sleep and then shares it with others. The apocryphal Testament of Levi describes a similar occurrence:

And I was grieving for the race of the sons of men, and I prayed to the Lord that I might be saved. Then there fell upon me a sleep, and I beheld a high mountain, and I was upon it. And behold the heavens were opened and an angel of God said to me, Levi enter, And I entered from the first heaven, and I saw there a great sea hanging. And further I saw a second heaven far brighter and more brilliant, for there was a boundless light also therein.

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham experiences a portentous vision while he is fast asleep. Abrahams slumbers are interrupted by a waking vision described in Genesis 15:12-18:

And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him., And he [God] said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.

Fourth Ezra describes three techniques that can facilitate an ascent to the heavens: fasting, eating flowers of the field, and drinking a fiery liquid. The last of these techniques, consuming a fiery liquid, may reflect the Persian tradition of imbibing psychedelic drugs to serve as a magical memory potion to facilitate the remembrance of scripture. Fasting is a proven method for the introduction of an altered state of consciousness. Whether or not ingesting the “flowers of the field” engendered psychotropic effects is unknown, but the author mentions the presence of a plethora of mind-altering substances that grew wild, in profusion, around the Mediterranean Sea including poppies, henbane, marijuana, and jimson weed.  

The singing of hymns was the most important means of achieving ascent in the Merkabah texts. Repetitive mantras are the mainstay for achieving an altered state of consciousness in Buddhism and Hinduism. Jewish texts do not emphasize hymnody, but intent, concentrated, and repetitive hymn singing occurs throughout the non-canonical scriptures. The Hekhahloth Rabbati prescribes that that an ascent be preceded by 112 recitations of a certain psalm, no more, and no less.

Much research has been conducted on the various neurological states that may underlie religious and other anomalous experiences. Whether these states arise spontaneously or are elicited through a trance-inducing technique, they can be distinguished from the hallucinations caused by mental illness. The book “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief” by Andrew Newberg, Eugene d’Aquili and Vince Rause concludes that the religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the human brain. Rare states of cognition involve deafferentation or disinhibition, two terms for a misfunction in the brain when nerve fibers fire erratically and stop sending meaningful signals to the central nervous system. This phenomenon can be detected using a variety of brain-imaging techniques, When it does occur, subjects who are being imaged report unusual experiences which, in some context, can be interpreted religiously. Occurrences where both the right and left parietal lobes of the brain are neutralized can lead to a unitive mystical experience, the perception of a state of union with God.

Proprioception is the body’s mysterious ability to locate our limbs, even in darkness. When medical imaging detects that a subject’s proprioception centers are quiet, they report that they can no longer perceive their body’s location, but instead have a distinct feeling of bodiless motion in space. While these “out of body” experiences can be imperfectly explained physiologically, the content of these episodes (a journey to heaven, for example) is shaped by the religious beliefs and context of the subjects. It is not difficult for mystics, shamans, and even average people to train themselves to obtain this altered state of consciousness. All that differentiates common instances of deafferentation or disinhibition from mystical visions is the extent of the religiosity of the visionary. Similar physiological conditions may account for what is termed a “near-death” experience. Traumatized people on the brink of death become disinhibited and often perceive a long, dark tunnel with a light shining at its far end. The author attributes this particular vision to a malfunction in the optical centers of the brain.

In apocalyptic texts, it is often difficult to distinguish literary from mystical content. One means of doing this is to examine the extent of a religious innovation and determine if is small enough to possibly represent an instance of exegesis, or great enough that it could only be the result of a vision. In the Book of Daniel, the two manifestations of God (“ancient of days” and the “Son of Man”) is innovative enough to have been a remembrance of an actual dream. Revelatory authority was claimed for this vision because the conceivably heretical conception of two beings who represent the same God was unprecedented. Exegesis plays an important part in apocalyptic writings, since those who produced these works were steeped in holy writ. It has been noted that the Book of Revelation is impossible to understand without first possessing a thorough knowledge of the Old Testament. In dream visions, the seer had assimilated details of biblical texts into their memory beforehand which naturally became integrated into narratives of their ascent to heaven.

Jews of the two centuries that marked the transition between BCE and CE took religiously induced states of consciousness, ecstatic experiences, and trance states seriously as a medium for revelation. Preceding ancient cultures similarly acknowledged these mental states as being mystically descriptive of the way in which humans resembled God, and, conversely, how God could become manifested in human form, beliefs that pervaded Jewish culture and enriched Jewish spirituality. Hellenistic era use of terms describing the physical translation of bodies into heaven, as well as the literary translation of biblical texts, were known to the apostle Paul and became central to his explanations of what Christianity is, and what it is not.

