A COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICAL AND ALTERED-STATE EXPERIENCE1

Perceptuai and Motor Skills, 1984, 58,467-513. @ Perceptual and Motor Skills 1984 Monograph Supplement 1-V58 A COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICAL AND ALTERED-STATE EXPERIENCE1 HARRY T. HLJNT Brock University Summmry.-Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have divided between more psychoanalytic and psychiatric views that associate such experience with "schizophrenia," "regression," and "primitivity" and the more intuitive Jungian and transpersonalhumanistic assertions of a "higher" path of development ("self-actualization"). By considering the full range of empirical reports from mysticalmeditational, psychedelic, and schizophrenic settings, a "positive" cognitive psychology of the abstract symbolic processes underlying such states is developed-potentially reconciling those divergent approaches, explaining the place of these states at the center of culture in "primitive" and classical societies, and casting a unique light on the normally masked core of semantic processes. Features of the abstract, recombinatory, cross-modal operations posited by Neisser, Arnheim, Mead, and Geschwind as criterial for human symbolic capacity are located within the varieties of altered-state report and Rudolf Otto's phenemonology of the numinous. However, such an analysis only becomes powerful when the ostensibly "primitive," "negative," or "withdrawn" aspects of such experienceits association with phylogenetically primitive and defensive "tonic immobility," the subjective "death" or "annihilation" experience of catatonic schizophrenia, and the "white light of the void realization'' in deep meditation--are also shown to be consequences of a specifically human creative capacity based on cross-modal translation between touch, vision, and audition. Religious-mystical experience is a full exteriorization and completion of our cross-modal synaesthetic capacity. Entailing an inherent "abstract" stress, it is defensively impacted in paranold and chronic schizophrenia. Of the traditional "developmental" models suggesting that religious-mystical experience is a regression to fetal, phylogeneric, or normally msked, ultra-rapid microgenetic/iconic stages, only the latter, as demonstrated by a reinterpretation of classical introspectionist research, is consistent with the abstract cognitive features of such experience and the view that all higher mental processes involve a disassembling and reuse of microgenetically preliminary perceptual and affective parterns. The more "primitive" the sensory quality, the more abstract its potential reference when synaesthetically embodied. Accordingly, the "reality status" of mystical experience is addressed. 'Partial support for this study came from a Brodc Universiry research grant. I express my gratitude to Paul Seligman, professor emeritus, Waterloo University and Honorary President of the C. G. Jung Foundation of Ontario, for his encouragement and example, and his detailed commentary on the draft of this article. Thanks are also due to Kate Friedlein for her careful reading of this work. Reprint requests should be addressed ro Harry T. Hunt, Dept. of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada U S 3A1. H. T. HUNT CONTENTS Introduction Empirical Material: Potentially Cognitive Attributes of Sense of Numinous and Related Phenomena A Holistic-Cognitive Approach To Numinous Experience and Ecstatic Trance Developmental Perspective and its Various Relations To a Cognitive Approach To States of Consc~ousness .... Conclusions References 468 . 472 481 492 - 502 508 INTRODUCTION: RELIGIOUS-MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE FOR SOCIALSCIENCE Methodological and Conceptzral Sourcer The nature of religious-mystical experience, and the significance of its phenomenal overlap with schizophrenia, is a foundational issue for contemporary human science. Its importance becomes obvious if we consider psychology as an emergent and often paradoxical attempt to mediate between the subject matter and concerns of the traditional humanities and the methods and assumptions of the natural sciences. By redefining "spirituality" as a naturalistic human experiencewith human mind as its center and sourcewe can ask for a psychology of such experiences. However, such attemptsas befits the disparate traditions they bring together-must tread a fine line between the reductionism of Freud or Piaget (with religious and altered-state experience taken as regressive disorganization or as a residue of a primitive or "protosymbolic" mentality) and the equally problematic covert re-spiritualization of some current humanistic and transpersonal psychologies-"selfactualization" as ideology. The delicacy of the balancing act can be seen in Jung's statement ( 1953) that, while as a psychologist, he could have no opinion on the reality of God, he also had to insist on the import and impact of a "God image" in the human psyche. The attempt here will be to show that the empirical phenomenology of such experiences caUs for a genuine cognitive psychology-so that naturalistic, non-primitive "cognitive-symbolic processes can be inserted between the ultimately nonscientific ideologies of avoidant reductionism and covert religiosity." Accordingly we turn to the holistic-cognitive tradition exemplified by Bartlett ( 1932 ) , Werner and Kaplan ( 1963), Vygorsky ( 1962), Mead ( 1934), Flavell and Draguns ( 1957), Schilder ( 1942), Arnheim ( 1969, 1974), and to some extent by Neisser (1976) and Gibson (1979), since these approaches are at least partly centered on the observation of experience rather than on