Sensing the Invisible with Spiritual Anthropologist Dr. Tanya Luhrmann

Tanya Luhrmann

0:00

And the paracosm means that you can talk about it with other people. And usually in a paracosm, if it’s a religious paracosm, you have to have a way for describing when the invisible being shows up. So first of all, who sees the invisible being? What’s the community here? Then how do you know? Let’s just call it God. How do you know that God is has shown up? What are the signs? Do you feel a certain way? Do you do certain words come to you?

 

Christine Mason

0:30

Hello, everybody. It’s Christine Marie Mason, your host for the rose woman podcast on love and liberation. Have you ever been sitting in a room and suddenly felt a presence, or just a sense that you weren’t alone, or maybe you were in the woods and suddenly you felt like you were suffused with something sacred and beautiful. Did you ever wonder what that was? Or perhaps you were having a moment and you heard a voice, loud as day, say something to you, and you couldn’t tell whether that voice came from outside of you or inside of you. Well, in many ways, these experiences are considered religious or spiritual experiences, and in other ways, they’re the signs of you know, I’m hearing voices. I’m schizophrenic or something considered to be a sign of mental illness. I was at the science of consciousness conference in Tucson, and an amazing presenter got on the stage, Dr Tanya Luhrmann, and she began discussing the difference between people who hear destructive voices and who are schizophrenics and people who hear spiritual voices, the voices of God and guidance and and her work on trying to differentiate the two, and also to look at culturally like how the quote, unquote mentally ill are treated in other parts of the world. So, you know, she started talking very moved by her work, and then I found out that she had a new book called How God becomes real, kindling the presence of invisible others, because we’re in a month of inquiring into consciousness, spirituality, God, sex neuroscience. I’ve got a bunch of very talented researchers coming up. Tanya’s, the first in a string of four, including Dr Andrew Newberg on sex god in the brain, including Harish Wallace, the near enemies of the truth, the person who wrote what is considered to be the current textbook of classical Tantra called Tantra illuminated. How do you know when there is something sacred or ineffable? Do you feel it all the time? Do you feel it occasionally? Do you feel it only in sort of the magic moment, the liminal space as the sun is rising and the house is quiet and all of a sudden everything is just imbued with light. Is that the way it is for you? How is it? How is it for you? We cover a lot in this episode, but there are a couple of pieces that I hope you will really tune in on. One is the experience that she talks about, of hyper focus, and what happens when you hyper focus and you go inward and you become very referential of your own experience, rather than looking outside of yourself at a screen or in a mirror or something like that, but you just really, really drop in deeply. What is that like? And then what does that do to the perception of presence or to the depth and amplitude of whatever experience you’re having. You know, there aren’t a lot of places where we are invited to dialog around these foundational, grounded being kinds of questions, the experience of the sacred outside of a religious context. And I’m really happy to be able to host some of those conversations here, before we get started with the interview, I thought I might read you a poem. This is a piece from the poet Chelan Harkin, and she has a new book coming out next month called the prophetess, the return of the prophet from the voice of the divine feminine. And if you are so inclined, the link to pre order on Amazon will be in the show notes. So here’s something that she writes. The worst thing we ever did was put God in the sky, out of reach, pulling the divinity from the leaf sitting out, the holy from our bones, insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement through everything we’ve made a hard commitment to see as ordinary, stripping the sacred from everywhere to put in a cloud man elsewhere, prying closeness from your heart. The worst thing we ever did was take the dance and the song out of prayer. Made it sit up straight and cross its legs, removed it of rejoicing, wiped clean, its hips sway, its questions, its ecstatic yowl, its tears, the worst thing we ever did is pretend God isn’t the easiest thing in this universe available to every soul in every breath. That’s her piece called The worst thing.So check her out. Chelan Harkin, so without any further ado. Dr Tonya Luhrman, I begin by asking her about her upbringing and how she became interested in these most profound questions.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

5:18

I grew up between faiths, my one grandfather was a Baptist minister. The other was a Christian Scientist. My parents moved away from faith, but in the way that you know people, people who have been a religious move away from faith. And I grew up in a an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where I went and I turned on the electric lights for some of my neighbors on their on Shabbat. And so I had, as a young person, a really sharp awareness that good people have different understandings of what is fundamentally real.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