In apocalypticism, heavenly ascents confirm that God’s cosmos operates on moral principles even though the enemies of God and of the sect apparently exercise temporal power in an arrogant and high-handed manner. An expected end will soon occur. The dead will be resurrected (a concept first introduced by Daniel) and sinners will be judged. Visionaries like Daniel serve as verifiers of this eschatological scenario, just as preceding prophets had similarly experienced less detailed glimpses of heaven. Altered states of consciousness experienced by Hebrew visionaries were an alternative means of describing Greek conceptions of the immortality of the soul. Platonic and Aristotelian ideas that the soul was the seat of the intellect are negated by modern conceptions that intellect is a product of the perishable grey matter of our brains. Souls are a psychic, rather than a physical attribute. The author provides an extended quote by Erich Rohde that describes Greek philosophical beliefs about the soul both before and after the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle rose to prominence:

What the Ionic philosophers in connection with the rest of their cosmology had to say about the soul of man did not for all its striking novelty bring them into direct conflict with religious opinion. Philosophy and religion used the same words to denote totally different things; it could surprise no one if different things were said about quite different objects.

According to the popular view, which finds expression in Homer, and with which, in spite of their very different estimate of the relative values of body and soul, the religious theory of the Orphics and other theologi also agreed — according to this view the " psyche” was regarded as a unique creature of combined spiritual and material nature that, wherever it may have come from, now dwells within man and there, as his second self, carries on its separate existence, making itself felt when the second self loses consciousness in dream, swoon, or ecstasy. In the same way, the moon and the stars become visible when no longer obscured by the brighter light of the sun. It was already implied in the conception itself that this double of mankind, which could be detached from him temporarily, had a separate existence of its own. It was no very great step from this to the idea that in death, which is simply the permanent separation of the visible man from the invisible, the latter did not perish, but only then became free and able to live by and for itself.

Similar claims are made about souls that experience an apocalyptic ascent, but they describe an afterlife that differs from that of the Greeks. Once the soul could be shown from experience to separate from and return to the body, similar views by the Platonists gained credence. Platonic “proofs” of the immortality of the soul hinged upon the qualities of memory and self-recognition, in other words, our consciousness. The author provides several paragraphs of his personal working definitions of epistemology (the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope):

We now have good physiological evidence that there is no single organ in the brain that corresponds to consciousness. Thus, consciousness is not a single unified phenomenon with a single origin; rather, it is a unitary experience which we effortlessly and unconsciously synthesize from various capacities operating more or less independently in our brains. Consciousness includes perception, cognition, and memory, but also proprioception and a variety of other functions. When organs in the brain are damaged in strokes and injuries, we observe the selective effects on our conscious processes. We may lose the faculty of speech temporarily or permanently, for instance. These are easily correlated with observable damage to areas in the brain, So we now know experimentally what various areas in the brain contribute to consciousness 

We also have the ability to selectively hone consciousness and to perform other tasks without conscious intervention. Almost everyone has had the experience of driving home from work, lost in thought, without being conscious of the process of driving at all and without being able to remember a single moment of it without the utmost concentration. By observation of hypnotic states we also know that consciousness is not continuous but the “breaks” are not always like a “black out” or “blue screen” on a television broadcast. We have breaks in consciousness when we are not aware that we have missed something.

This suggests that consciousness is an emergent property, not inherent to any one organ but something that emerges from the harmonious operation of a series of processes. Because consciousness is emergent and complex, and because consciousness itself can be the subject of thought, we have a felling that I will call “self-consciousness.” Self-consciousness is affected greatly by our cultural understandings of what our consciousness is. Buddhists may not only have different notions of selfhood than Christians; because of these differing religious definitions, their experience of self may well be different. That suggests that there cannot be a simple and single description of self-consciousness. Like Religiously Interpretated States of Consciousness, it is partially a culturally mediated experience. The notion of the soul or the transformed body od apocalypticism really can and does affect how we understand ourselves.