behaviorally "objective" laboratory experimentation. W e may avoid some of the problems of "ecological validity" that leave the more experimental cognitive psychologies with their problematic distance from "experience." The method followed below is to use the range and variety of reports of mystical and deep altered-state experience as the evidence to which these COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 469 cognitive theories should be applied-but also to go further and extend that approach by regarding "altered states" as a naturalistic manifestation of mindto study subjective states as a way of doing cognitive psychology. Within the holistic cognitive tradition there has been a tendency to regard subjective anomalies as "nature's experimentsw-uite possibly more incisively designed than the laboratory sort. Altered states of consciousness can be seen as "deep structure nearw-a sort of self-generated tachistoscope for mind. This approach then is reminiscent of clinical neurology-except that whereas the attempt there is to infer underlying brain process from symptoms of deficit, more generally I will infer underlying cognitive processes from experiences which though "dislocating" and "nonordinary" are cross-culturally common and may show in their very fabric something fundamental about our symbolic capacity. Several concepts and controversies from cognitive psychology will prove of particular relevance: ( 1 ) Bartlett ( 1932 ) and Neisser ( 1976) suggest that "higher" or "recombinatory" mental processes operate by a turning around on, disassembling, and then rearranging and condensing "lower" perceptual and affective schemata in order to generate the emergent patterns of metaphor and symbol. Prototypes for what Neisser calls "schematic rearrangement" would be found in Kohler's crate-stacking chimpanzees and in approaches to metaphor as the creative-imaginal core for thought and language (Ricoeur, 1977; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Similarly, Mead ( 1934) viewed the transition from animal signalling to human symbolic communication as based on a capacity for "taking the role of the other." This, in common with Bartlett and Neisser, makes "turning around," or socially based "self-consciousness," basic to higher cognition. ( 2 ) The basis of these rearrangements would be the capacity for cortical cross-modal or synaesthetic translations (Geschwind, 1965) via structural correspondences between microgenetically preliminary (prefigural synthesis [Neisser, 19671, ultra rapid, and normally masked) stages of vision, touch, and vocalization (Hunt, 1982). Arnheim's work ( 1969, 1974) suggests that the guiding template for these translations would be the "simultaneously" given geometries of the visual-spatial system. For Vygotsky ( 1962) and Geschwind ( 1965) there is a proto-symbolic capacity among higher primates based on cross-modal translations between visual and tactile-gestural schemata-with the human addition of sequential audition-vocalization qualitatively extending and deepening the social genesis and communication of spatial structuring. ( 3 ) Finally, there is the controversy over the "deep structure" of thought and language-with most experimental cognitive psychologists positing a logical-propositional (predominantly linguistic) core for abstract intelligence and the "dual-processing" approaches of Paivio ( 1979) and Kosslyn (1981) at most allowing a separate spatial imagery factor for a preliminary concrete intelligence. Especially important then for what follows will be Arnheim's attempt to offer the only strong alternative to propositional- 470 H.T. HUNT linguistic approaches. For Arnheim only simultaneous, non-mimetic geometric-dynamic spatial patterns would be complex enough to be the root processes of both verbal and nonverbal symbolization. At the very least then, visually based imaginal-synaesthetic processes would not be inherently concrete and primitive but capable of an abstract line of development in their own right. Since such abstract, geometric imagery (Arnheim's "visual dynamics") would re-use microgenetic patterns of perception, the way is also open to understand certain "hallucinatory" phenomena as showing normally masked sub-processes of our cognitive-symbolic capacity and their direct manifestation in the form of "presentational symbolism." Historical-Cilltilral Background The "naturalistic" approach to what we now term "religious-mystical" or, following Rudolf Otto's usage, "numinous" experience can be most usefully traced to Nietzsche ( 1967), who in his later writings often called himself a "psychologist." Nietzsche's "God is dead" was something more than our own nihilistic (or humanistic) pragmatism. While Nietzsche understood God as an unconscious projection of human nature, this was also our primary means of achieving a sense of encompassing significance and meaning. Thus Nietzsche's "overman," of such direct influence on the concept of self-actualization in Jung ( 1961) , the later Rank ( 1932), and Maslow ( 197 I ) , includes the view that in our age we must somehow re-create that lost sense of transcendence, consciously and without "projection." For Nietzsche this recovery could come through the cultivation of creative "ecstasy" and "raptureH--without positing an "illusory" order as its basis. In this context he spoke of the need for a naturalistic "physiology" of ecstasy. Yet this sort of radical pragmatism (perhaps reaching its purest expression in the psychedelic movement) has seemed to many to leave "meaningw-the re-animation of a mechanistic universe--lost in a negative and relativistic subjectivity. What could be more "inward," "private," and "merely