5:59

When I went to graduate school in anthropology. I went to a sort of philosophical department. People asked a lot of philosophical questions. My best friends were philosophers. I went to lectures by philosophers and and really the anthropology book. So I became an anthropologist because I was curious about what it was like to live in different social worlds and the and the the anthropology book that the philosophers really liked was a book about witchcraft. It asked how appareny reasonable people could believe in appareny unreasonable beliefs. And this particular book was about people in a traditional society, and many of the answers when people argued about that book, which was by Evans Pritchard, E, Evans Pritchard, witchcraft, oracles and magic among the azande, when people argued about that book, they tended to argue about a what it was like in a non science oriented society. And so you know that be their explanation of why people could reasonable. People could believe in appareny unreasonable beliefs. And sort of by happenstance, I came across a world of people who seem to be practicing something like witchcraft and magic, except they lived in London. They were clearly modern. They’d had excellent educations, and so that so I became curious about, you know, what would you say about these people, about why these people seem to believe in appareny irrational beliefs? And one of the things I learned when I entered that world was that belief was really not nearly as important as experience, and if you did certain practices, it would change the way that you kind of felt magical force, that you would feel that force. And so, you know, people ended up having a lot of complicated beliefs, but really they experienced the magical force of the world as alive and present. And so that’s what hooked me. I thought that was fascinating. How did that how did that work? And, you know, an anthropologist, you’re trying to live on two levels. You’re trying to, you know, say, Oh, what is this like? What does it feel like? And you’re also trying to say, well, if I didn’t accept this worldview, if I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t adopt this worldview as my own, how would I make sense of these experiences? And I try to walk that line without coming up with the final no metaphysics, you know, I don’t, you know, I’m, I don’t, as a scholar, say yes or no, this is magic, this is God, this is spirit. You know, I’d say, I talk about how people in a group make those judgments and try to figure out what they’re experiencing, and can I see any kind of structure to what they experience? Yeah, I feel like this point you’re making around experience both trumping belief and driving belief. It’s really, it’s a really sube thing, but, but I have a concept about the scientific worldview that I’m growing up with in London, but then I come into this space, and we’re casting spells, and we’re creating energy fields between us, and suddenly I can diminish that scientific worldview for and also begin to believe in something else. I think you also said that in the context of religious movements, all of these practices that you do in worship, can lead you to believe? Can you say a lite more about that, how the practices are connected? I mean, and this became the fascinating question for me. Now, going back to the literature, you know, going back to our history, we know that many.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