Consciousness is an attribute possessed by animals, but self-consciousness is a human, culturally conditioned phenomenon. Physical anthropologist Daniel Povinelli proposes that higher primates such as chimps, apes, and human beings developed advanced senses of self-awareness to better swing from branch to branch, the better to avoid preditors that stalked the forest floors. Proprioception, the sense that informs us of our position on space, may have developed into culturally mediated conceptions of who we are and how our internal state defines us as individuals. Reference is made to John D. Gottsch, whose views on this topic are expressed in the following abstract of his peer-reviewed article  “Mutation, selection, and vertical transmission of theistic memes in religious canons,“ copied from the  the John Hopkins University website:

A study of ancient and modern Near Eastern religious canons reveals the mutation, selection, and vertical transmission of fitness-enhancing textual units, defined as theistic memes. The earliest recorded theistic memes dealt with human fear of death and defined man's earliest relationship to god. Theistic memes that could theoretically affect fitness through selection and incorporation into religious canons included those dictating beliefs about (a) self-awareness in an unknown world, (b) strategies and behaviors toward others and within the nuclear family, and (c) appropriate sexual behaviors within marriage. Prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution would have further maximized fitness. A remarkable mutation of the ancient Near Eastern theistic meme of child sacrifice is documented in the Old Testament in the story of Abraham and Isaac. Vertically transmitted theistic memes in the Hebrew canon were largely incorporated into Christian and Muslim religious canons (New Testament and Qur'an). Mutations of theistic memes during vertical transmission into these other canons allowed the same fitness-enhancing stability for the gentile and Arabic populations and are notable for the different strategies used to produce homogenized, orthodox canons.

John Gottsch proposes that religion itself may be a response to the development of the self-perception that we as human beings are unique, and that we as human beings must all die. This basic insight fails to explain every aspect of religion but does serve as a partial explanation for conceptions of the afterlife. It is difficult to directly correlate the emergence of these conceptions with the emergence of self-consciousness. This emergence was imaginatively postulated by Juliane Jaynes in his book “The Origen of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” Jaynes proposed that before the Odyssey was written, Greeks could not distinguish between internal and external processes easily because they had not yet developed the phenomenon of the bicameral mind. a “split” brain with each hemisphere allocated to a separate aspect of cognition (the left-brain right-brain dichotomy). Because of this, archaic Greeks easily mistook their own internal voices and cognitions with the voices of gods. A shift occurred between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which Jaynes identifies as a turning point in history (a conceit which the author dismisses, since the assembly of these works was a slow and unsynchronized affair). Ever since the bicameral mind arose in humanity, only transitional or abnormal personalities have exhibited pre-bicameral traits. The author admires this bold hypothesis and its influence on later experimenters but dismisses it for its sloppiness. Despite the author’s reservations, a passage drawn from pages 340-341 of Jaynes’s book is enlightening:

Plato, in the fourth century B.C., has Socrates casually say in the midst of a political discussion that "God-possessed men speak much truth, but know nothing of what they say," as if such prophets could be heard every day around the streets of Athens. And he was very clear about the loss of consciousness in the oracles of his time:

“…for prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none.”

And so in the centuries that follow, supposed possession is the obliteration of ordinary consciousness. Four hundred years after Plato, in the first century A.D., Philo Judaeus categorically states,

“When he (a prophet) is inspired he becomes unconscious; thought vanishes away and leaves the fortress of the soul; but the divine spirit has entered there and taken up its abode; and this later makes all the organs resound so that the man gives clear expression to what the spirit gives him to say.”

The emergence of self-consciousness was traced by scholars in several succeeding ages, but their efforts can be described as glosses on a basic theme that has remained unchanged since the dawn of history. The novels of Henry James represent a high-water mark in this sustained flood, replete with characters who are insufficiently aware of themselves or of the motives of their contemporaries. Although some regard the works of James representative of the West’s most advanced attainment of self-consciousness, the author reminds us that every major milestone James crossed had already been described, thousands of years earlier, in the philosophical writings of Plato. Additional milestones were crossed in the subsequent writings of Plotinus and Augustine, the subject of later chapters, writers who elaborated upon the basic themes of self-consciousness to resolve certain intellectual dilemmas. Through time, eliciting personal experience to better explain humanity’s collective worldview became increasingly dominant

By asserting that the soul is immortal, the Greeks also asserted that our memory and our knowledge is a transcendent and valuable commodity that endures beyond the brief spans of our corporeal lives. By defining the afterlife in terms of the resurrection of the body, apocalyptic writers not only described the purpose of life, but also ennobled martyrdom as an appropriate means of contributing to and hastening the arrival of God’s kingdom. By investigating the undiscovered country of the afterlife, we are actually investigating our own self-consciousness through the mirror of our own culture. The journey to heaven is a journey into our own selves. Conclusions about this journey are reserved by the author for the conclusion of his book, assuming the reader (he jokes) does not die before reaching the book's conclusion. If they do perish beforehand, they will either fall into an unconscious sleep to await final judgement or immediately awaken in heaven or hell, a scenario that is only metaphorically touched upon in the Bible. The New Testament assets that the dead are going to all be resurrected simultaneously. First Thessalonians 4:11-17 is a goodt example of the apostle Paul’s utiization of contemporary Hellenistic eschatological terminology:

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.  For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.  For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.