psychological" in our era than religiousmystical experience? Of course, this logical "subjectivity" is in complete contrast to its phenomenological sense of overwhelming "objectivity," which may require "projection." There are two subsequent lines of influence coming from Nietzsche that taken together show the importance of attempting a cognitive psychology of this material. First, the phenomenological-existential tradition-especially as seen in Heidegger's Being and Time-sought within the features of the everyday life-world for a concrete, immediate source for the very possibility of any concern with a "transcendence" or "beyond." This possibility rests on a species-specific abstract attitude that opens us out into a dimension of time in such a way that we are always "ahead-of-ourselves" into a future. Our concrete plans ordinarily obscure our potential realization that what lies ahead COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY:MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 47 1 is necessarily unknown (Goldstein, 1963). The lived time of everyday social reality also opens us out toward what is unknown and "beyond-both in the sense of what will occur next week and in the form of "death." For Heidegger the ability to face into and not deny this "nothingness" ahead is also the immediate occasion for a sense of Being as such-a wonder, fascination, and awe that things are at all. "Being" experience would be the lived source and impetus of all traditional religious and metaphysical concern, a notion also developed in the writings of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1971). Heidegger's later writings ( 1972) include abstract and naturalistic physiognomies of Being in terms like presencing, allowing, giving, gathering, and especially the glow, shining or welling-forth of light. As Herbert Guenther (1976) has illustrated with his translations of Tibetan Buddhism, Heidegger's verbal physiognomies bear a striking resemblance to accounts of void-realization in mysticism. But we do not yet have a western psychology of mind that can explain such absuactly generated experience. Then there is the more obviously psychological line of direct and indirect influence that begins with William James (1902) and extends to the psychologies of Jung, Maslow, and the current uanspersonal movement. James' views on the relativity of all knowledge to the pragmatics of human concerns and his turn to the empirical study of religious experience, as showing the basic form of all "meaning," makes him a kind of North American Nietzsche. For James the existence of religious experience cannot prove the reality of its object, but the sense of significance and meaning thereby gained becomes important to any "positive" mental health. Correspondingly, Jung and Maslow see such experience as a natural consequence of personality growth or "selfactualization"-with psychosis illustrating the miscarriage of the same capacity. However, excepting the beginnings made by Deikman (1966, 1971), Van Dusen ( 1972), Fischer ( 1975), Hunt ( 1982), Hunt and Chefurka ( 1976), and Brown (1977), this tradition lacks a systematic cognitive "process" language. Accordingly it often verges on a potentially self-serving, almost "masturbatory" technology of "transcendence" as the cultivation of this or that transpersonal "state." T o begin, then, it is clearly plausible to regard all major altered-state phenomena as more or less of a piece, since overlapping subjective effects emerge from causally diverse settings and this commonality increases strikingly with intensification (Bowers & Freedman, 1966; Hunt, 1971). So there is a developmental line involved, but is it "up" or "down?" The question becomes whether the probably uniquely human potential for mystical experience should be understood as a cognitive emergent-a line of intellectual development in its own right, one left neglected by Piaget--or as a regressive, primitive mentality or even as a specifically noncognitive disorganization and collapse. What 472 H. T. HUNT can the phenomena of "deep subjectivity" tell us about human nature and the interaction between our capacity for disorganization and creative reorganization? The real problem comes from the actually contradictory features of "numinous" and "altered-state" experiences. They are associated both with some of our most abstract cultural concerns and at the same time with schizophrenias, hallucinations, ritualistic activities that may become monstrous and "instinctually" perverse. They occur in a behavioral setting-"trance" or "tonic immobilityw- which constitutes a phylogenetically primitive and rudimentary defense reaction. How are these contradictions possible? EMPIRICAL MATERIAL: POTENTIALLY COGNITIVE ATTRIBUTES OF SENSEOF NUMINOUS AND RELATED PHENOMENA Altered States of Conscio~sness There is both challenge and ambiguity in the notion that the general features of altered states of consciousness have their roots in an abstract intelligence. Before pursuing a detailed discussion of Rudolf Otto's phenomenology of the "numinous" along these lines, we need to look at a number of these more general features. While religious and much altered-state experience is reported as ineffable, not only outside ordinary language but also not truly communicable even in the specialized languages of developed meditational systems, there is still the simultaneous pressure to attempt its verbalization or expression. In other words, the experience is about something. It is full of an abstract-metaphysical "portent" (Freedman, 1968), or in William James' term, it is "noetic." Indeed, the verbalization of these states tends to involve the highly abstract