10:00

Religious people, people of faith, people interested in spiritual they do these practices, but I don’t think we fully appreciate how powerful the practices are and how those practices can change your experience, so that you see visions, hear voices, feel a sense of presence. Feel power shoot through you. You people have out of body experiences. And one of the things you can see as an observer is that, you know, many of these spiritual practices have elements in common, so we don’t really know which are the more important and the less less important, but we can say something about some features of those experiences. And the other thing that we can see is that there is kind of their patterns in what happens to people. So there are patterns, there’s certain kinds of people who respond more to practice than other people. There’s certain people who have certain ideas about how thought works. Are more likely to have vivid experiences. But you know people who just do the practices it affects them. So there are two really big questions here. One is exacy what’s going on in the practice, and the other is exacy what are the patterns. May I can say something about both of those things in some blunt sense, prayer, magic, Kabbalah, yoga, meditation, these all share the intense focus on inner experience. Yoga may be, you know, depends on your version of yoga, but there’s something about this. This first, the big obvious thing is that people shift their awareness of the everyday, and they focus on their inner world. And sometimes they describe it a lite differeny. They talk about being present, and they, you know, they talk, you know, they use a mantra, but, or sport something, but there’s this intense focus. Happens in sports as well. People intensely focus whatever they’re doing in order to achieve their goal. Now, another thing that’s often present there is a focus on inner imagery, mental imagery, inner auditory imagery, inner visual imagery. People try to see in their mind, I they try to hear with your mind’s ear. The Ignatian spiritual exercises, these famous Christian exercises. Ignatius wanted people to experience all use all their inner senses. So he would have this, you know, these very Christian exercitants, they’re supposed to contemplate different pieces of Scripture, and what they’re doing is, or what he’s asking them to do is to see, hear, smell, feel, taste, so that like the day that you spend thinking about hell, you are supposed to listen to the screen. You know you’re making this up in your mind, and you’re trying to listen to the screams the damned, and smell the sulfur and feel the heat and see the flames, and that’s very much what was going on in the magical world, making it as real as possible for you, absolutely. Yeah, using all your inner senses in the magical world, they talked about this is path working. So you sit in a group and you somebody would sort of tell a story, and you try to replicate it as a member of the group. You replicated this in your mind using all your inner senses, you know. And there’s a certain kind of, as if, dimension to a lot of these practices. Once you start having other beings, people are also just, you know, trying to talk to the being as if the being is there, they’re sort of, you could call it pretending, but it’s more that, you know, another way to talk about that would be relaxing your skepticism. You’re trying to you know, you know, like, like when you play, you’re sort of living in two epistemic worlds, two ways of knowing things. Like a kid who’s a kid with their friend, with her friends, if you know, you’ve got good if the kids are playing it, you know, Pirate boys. I said something I did as a kid, you know. And you take the you know, that the pillows, and you make a ship, and you’re all in a ship together, you know. And on the one hand, those lite children, they know perfecy well. This is not really a pirate ship, but their behavior. Thing, as if you know you’re on a ship, it’s the ocean. There are sharks, another ship coming, you’re going to capture those people. So you have these two ways of knowing. And that’s, I think, important in these spiritual practices, you sort of, you become comfortable shifting between ways of knowing. You could call it epistemic frames. It’s a more academic way of describing it. The other thing we know is that when people do these practices, so in a magical practice, people will get involved with a particular divinity, and often they’re reaching for Greek gods or Celtic gods or Egyptian gods. And when I was an anthropologist in that world, I knew a woman for whom Sekhmet was a very important being. So Sekhmet is an Egyptian cat goddess and cat goddess, Lion goddess, she’s sometimes associated with fire. And this woman led us on a vivid inner journey in which, you know, we were walking across a pit of fire, and we were, you know, looking down into the pit, and then we reached the other side, and we talked to segment, and we listened for segments, response, those kinds of elements it was, seeing it vividly, understanding that there’s a being listening for what the being says. Those are, you know, those are pretty common in many spiritual domains. So if you do this, what happens, putting aside the question of whatever you believe, we know that people are more likely to have ordinary experiences that pop out. So they’re more likely to have, you know, an experience of crying or laughing That’s bigger than that. They’re more likely to have a thought that comes into their mind that doesn’t quite feel like theirs. They’re more likely to have a dream that feels like a really important dream doesn’t quite feel like they’re it’s your own dream. It feels like it contains knowledge from that side. That’s the most common thing that happens. You have these sort of ordinary experiences that don’t feel ordinary. And then there are three other categories of experience, one of them you could gloss as hallucination, like voices, visions, smells, taste, touch, those experiences of the senses when there’s nothing material there to be sensed, people are more likely to have those experiences. They’re not so common, but they happen, and people experience them. You know, you talk to people, and people will say, yeah, I really felt I heard it with my ears. And there. It’s complicated. There’s often in between. Well, you know, I heard it out loud in my mind, or I heard it it was came from outside, but I didn’t hear it with my ears and but sometimes it’s completely, fully auditory. So there are these, those kinds of experiences, and then there is presence. So what is presence

 

Christine Mason

18:23

Like feeling someone’s with you, or an entity is with you? 

 

Tanya Luhrmann

18:26

Yes, there’s so much to learn about what people mean by that word. Sometimes people say, I know exacy where this entity was. They were sitting in the room. I knew where they were sitting. I couldn’t see them or smell them or hear them or touch them, but I knew exactly where they where they were. There are sometimes people say, well, it it just wrapped itself around me, and I felt hotter or colder. I felt different, and I knew it was there. There’s a certain kind of that experience, which is sometimes called the third man experience, like it’s an Ernst Shackleton. Shackleton and his men, there are these three British guys, yeah, three British guys. They they’re explorers. They sail to the Antarctic. They get their boat locked in the ice. Shackleton and two guys set out to find somebody to help, and they trudge across South Georgia, and each of them has a very distinctive sense that there’s another person with them. Each of them, independently has that sense. And so people have that experience, I think, more commonly, when they are skiing on mountains on when they’ve been shipwrecked. So there’s some kind of combination of, you know, high anxiety, either it’s the play of light on water, or it’s the people are just not good at identifying where they’re. Body is in space. There’s some underlying mechanism, but that’s a kind of mechanism, a kind of presence mechanism.

