Entrancement

Description

This study of dreaming, death and shared consciousness develops a context that is humanistic, comparative and evidence-based in its engagement with the work of cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology and the study of the imagination. It also reaches into current research on consciousness at the interface of neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, musicology, computer studies, psychology/parapsychology, literature and cognitive studies, in the process of drawing its content from a range of original writing from diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds.

Preface
‘There’, Ruth Finnegan,
Walking with dragons, Tim Ingold
The double language of dreaming, Barbara Tedlock
Home as dream space, Kate Pahl
In the land of dreams: wives, husbands and dreaming, Irma-Ritta Järvinen and Senni Timonen
Pre-dreaming: telepathy, prophecy and trance, Gerd Baumann with Walo Subsin and doctoral students
Trance and sacred language in religious Daoism, Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew
Everyday trancing and musical daydreams, Ruth Herbert
An angel of modernity: Karlheinz Stockhausen's musical vision, Morag Josephine Grant,
How do singers and other groups synchronise to form communities? Guy Hayward
The un-speak-able language of united sensing: taste the wine! Gianmarco Navarini
Then… Ruth Finnegan
Coda
Further reading
Bibliography

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786830029
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

E NTRANCEMENT
Entrancement
The consciousness of dreaming, music, and the world
edited by Ruth Finnegan -->