concepts of metaphysics or theology or the more metaphoric-mythological images that are their precursors (Seligman, 1962). In primitive tribal shamanism, visionary trance was the source of art, myth, and cosmology (Eliade, 1964; Furst, 1973). For James, the mystic's experience was one of pure meaning, an exaggeration of the "something there" of ordinary semantics. But is his sense of meaning (without: anything specific which it is o f ) an abstract capacity open to adult development in its own right or something p r i m i t i v e a n infantile residue, perhaps of a fetal mentality (Laing, 1982; Bion, 1977)? Or might not this combination of noetic significance and ineffability indicate that we have a sort of cognitive illusion based on the premature exteriorization of the actual point of transition between nonverbal imagery and the linguistic system? Are the ultimate concerns of culture an "illusion"? Consider the ubiquity of synaesthesias in reports of altered-states from diverse settings. These are not felt as merely unusual sensory effects by those who report them but as cognitive meanings (McKellar, 1957; Marks, 1978; Wheeler & Cutsforth, 1922). We might take synaesthesias as the subjective COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 473 side of the cortically based cross-modal translation processes so basic to Geschwind's (1965) approach to higher mental processes, with language itself as a kind of complex synaesthesia Yet others have suggested that synaesthesias are either residues of a phylogenetically primitive sub-cortical tonus, preliminary to sensory differentiation (Osgood, 1964) or a primitive, concrete, imaginal symbolism which is replaced in human ontogenetic development by a more advanced linguistic capacity (Marks, 1978; Werner, 1961). Similarly, consider Heinrich Kliiver's ( 1966) "hallucinatory constantswgeometric designs, spontaneous variations and reorganizations in the dimensions underlying the phenomenal constancies (size, distance, shape, color, number, and motion) and the spatial-temporal reorganizations seen in condensations and motion anomalies. These are usually regarded as "simply" entoptic (Siege1 & Jarvick, 1975; Horowitz, 1975), as "iconic" (pre-figural synthesis) (Brown, 1977), or perhaps better, as normally masked "microgenetic" phases of perception (Flavell & Draguns, 1957; Hunt & Chefurka, 1976). However, while some of .these labels are surely correct as far as they go, the complex "noetic" designs typical of what Jung (1961) termed "mandala" imagery and cross-culturally ubiquitous in sacred art (Seligman, 1976; Fischer, 1975) can also be taken as evidence for Arnheim's view that the simultaneous-spatial roots of abstract thought must rest on .a re-use of nonrnimetic, geometric perceptual patterns. Thereby, the "turning around" of thought would operate by penetrating back along the lines of the visual-spatial microgenesis of perception via synaestheic translations in search of potentially "abstract" symbolic vehicles. The "white light" experience reported in deep meditation, psychedelic, and near-death settings w o u l d - a s the most preliminary quale of the visual system--on this view be the most potentially open, encompassing, metaphoric vehicle--which externalized as direct awareness would be felt as "pure meaning." Correspondingly, the separate manifestation of dimensions normally subordinated to the phenomenal constancies may be a direct reflection of creativerecombinatory cognition, showing the disassemblings and reorganizations that Neisser terms "schematic re-arrangements." Finally, hallucinatory-imaginal condensations, super-impositions, and ultra-rapid scintillations could illustrate the polyvalent, simultaneous presentation of potentially contrary patterns by a spatial intelligence which, unlike the verbal-motor capacities of Piaget, would already come "decentered." It would be a form of thought capable of connecting anything with anything else via specific condensations and mutual assimilations to common underlying geometric designs. Rather than a gradual reversibility, the development of this line of thought would require the kind of gradual, sequential spelling out or articulation found in the aesthetic and religious-mystical traditions. Going even further, these ostensibly primitive and perceptual anomalies actually seem to embody all the transformational opera- 474 H.T. HUNT tions of the "deep structure" of language--deletion, substitution, expansion, condensation, addition, and permutation. They could constitute the simultaneous visual-spatial source of all symbolism (verbal and nonverbal) or a potential, nondominant line of imaginal development with its own special difficulties and achievements. The point, of course, is that all the above experiential phenomena are also prominent features of schizophrenia and related "hallucinatory" and braindamage syndromes. So high stakes are involved in this questioning. Either alternative makes major demands on us. If the experiential core of cultural activity and creativity becomes "instead a "schizophrenic" vulnerability, then in a utilitarian society that would require "cure" or at best "control." "Total subjectivity" becomes both pointless and dangerous in a routinized mass society where our meaning is our use. If we take such a position, we then need to know whether our propensity for disorganization stems from limits and vulnerabilities caused by our very complexity, a proneness to structural collapse as Hebb (1968) might hold or whether we are dealing with Freud's specifically regressive pull towards a lost neonatal or fetal equilibrium. On the other hand, and keeping in mind research showing elevated paranoid and