 

Christine Mason

20:07

Yeah, I do remember seeing maybe in the 70s and 80s, there was this one meme kind of thing that was going around where it shows one set of footprints in the sun, in the sand, and it’s got that thing where it’s like, Oh, Jesus, that was the hardest time of my life. Why did you abandon me? He goes, I didn’t abandon you. I was carrying you. Yeah, at that moment, that’s sort of what it reminds it reminds me of, or, or, like a sense of, of, like the air being heavy, you know, like there’s something in the room with you, or something.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

20:37

Sometimes people talk about eyes on their back of their head. And so some like Rupert Sheldrake wants to say, well, that’s a thing. That’s this kind of experience that people have, and it’s, you know, and sometimes people want to say, well, that proves that actually thought can exist outside the mind. That’s what Rupert Sheldrake wants to argue, that the thought is somehow like powerful or forceful

 

Christine Mason

21:04 

That the thought sometimes is what’s in your own brain store is more like a shortcut, an IP address to a thought that exists outside of you.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

21:12

Well, I think he would say that there’s when you look at somebody else, that’s not an immaterial action, but a material action. So people, you know, people explain this in different ways, but the phenomenon is that people report that somebody is staring at them, and they can’t see it, and they feel the stare. So that’s a kind of experience. And so there are, you know, there are whole variety of these kinds of experiences that you know are way more complex than I’m describing.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

21:45

No, I mean, this is great. It’s really interesting. Like I’m thinking, oh, there’s those times when you know someone’s thinking about you, yeah, you can feel them. They like pop into consciousness in the room. Whatever I could be, I could be hallucinating that. But there’s, there are these questions of about God, hyper focused. And we’re not just talking about visualization. We’re talking about complete sensualization, right? You’re saying, use all of your senses and your imagination to make something real, and then then you’re in this state where you’ve kind of shot out what would be considered sort of material, normative reality, and your perceptual field is so intense at that moment that everything is magnified. That’s what it feels like as you’re speaking,

 

Tanya Luhrmann

22:25

yes, and I think, in some blunt sense, the secular version of that story is that you focus intensely on that inner sensory world, and sometimes it kind of pops out, and it’s felt to be outside of you interesting, and you can experience it with your senses. I

 

Tanya Luhrmann

22:48

had that experience in an Ayahuasca ceremony like I was, I was pretty much sitting there, and I’ll just describe to see if this is what you mean. I’m pretty much sitting there and I’m having the thought that I’m not having an experience. I’m having the thought that I’ve really kind of run the course of this medicine in my life, and I’m done. I’m kind of but then I hear an auditory hallucination that’s like, why are you here? I told you what you needed to know last time. Go and integrate. You know what I mean? Like I heard it as if it was a sound that was hitting my heart, and yet I couldn’t tell it was it outside of me or inside of me. So

 

Tanya Luhrmann

23:31

when I sit with people, I mean sometimes they are using language, which makes it very, very clear that it’s a fully auditory outside my head experience. But often it’s in between. Often it, you know, would people first say, or people know more clearly than anything else, is that it doesn’t feel like them. It feels like it came from, you know, outside from onto the better word comes from another being. It comes from another mind. It comes from it’s not me. Is what people say. And then, you know, there’s this ambiguous spatialization, where is where precisely is it located? Some people talk as if there’s a kind of space between the inside and the outside. Again, these are metaphors, but there’s, you know, often we think of our skin as our the boundary between inside and outside. And you know, in the western secular world that there’s often a sense that that’s a very clear, sharp boundary, like, you know, it really matters to us whether that was an inside experience or an outside experience. These experiences, people sometimes talk as if all of a sudden there’s a gulf, like, there’s there, there’s the inner me over here, and then there’s the atta world. Rolled over there, then there’s all this stuff in between, like in the in the membrane, yeah, like the membrane is just huge, thick, right, wide, porous, lots of holes. But, you know, it’s not like there’s a concrete wall. There’s something that’s rich and dense but permeable. And sometimes people talk as if thought is that stuff like, you know, you because there’s this, there’s a signal that’s coming in from outside. So you know that the signal is not you, but this signal is coming in through all that, these ideas and memories and sensations that you have, and you’re trying to pick up the signal in, you know, all of that stuff. And sometimes people will say that, Christians will say this, well, one time I knew that was God, but, you know, there’s other times I thought it was God, but maybe it was really just me. Yeah, do you think

 