University of Wales Press 2017
© The Contributors, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78683-000-5 (hardback)
978-1-78683-076-0 (paperback)
eISBN 978-1-78683-002-9
The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Remembering Alan Sell
that wise human spirit who takes us, still, into and beyond all things earthly
C ONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
There
Ruth Finnegan
Walking with Dragons
Tim Ingold
The Double Language of Dreaming
Barbara Tedlock
In the Land of Dreams: Wives, Husbands and Dreaming
Irma-Riitta Järvinen and Senni Timonen
Home as Dream Space
Kate Pahl
Pre-dreaming: Telepathy, Prophecy and Trance
Gerd Baumann with Walo Subsin et al.
Trance and Sacred Language in Religious Daoism
Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew
Everyday Trancing and Musical Daydreams
Ruth Herbert
An Angel of Modernity: Karlheinz Stockhausen s Musical Vision
Morag Josephine Grant
How do Singers and Other Groups Synchronise to Form Communities?
Guy Hayward
The Un-speak-able Language of United Sensing: Taste the Wine!
Gianmarco Navarini
Then…
Ruth Finnegan
Coda
Further Reading
Bibliography
P REFACE
Until I somehow found myself in the middle of this book I hadn t known that I was interested in what I call (for the moment) the experience of entrancement - extra-sensory perception, separate-togetherness. Nor did I realise that the same is probably true of countless others. Far less did I think it was, or could be, a subject of study. With a wild story-telling and spooky mother from the magical land of Ireland, I should have known better - and perhaps in some reaches of the self I did.
At any rate I began at last to look more directly into the literature, and, equally, into myself. I was increasingly intrigued. I saw that in many ways it was a natural extension of my earlier interests as an anthropologist, historian and (up to a point) classical scholar: in modes of thinking, memory, multi-sensory experiencing, and, perhaps above all, in things that are known, humanly experienced, but somehow, though in plain view, hidden . For me these all emerged as obvious links to my earlier work. More surprisingly but even more profound, it dug deep into my interest in the human-divine arts of quoting and of communicating through allusion, myth and metaphor. This led almost imperceptibly to a more conscious exploration of the significance of dreaming - where most people first find themselves entering this mysterious realm - and of what I might call (again for the moment) the ethereal, noetic and psychic dimensions of human experience. This in turn complements my earlier discussion of quoting, that profound human mechanism for extending memory and contact across time, by some consideration of communicating - communion - across space, or, better put, beyond spatial limitations. It takes us, in some kind of Einsteinian myth, outside time and space into a hidden but fully existent dimension of experience.
The subject is now in many (but far from all) circles accepted as worthy of serious study. But how to pursue it, or the terminology to articulate it, is far from easy (an issue to return to in the final chapter). One way in however is, as here, to draw extensively on the findings and insights of cultural anthropology and related studies. Here, essentially from an interdisciplinary perspective, we can find ourselves in close contact with the detailed, carefully observed and unquestionably real experiences of ordinary people on the ground, allied - this too is needed - with the theoretical insights that link these to the more far-reaching contemporary studies of the mind and the imagination.
The volume also touches, as is necessary, on the burgeoning current research, in this area, especially that on consciousness and mental processes, research that sometimes challenges the very roots of our inbuilt preconceptions. Here we encounter thinking at the interface between neuroscience, anthropology, musicology, scientific theory, psychology and cognitive studies. And if this sounds over-ambitious, I can only say that any exploration of the core topics of the human mind, experience and imagination, and how we make contact with one another, separate but together - all that must necessarily draw something from a wide range of perspectives, inevitably transdisciplinary.
Anthropology, like history, like any truly open-minded discipline, allows, indeed encourages, its readers to treat seriously, and learn something from, unfamiliar beliefs and actions which they would normally dismiss as nonsense or at any rate to which they would attach little or no credence, whether within their own time and culture or elsewhere. Dear reader, I ask you to follow this suspension of belief and pay attention to many things strange and wonderful as you peruse this volume; and to follow the authors here in learning from these creatures and creations of, perhaps, another world.
Old Bletchley, May 2016
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have many thanks to offer, above all to the imaginative University of Wales Press for their preparedness to take on a topic which other established presses shunned. I thank especially their truly wonderful and thoughtful reader who radically (and I mean radically), improved this volume, sticking with it through successive, slowly improving, versions, most significantly of all insisting on the need for a concluding chapter. I salute also all those, past and present, who have worked in this area, including those with whom I disagree (much to learn from them too), as also the many, named and unnamed, from whom I have gained in informal discussion - the Platonic dialogue lives on.
Throughout the years I have had great support from my wonderful institution, the Open University, its library and, specially, from open-minded and friendly colleagues in sociology. I must also mention, with joy, David, my husband of over fifty years, and my sceptical but ever-loving daughters. I think too that our pair of cairn terriers may have had something to do with it - who can tell?
1
There
Ruth Finnegan Department of Sociology, The Open University
Everywhere there is enchantment, it seems, everywhere the rational. In the modern West we have the achievements of science. We also have shamanic trancing, zodiac-inspired name changes, healing workshops, web prophecies of the future, birthdate predictions, all widely advertised and paid for on the internet. We have offers of help with ethereal communicating, swathes of high-selling books on dreaming, returns from death and telepathy, and wide popular interest manifested in everyday conversations once people let their guard down, and by the candid reports from the hundreds-strong Mass Observation panel. 1 There is immense interest, not always openly declared, in the nature and experience of entrancement and of entranced, altered, shared consciousness.
The normality of queer experiences is reinforced when we look at current approaches to human - and other - consciousness described more directly in the concluding chapter of this volume. To some these ideas are blind alleys, misleading. To many, including myself, they are advances in insight, linking the topics of this volume and in doing so bringing new understanding of the ether, the noosphere, the beyond - call it what you will (an issue to return to in the final chapter). So much is now becoming common knowledge for those prepared to open their minds to new understandings and have the perseverance to look.
This chapter, however, shorn of documentary references, is different. As in some other chapters of this book it digs into a single case to move close and deep. The case is my own, and not easy to enunciate. 2 Like many who have tried to speak of their own unusual (but perhaps not so unusual) experience I struggle to communicate it. For a number of reasons I cannot recount all my own experiences or frame them with complete detail. But what I do say is, I promise you, fully candid. Having led, I believe, a truthful life as scholar, as human, why would I now take the trouble to lie?
The first thing to say is that I do not have the vocabulary to describe what I mean by there or my experience of it. It seems to draw on some other sense(s) beyond our usually recognised five : on dreams, visions, perhaps prophecies and certainly telepathy (what some would rather call extra sensory perception , psychic , or the third sense - I myself prefer the term shared minds ). In discussing such phenomena we do indeed seem to reach the limits of our currently agreed linguistic resources. So to describe what to me have by now become somewhat familiar experiences, if still mysterious and not as yet understood even though they are known through my own senses, I have to go a kind of roundabout route. On wings of song I ll bear you , or maybe Stille Nacht , or in the imagery of the medieval mystical poet from Persia , Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field.
I ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
The world is too full to talk about.
I struggle to express myse