schizoid MMPI subscales in the highly creative (Barton, 1969) and the high test-creativity scores in hospitalized schizophrenics (Dykes & McGhie, 1976; Woody & Claridge, 1977), perhaps we should conclude that schizophrenia is a problemsolving crisis (Boisen, 1962; Bowers, 1974) of "absolute" intensity and totality -a sort of "thought attack." This could be the case whether brought on by biochemical-genetic instability and/or hyper-sensitivity to social-cultural dilemma. If so, we are opened out towards an intrinsic species-specific organismic crisis as a direct consequence of our recombinatory capacity-a crisis which has yet to be understood within a cognitive-psychological framework. That will be our present task. While the relevance of synaesthetic, luminosity, and geometric "hallucinatory" phenomena for cognitive theory (and vice versa) will be addressed in a later paper, the analysis that follows centers on such a "positive" cognitive psychology of Otto's "numinous" and of "trance" as its behavioral setting. Otto's "Numinotlr" as the Lived Expsession of the Sense of Encompassing Totality As we will see, Rudolf Otto's 1923 classic on the phenomenology of religious-mystical experience, The Idea of the Holy, actually amounts to the delineation of a humanly criteria1 pattern of response, part of the "negative capabilicy" so important to various accounts of creativity. It provides the best place to begin and to challenge a detailed cognitive account. Otto agreed with James that religious-mystical experience is first of all "noetic" or "rational"-that its point is the abstract and all encompassing COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 475 meaning it is "of1-its intentionality. But he also foreshadows Jung in the view that the traditional and systematic expressions of such meaning easily become dogmatized and encrusted, thereby hiding their spontaneous experiential core. Otto terms this more immediate source the "numinous" and he attempts to describe and classify its various aspects or facets. In our era we may have to regard such experience as "subjective" (as in "merely"), but its impact on the individual ( and group) is overwhelming. Phenomenally, it is felt to be intensely objective and real in a way eclipsing and relativizing "everyday life." In order to represent this felt "objectivity," Jung, in his later writings, switched from the term "collective unconscious" as the source of such experience to "objective psychew-thereby conveying that as an experience "it has you" rather than you having it. Part of the unique importance of Otto's classification is that he shows that, while the various facets of the numinous appear together in the reports of the great mystics, they can also occur separately, and as such shade all through human life-into areas that ordinarily would not be called "sacred" or "religious." Thereby we will start to see the necessity of including this material at the base of any account of human nature. Otto's classification distinguishes the "rational object" or "schematization" from an immediate numinosity, and within that numinous he distinguishes "creature feeling" (as the primary subjective reaction of the individual) from the sense of "mysterium-tremendum (as closer to the meaning or object of the experience). The numinous can be further subdivided, with each of these facets corresponding to a traditional religious-metaphysical schematization of which it is the source. For instance, "creature feeling" is the sense of being overwhelmed by an infinite force or power, of being "blown away," "snuffed," "annihilated." By itself it shades off into a more "everyday" sense of helplessness and finitude. Otto suggests that "creature feeling" is the immediate occasion and inspiration for concepts like "original sin," "karma," or "predestination," in that a fully resonant and sensitive thinking through of such concepts evokes an immediate sense of our cosmic helplessness and all-encompassing dependence and finitude. The "tremendumW-schematized as the absolute force or power of the numinous-<an be subdivided into the sense of awe, of the overpowering or majestic, and of urgency or frenzy. Awe is ambivalentpoised between ecstatic bliss and uncanny dread. Manifested more or less on its own i t shades out into feelings of eeriness, unreality, and the uncanny. Schematized it becomes God's incomprehensibility, while the quality of overpoweringness becomes God's omnipotence and omniscience. The urgency or ecstatic frenzy lends itself to rationalization as "pure energy," and it shades off towards the agitated excitement of creative insight. It is probably best illustrated in the searing, annihilating quality of many accounts of the classical "white light" experience-which in modern LSD experience is often 476 H. T. HUNT reflected in images of nuclear holocaust and which behaviorally can amount to a kind of physical seizure (Grof, 1980). The "urgency" aspect is also seen in the excitement phase of catatonia, where the patient may feel compelled to act out a cosmic mission (Boisen, 1962). (Here we see most clearly that any cognitive account of the numinous must also explain in like terms its more primitive "autonomic" component as well.) The "mysterium" is that aspect of the numinous closest to its intentional noetic object. It is the experiential occasion for the concepts or schematizations of God, Being, or void. "Fascination" is the first subdivision of "mysterium." Fascination is schematized as God's perfection (love and mercy), and it shades off into any sense of wonder or amazement. The final aspect of Otto's phenomenology is the felt sense of the "wholly otheru--of something so absolutely "beyond" that one's immediate response can only be a kind of "stupor." The "wholly other" covers the sense that nothing whatsower can be positively asserted of the numinous, and it has led the most developed mysticisms to their assertions of ineffability and a "neither this nor that" via negativia that can only "conceptualize" its object as "nothingness" or "void." Accordingly, whatever the numinous is-it is inseparable from and gives rise to our most abstract categories. In this sense it is something specifically human and developmentally advanced. I t will be of particular importance for what follows that accounts from classical mysticism, schizophrenia, LSD, and even Maslow's (1962) spontaneous "peak experience" commonly assert that these subjects believed themselves to be acttlally dying-that the "wholly other" quality of the full experience entails a felt "cessation" or "snuffing out." So powerful is this impact that there are accounts of Buddhist monks who have sought the nirvana/nirodh realization for years yet pull back in terror at its advent-they had not "realized" that they woald "die" (Luk, 1960). Similar descriptions of a death-annihilation experience come from what Chapman ( 1966) terms "generalized blocking" in schizophrenia. If anything, the "cessation" sense does not seem to progress as f a t in Moody's (1975) collection of accounts from clinically dead or dying patients as it does in the most developed meditative traditions or in some LSD experience (Grofs perinatal matrices). Moody's subjects do not describe anything that does not appear in similar form in LSD and deep meditation, and it is of further interest that even the "return"-often to complete unfinished tasks and with transformed values such that Ring ( 1980) sees them as messengers of a new faith-is reminiscent of the resurrectionredeemer or Bodhisattva patterns of Christianity or Buddhism. The primitive shaman is hallucinatorially dismembered and then "reborn" to serve his people. Moody's subjects are describing a general human "category" of experience in response to the "wholly ocher." The response occurs in the face of situations that are "beyond all ordinary categorization. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 477 It seems especially striking that people who have never "died beforeboth those actually dying and those in deep meditation-immediately and spontaneously identify their more or less common experience as "dyinguapparently as the most appropriate "category." Thus something like our secular concept of "death-as an inherently unknowable "nothing"-comes closest to being a full and culturally valid schematization for the "wholly other" of full nurninosity. Further, it is interesting - that in all cultures and times, the contemplation of the inevitability and finality of physical deathwhatever that ir--does give rise to feelings of awe and uncanniness, a sense of overwhelming impact, fascination, creature feeling, and a sense of something wholly beyond and other than "all of this." Thus "death" is a symbol and even more importantly an experience for us--quite apart from its actual physical (third person criterial) reality. It both evokes a sense of the numinous and schematizes it. Accordingly the tendency towards rigid schematization of the meaning of religious-mystical experience goes deeper than the dogmatic-encrustation and separation of creed from experience that grows with church codification and/or social-economic change as understood by Otto, Jung, and Max Weber (1963). The question becomes whether all other "concepts" of what the numinous is may function primarily as defensive containment-since it is often clear that if the individual could stop the full form of this cessation experience, he would. "Rebirth," "fetal consciousness," and Grof's various phylogenetic regressions and extra-galactic realities-while also overwhelming-might be preferable "containments" to "death" or disappearance into an absolute, infinite "nothing." The numinous would be thereby redirected and schematized short of its full potential procers by means of the enhanced role of "set" and expectation in these states. The issue we must face is whether that "dying" or "snuff-out" process-not its cognitive schematizations--can receive a genuinely cognitive account, whether it can be seen as a natural consequence of symbolic-recombinatory higher mental processes. Otto's phenomenology-somewhat beyond his intentions-presents us with a highly general "response pattern" whose various aspects cohere together as "religious experience," but taken separately shade out quite surprisingly throughout diverse aspects of human life. For instance, the attitude of modern nihilism-seeing ourselves as part and parcel of an utterly immense, pointless, and indifferent physical order-ould itself be taken as a kind of formulation of "creature feeling" as well as evoking a sense of uncanniness and "feelings of unreality." The "universe" of modern science--especially for those scientists actively engaged in its construction-gives rise to feelings of awe, fascination, wonder, and perhaps dread. Closer to home, crimes of monstrous and driven perversion, often committed in "moods" of "cosmic" urgency and frenzy, woke from newspaper readers feelings of awe, uncanny horror, and dread fascination. 