Christine Mason

25:54

so? That’s a I want to come make sure we don’t lose the thread of the patterns. But as long as we’re here, it would seem to me that if you were interested in power or in creating systems and structures to really suck people in, that you would notice this pretty quickly, and you would start to create cultural systems to offer those experiences to people and sort of suck in their tithe. I know I’m being a lite cynical, which is not my normal way. But you know, how do you think this, this awareness of altered states, of experience, of of magic, of high peak moments, is used or manipulated by religious structures? Or do you Well,

 

Tanya Luhrmann

26:38

you know, I think you go to events like political rallies and concerts, and it can, if you, if you have an intense, emotional experience, you like it more. It’s, you know, it’s powerful, compelling, pleasing, engaging. Religious. There are many kinds of faiths, many kinds of religions, and any one person will see some religions as being good and kind and helpful, and other religions as being, you know, people will use the cult, the word cult, in a dismissive way. And one of the things you see is that religions that though, when I talk, when people ask me, Well, what’s my definition of a cult? That word is in the the eye of the beholder at the same time, practices that cut people off from the outside so they have one source of information, practices that make it difficult for you to leave that world. So there’s some, you know, like Heaven’s Gate in San Diego was sort of famous, first insisting that nobody would leave that would leave the house, except with another member of the group. Groups that have lots of vivid practices that generate experience when that particularly if those experiences are so emotional that the person is like, on the one hand, addicted, and on the other hand, very vulnerable. You know, those are more those structures are more vulnerable to creating problems. It’s also true that, you know, the great Christian monasteries did that. You know the great any you know, good Thai monastery will do that. I mean, that’s what monasteries do. They cut you off from the outside world. They give you these bigoted practices. They give you practices that are intensely, emotionally, emotionally engaging, so that you kind of want to have them again and again, and the person who has them is kind of vulnerable. And so somebody like, you know, the Jesuits, who insist that you go through a set of these practices, have lots of ethical ideas about how you need to make sure that the person who’s leading the exercises does not take advantage of the person who’s taking the exercises. But it’s, you know, this is a perennial issue in faith communities and in any community, really. Yeah,

 

Christine Mason

29:16

I mean, I we could have a whole conversation just on that. How do you not take advantage of the position you’re in when you’re giving someone a potent, transformative experience? Oh, yeah, and make sure that you’ve done your own emotional work, that you’re not in it to manipulate. You know, I

 

Tanya Luhrmann

29:31

was just going to tell you a story about that, which is that I thought about studying a group like that, and when I saw it up close and personal. I realized, I mean, people would do these nine days spiritual retreats. They were incredibly intense. They came out looking like lite amoebas. And I thought to myself, I don’t want to do that. You know, that would scare me. They could take

 

Christine Mason

29:56

you down to the nubs, question your identity, and then rebuild. Me back up. So here we are. You mentioned that there are some people who are more prone to having these experiences, people who respond better, who have certain ideas about ideas about thinking. Can you say more about that? Maybe

 

Tanya Luhrmann

30:17

15 years ago, I was beginning to, you know, step into more psychological researchers. I’d always been an anthropologist where, and that means that I study by joining a group, and I describe with the group experiences, and I write it down, and I try to really come to a rich understanding. And by 15 years ago, I started to say, well, actually, 20 years ago at this point, I started to say, oh, I should add psychological techniques, because I’m really interested in these, these, the qualities of these experiences. And I started giving people scales. So a scale is a list of questions, you know, give them to somebody and they fill them out. They say yes or true. This is, you know, whatever the scale is asking. And there was one scale that called the absorption scale, and it has statements. Sometimes I experienced things the way I did as a child, true or false. Now, sometimes I can change noise into music by the way, I listen to it true or false. Sometimes the sound of a voice is so fascinating, I feel I can listen to it forever, true or false. And, you know, so So there are 34 statements. It’s so striking to me that the way somebody responds to this scale, you know, pretty powerfully predicts how, what, whether they have vivid experiences, whether they experience God as being present like a person, whether they I can enjoy being caught up in prayer. You know, it predicts all these things, and it predicts, it predicts them for religious people and it predicts them for non religious people. It’s just really interesting. 

 

Christine Mason

32:07

So are there longitudinal studies on that? Does that stay static your whole life? Well,

 

Tanya Luhrmann

32:11

that’s a very good question. So the people who came up with this scale, they thought they were looking for a trait, and they thought they were looking for the trait of hypnotizability. And there’s a famous study, which is a 25 year study, which gives people what’s called the Stanford C, which is like a gold standard of hypnotizability, how easily, easily can you be hypnotized? And gives them the same test, 25 years later, and they get almost the same score. And absorption is supposed to be a pen and paper version of hypnotizability, even though it turns out it doesn’t correlate. Correlates, but it’s a modest correlation. There’s something else going on. The people who write about this, to write about it as a personality trait. You have it, it’s fixed. And it is true that I did a study in which we were trying to train people over a one month period, and we gave people the absorption scale at the beginning and at the end, and if their score didn’t change at the same time, I actually think that people can learn to become more immersed, to be to go deeper, to get more involved. And if you talk to people who hypnotize other people clinically, then they will tell you that, of course, people learn to become more involved in the state. So exacy what the story is is not quite clear. Are we picking up a trait and you can train the state as well? You know? Is there a better scale that would pick up the way people change over time? So I think both of those are true. There’s, there’s something a lite trait, like,

 

Tanya Luhrmann

34:02

yeah, and also contextual like, like, you have to feel safe and trust, trust the environment and and be willing to surrender your ego a lite bit, like, not be in control. There’s so much cultural stuff I would think, I mean, you’ve been in so many cultures you know, to surrender and be a wild maniac waving your hands and Dancing Crazy in the in most public environments in the United States, it’s like people withhold, they hold themselves back. So, I mean, is it, you know, cultural frame? Yeah, I don’t know. I do. I do feel, as you’re speaking to it, that I’ve noticed that people who have done a lot of trauma healing, like they’ve gone through and sort of bit by bit, picked out things that they’re more willing because they feel more confident of their capacity to respond. They’re more willing to go open and wild because they know they can reclaim themselves. So

 

Tanya Luhrmann

34:51

what you’re pointing to is that there’s some human capacity to shift frames. Systems? Yes, you could call it cognitive flexibility, you could call it trance, you could call it dissociation, you could call it play. There’s some deep human capacity.

 

Christine Mason

35:11

Yeah, you were talking about innate systems in the human and I think this is true, the frame shifting system, okay, continues. So,

 

Tanya Luhrmann

35:19

can that be trained? I think so. I think, in fact, I think ultimately, that’s at the heart of absorption. But this scale picks up, is something like a joy and cognitive flexibility. So you say, Yeah, sure, I’m going to go along with this play and see. You know this, you know? So it’s like one of their, one of the absorption items is sometimes I experience a play as if it’s real. I forget, but it’s only a play. So there’s so there. I think that the heart of this is there’s some kind of capacity to it’s just less about the mental imagery per se, and more about, okay, I’m going to go with it. I’m going to just relax. And I think that there is a healthy and non healthy dimension here, so that people who are traumatized, you know, this is the language that some people will use. They reached for this capacity in order to help protect themselves, and something got stuck. You know, you’re protecting yourself from your father’s groping hands, and you go into another mode of being, and somehow that there’s a point at which it stops being protective. I mean, it always is a lite protective in some ways, but something else happens. And then there’s these, this more healthy dimension, which is probably what you experience with Ayahuasca, probably what people experience in mature prayer practices, when people choose to let themselves go. And it’s powerful.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

37:00

Oh, this is so beautiful. This idea of the leaving your body as a helpful adaptation in childhood abuse to protect the core of yourself is a is an obvious, undocumented thing, but then you never deal with the skill set required as an adult to sit in the discomfort, claim your own space, stand up to your violator, and you are disconnected, and then you, like, enter into these magical, ungrounded realms without having the material capacity to solve the real problem in your daily life. So I see that, and I also see like, how being able to jump into the Play World makes the annoyances of everyday life, so much better. We have one where, like, every time you hear a car alarm go off, you turn it into a dance party, instead of like, like, oh my god, this is annoying. You go. You guys can’t see me because we’re not on camera, but I’m doing a, you know, like a voguing anyhow. So we’re, you’re talking about the this, this capacity to switch back and forth. We’ve touched a lite bit on absorption, a lite bit on hallucination, not really on dreaming yet. But I want to jump into this thing that you mentioned in the book on paracosms, and because I feel those are also so related to religious worldviews, and at a time right now when the world feels very separated into people with utterly different perceptions of reality, worldviews, cosmologies, like we’re not even talking the same language. I mean, you tied it to Tolkien, but can you speak about what paracosms are and how they work? So the

 