478 H. T. HUNT Indeed, for Freud (1919) the direct experience of normally unconscious drives is, by definition, "uncanny." It is the prominence of such behaviors in classical religious myth and ritual that at first seems to make such a powerful case for the "primitivity" hypothesis. Along these lines, Laski ( 1961) and Maslow ( 1962) have independently drawn attention to the exact similarities in descriptions of very intense orgasm and religious-mystical experience, while the Tantric and Taoistic traditions describe techniques to arouse and "sublimate" sexuality as part of meditative practice. Finally, Heidegger-who rightly finds human nature itself uncanny-has shown how the full contemplation of time, becoming, being, and other classical metaphysical concepts evokes a sense of encompassing totality, releasing "feeling" experiences largely lost to US because they have been cloaked within our overly reified "calculative" thinking. His attempts to evoke and convey these feeling experiences touch on the major features of Otto's numinous. It is almost as if the numinous is exactly the total of what goes into a life. If one's life were experienced all at once and not spread and differentiated over many years, that would be numinous. For good or ill each of us is the locus of a "totality response," and not only can anything people do be inspired by that sense, but anything done or experienced with "totality" is felt as numinous-which of course would include actually dying. As psychologists and "naturalists" we should be very surprised at the pervasiveness of this experiential category or "response pattern," extending far beyond anything our secular era can regard as "religious." After d,it seems biologically remarkable that there could be a species which is inherently open to an "internally" generated experience which is beyond its ordinary adaptive emotional and cognitive capacities. Being overwhelmed by something one can't escape or master is also the definition of Goldstein's (1963) "catastrophic anxiety" and Freud's (1925) "traumatic factor." If we follow out the cognitive view, then this experience pattern for what cannot be known, which intersects with both our very highest and lowest behaviors, can be understood as the most direct manifestation of that "negative capability" essential to creativity (Rycroft, 1979)-part of the propensity of recombinatory intelligence to face out towards the inherently novel and unknown. If the numinous is a function and specific development of higher mental processes, as appears to be the case, then that which defines our unique attainments includes within it a potential kind of annihilation-against which the young child's nightmares and fear of the dark may be the first recoiling. An automatically self-generated avoidance conditioning against what would in fact be the "negative capability" of our recombinatory potential would be the almost inevitable result. As W. R. Bion ( 1962, p. 14) states, "the capacity to think is rudimentary in all of us." W e become inherently self-limited and COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 479 tragic creatures--since full cognitive "releasement," whether denied or attained, carries a high price. Tonic Immobility: Potential Primitivity in Organismic Setting of the Numinous U p to now our emphasis on the subjective experience of altered states, with their abstract recombinatory qualities and place within culture, has mainly suggested a uniquely human capacity--one to be distinguished from lower evolutionary forms lacking recombinatory intelligence, including the protosymbolic higher apes. Considering instead the behavioral-physiological setting of full numinosity-the immobile "trance" of catatonia and deep meditation and ecstatic states-we get the very different impression of an evolutionary continuity and primitivity. The behavioral basis of human trance does seem to rest on an evolutionarily primitive defense mechanism, variously termed tonic immobility, still reaction, feigned death, or animal hypnosis, and which, following here Gallup's (1974) review of this literature, is found from mammals, reptiles, and fish to crustaceans and even insects. It occurs under circumstances where the creature is overwhelmed by a catastrophe that cannot be assimilated or mastered. In keeping with its unusually wide phylogenetic disuibution, this very primitive mechanism is based in the lower brain stem reticular formation, with decorticate rats showing longer immobility times. However, we will see below that there is an ambiguity in its comparative phylogenetic distribution which may provide the clue for a new emergent significance and transformation in man. Most easily studied experimentally in rabbits and chickens, tonic immobility is elicited by some combination of high physiological arousal and physical restraint. Frenzied fight-flight behaviors are soon replaced by a frozen, immobilized posture-lasting from seconds to ten or more minutesduring which there is a hyper-tonicity of opposing muscle groups, with catatonic-like waxy flexibility. The creature will hold any position in which its limbs can be placed. While there is no overt behavioral responsiveness to external stimulation, there has been occasional evidecce of a continued monitoring of the environment (changes in heart-rate and pupil dilation with new stimulation). Recovery is also associated with signs of disorganized distress and incipient flight-fight behaviors. Pavlov (1960) called attention to the phenomenon as a major problem for classical conditioning studies, since naive, hyper-excited dogs placed in the experimental harness routinely went into a dazed cataleptic and unresponsive state, while fully adapted dogs were still liable to a sleep-like stupor if an expected cue was overly delayed. (In an interesting parallel to the range of human trance and varieties of meditation, there is also a less researched "quietistic" version associated with less stressful restraint and monotonous repetitive stimulation.) Physiological correlates of tonic immobility have been various