Tanya Luhrmann

38:36

idea behind a paracosm The people who the person who coined the term, it was an attempt to describe a shared imaginary world. So like the Bronte sisters, their sisters and a brother who created an imaginary world, they named the world. They sat around thinking about the rules of the world, the language of the world, and the people in the world. And, you know, and so that that was the name of it, that that’s the shared imaginative world. I think you could use the same word to capture like the Harry Potter world. Like when people are into Harry Potter, they just know Harry Potter. And it’s so vividly detailed. And the more detailed it is, the more more effectively it works as an as an imagined world, the more effectively you can say, So, what would have happened to Snape, you know, or what did happen to Snape when he was 20? What kind of person would marry Draco? I mean, people get it. Can, can really I mean, that’s the world of fan fiction, where people take the ideas and they develop them, and they make them more rich. They make them their own. And there’s this paradox that the more detailed the world is, the easier it is for the fan to make the world into their own paracosm, to have their own memory. Is their own experiences to know where they were when they were reading the story for the first time. So I think that effective religions create paracosms for people, right? Effective worlds, you know, things that act equivalent to a to a religion. So really, if the effective versions of Christianity. People really know those stories, and they can reach for their stories to explain what it’s like to be them on some random Tuesday afternoon, and then they have this kind of inner world that’s kind of just rich with different ways of describing the way the world is. And the paracosm means that you can talk about it with other people. And usually in a paracosma, if it’s a religious paracosm, you have to have a way for describing when the invisible being shows up. So first of all, who sees the invisible being. What’s the community here? Then how do you know? Let’s just call it God. How do you know that God is has shown up? What are the signs? Do you feel a certain way? Do you do certain words come to you? And then, if you’re going to talk to the invisible being, how are you going to talk to that being and understand what the being is saying. Are you going to look for certain signs in the landscape? So you’re going to look for emotional experiences that move you and you know, and that that social world is going to be judging each other to say, oh, okay, so we think that God makes you warm and that demons make you cold. You felt cold. That’s not God. So you need a kind of shared social world that, and then, then that, that sharedness really helps to make it feel more real, to see you can trust yourself. I mean, you always have this problem in any religious domain that it’s only the word of the of that’s that particular congregant or practitioner or witch or Kabbalist, and so you’ve always got the problem, are they they really experience spirit? Are they crazy? Are they lying? Are they trying to manipulate you, because we know that people can manipulate other people for their own end, and so you’ve got this community that’s always kind of making those judgments. You want. If it’s God, you want more God. Want more access to the Holy Spirit or the force or the contact, or whatever it is you know you want. If you’re going to train as a medium, you want to go to somebody who’s going to get you in touch with good, dead humans and not demons. Now you want somebody you take ayahuasca, you don’t you want somebody who’s going to help to kind of help you figure out when you can trust that voice, how to search for that voice and how not to be overwhelmed. And as you know, I mean, the challenge of taking a substance is that sometimes there are bad trips. So, you know, so a parent chasm helps you have to have a good trip. It helps you to have a inner world that is helpful, useful, calming, soothing, supportive whatever the religion is complicated. Whenever you’ve got a good in every whenever you’ve got a good, calm meadow story, probably have a demonic dimension of God lurking there as well, because human life is complicated, and people people confront their own shadow, but that imaginative space is the one that you live in and more or less share with somebody else, even though you make it entirely your own. And

 

Christine Mason

43:50

again, it sounds like that could be healthy or unhealthy,

 

Tanya Luhrmann

43:53

absolutely.

 

Christine Mason

43:55

Can I ask you about how your work applies to non dualists, like people who don’t think of Goddess other well,

 

Tanya Luhrmann

44:03

so that’s a world I have spent less time pursuing. I did the small training study. You know, when people have another they’re interacting with, they’re using this imagination, rich practice and a non dualist, non divine rich world. Often people are doing what I would call apathetic practice, which you can do with a big God, but you can also do this like Zen Buddhism. And one of the things I would observe is that it’s a lot harder to do Zen than it is to do imagination, rich spiritual practices, just, I mean, that’s just a human experience. It’s just harder, you know. So, you know, some people try to sit and it’s like, what on earth is this practice? It’s, you know, just doesn’t seem they just, they’re just bored and monkey mind all over the place. I. Think for people who are able to do the Zen and to really do it properly, it’s probably even more effective. So I think there’s a big kind of fork people hate the practice, or the practice is really helpful. So are the experiences the same? I don’t know the answer to that question. I think a lite, yes, a lite No. I mean, there’s that famous comment, you know, if you see the Buddha along the path, shoot him, you know, don’t, don’t get distracted by this god stuff. Just stand it says that suggests that sometimes, you know, the Buddha shows up. So there’s their stuff shows up. So, you know, I think that’s a really interesting question. I mean, when Andrew Newberg puts people into big machines and has them, remember peak experiences, you know, often the big stuff, it doesn’t need a god. Sometimes it has a god. You know, the big stuff, where you feel like, Oh, my heaven, suspended in space and time more myself than ever before, but I don’t have the self at all. You know, there’s no time, but it lasts 30 seconds, and there’s this white light, and there’s a sense of love. You know, sometimes there’s also a booming voice, and sometimes there isn’t, I don’t That’s a deep question.

 

Christine Mason

46:17

Yeah, I think sometimes what happens is you also begin to dream in things you never imagined, like in sacred geometry and math, you know all kinds of unknowable things. They like it self forms. They’ll be like a cosmic swirl, or something that comes out of nowhere, or like the universe, or the cosmos will show up, which you at least you think that’s what it is, because you’ve only seen it from imagery before. Well, I think this is, you know, the work is fascinating. So if you are interested in this question of how God becomes real, and how our imagination, our practices, speak to that, and then some of the other further work on telling the difference between a healthy and expansive, transcendent manifestation that supports life in a body and with others and and ones that are, you know, a lite bit more harmful that Lapierre schizophrenia or lead people to do things to hurt themselves or others. All of these are in some of Tanya’s works, and she’s she’s investigating some super interesting questions for those of us who are trying to optimize life in this body. So I wonder if you have any closing ideas or or things you’d like to share about how people might apply this work to help them live more happy, joyful lives.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

47:38

Well, the most basic thing to say is that a lot of people have these, have these intense experiences. So if you have one, you know your first judgment should not be I must be crazy these experience intense experiences are a lot more common than people think. It’s also true that intense experiences need a kind of discernment. They need a sense of wisdom to understand what they mean for the person who’s had them. And so reaching out and talking to people can be super helpful as well.

 

Christine Mason

48:13

So read some of these books if it hits you, and make sure that if you are investigating these things for yourself, that you have good advisors, is what I’m hearing good and trusted advisors and people who don’t want to lead you to great experiences for their own gain. Well, thank you so much.

 

Tanya Luhrmann

48:30

Thank you so much. This was great.

 

Christine Mason

48:32

I think the meta inquiry in this episode and with many of the others that we’ve been touching on is, how do we know what we know, and how do we hold it lightly, so that others can have their experiences without us judging them or turning them into something different or wicked or separate or ill, and just to allow the breadth of human experience to be as beautiful and diverse as it really is, and to walk around with curiosity. A cure is curiosity for most things, most mental force, errors and judgments. Many of the people that I interview write for an academic audience, and it’s such a joy to me to bring academic people to the general public conversation on consciousness, God, theology, spirituality, embodiment, you know, stages of life, all of the things that we’ve been talking about that help us be more free. They’re doing this deep work, and often it gets sort of ghettoized in academia, important to their colleagues, but it doesn’t hit the popular zeitgeist, you know, and in the meanwhile, what’s in the popular shelves is often really simplified, sometimes even, you know, we could say dumbed down. We could say accessible. But I believe we’re so hungry for richer, deeper dialog that. Have thinkers of the quality of Tanya orish or any of the people that have been on the show recently, is just an utter joy. So we can be simple of heart and joyful and happy and all of those things, while also being in the subtlety and nuance of exploring embodiment, idea at ideation, and I am hoping that you’re enjoying that, that this is one of the places that you can come to really look at a celebratory embodied spirituality, and to do it with nuance and and depth that you might not get in a more mainstream environment. So thank you so much for being here, being a part of the community, being committed to living happy and free and to being a contagion of joy in your life. You can find my company, Rosebud woman, making beautiful intimate care and body care products, yes, for all the stages of a woman’s life. Rosewellman.com and you can find me@radiantfarms.us where we’re making beautiful and now Blue Lotus and Bob and Sonic gummies have been added to the line beautiful psychoactive aids for living well through plants. I am happy to be doing some life programs this fall. And those include things on yogis and perimenopause and menopause, Introduction to Tantra, Bhakti Tantra, or the relationship between devotion, surrender and unity consciousness, but as an experienced thing, doing some live experiences on accessing altered states of consciousness through sexuality as well. So if you want to know more about my personal programming and events, you can find that at xtinem.com, okay, that’s all I have for you today. All love. Remember who you are.