and often contradictory, but Gallup sug- 480 H. T. HUNT gests that both EEG and autonomic measures tend to show an initial sharp elevation in arousal, followed by a compensatory undershoot of unusually low arousal. Applying Solomon's opponent-process model of emotion ( 1974), he suggests that this sleep-like phase is a homeostatic balancing of aversive hyper-arousal. Two explanatory hypotheses have been advanced, but they are not necessarily mutually exclusive: First, and going back to Darwin on "death-feigning," tonic immobility would be a functional, adaptive defense within predatorprey relations. Indeed, below man, it is only shown in naturalistic settings by typically preyed upon creatures, not predators. There is evidence of its survival value, in that unless the predator is strongly driven by hunger it tends to abandon captured creatures that remain motionless and do not struggle. Similarly in experimental studies any stimulation that increases the initial stress tends to prolong time of immobility, most especially features of the predatorprey situation such as artificial depictions of widely opened eyes. When prey can see the eyes of the predator further flight/fight is useless. The other major hypothesis is that tonic immobility is a phase of psychosomatic shock syndrome, since the initial over-arousal is followed by an under-arousal which, if it is deep enough, can end in shock and death. Indeed, a certain portion of experimental animals in these studies do not come out of the induced immobility and die. Here we come to a crucial juncture. It seems most parsimonious to conclude that something so widely distributed phylogenetically would also be relevant to man. While Erickson and Rossi (1981) discuss several spontaneous cataleptic signs in human hypnosis, the most striking reflection of tonic immobility in man seems to come with the trance of catatonia and deep meditation. There we find subjective reports of motoric paralysis, with no apparent responsiveness to the environment but often with continued conscious monitoring (Landis, I964), waxy flexibility, and-strikingly reminiscent of DeJong's (1945) observations on "experimental catatonia" in monkeys and apes-increased production and retention of saliva. [This latter may well be the concrete occasion for reports in classical Yoga (Rieker, 1971) of a divine nectar or bindu which descends through the body.] The EEG and autonomic correlates of human trance similarly range from hyperarousal to hypoarousal, with sudden exchanges between the extremes (Fischer, 1975). More phenomenally, the basic features of Otto's numinous can easily be seen as symbolic elaborations of tonic immobility induction in animals: contact with something overwhelming and "wholly other" elicits feelings of absolute helplessness and weakness (creature feeling); there is the sense of a power "having" the subject-with frenzy and urgency giving way to a dread fascination and stupor. Indeed for Otto it is the more negative tremendilm aspect COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 481 that is the core of the numinous, since uncanny dread and horror typically precede the ecstatic redemption, release, and re-birth experience of the mystic. Finally, of course, and echoing both hypotheses of animal tonic immobility, we have already seen that the most basic and cross-culturally common schematization of the numinous is as a "dying" or "death," and the religious-mystical traditions center on "death" as concept, physical fact, and first-person phenomenology. Accepting this linkage of the numinous and tonic immobility, we then have a very primitive defense mechanism at the core of culture. This linkage introduces a further ambiguity-which may in turn show that human religiousmystical trance is based on correspondingly cognitive-symbolic re-use and transformation of tonic immobility that is unique to man: Thus tonic immobility is not found in predators under naturalistic conditions-not in lions, bears, or chimpanzees (who have no natural predators)-but it is found in rabbits, ducks, and people. However, like the great apes, we have no typical natural predators and we are ourselves the dominant predators of an entire planet. Tonic immobility can be induced in chimpanzees and bears, but only in an experimental context ( DeJong, 1945)-for instance, Katz's Psychological Atlas has a p i c t u e of a cataleptic bear that had been tied to a large wheel and spun. The puzzle in all this is that tonic immobility is not found naturally among chimpanzees-who show at least the protosymbolic beginnings of recombinatory cognition, capacity for self-consciousness, and a corresponding emotionalism and sensitivity that may approximate the rudiments of uncanny emotion. Goodall (1971) reports their aesthetically resonant "dance" to sudden rain, and Hebb describes their uncontrollable horror when confronted with a swered chimpanzee head (in contrast to the curiosity of dogs). Siege1 ( 1980) has recently cited what may be aesthetic and death ritual precursors in apes and elephants. Accordingly it is all the more surprising that the only forms of "trance" observable in apes must be experimentally and concretely triggered. There do not seem to be the equivalent of shamanistic behaviors among apes. W e can now ask what the differences are in recombinatory or higher mental processes between man and ape that might explain (1) the predominance of dominant predator-and ( 2 ) its "internal" and tonic immobilicy in us-the "abstract" causation in man, quite apart from situations of actual physical danger. A HOLISTIC-COGNITIVE APPROACH TO NUMINOUS EXPERIENCE AND ECSTATIC TRANCE Intrinsic Relation Between Human Trance and Recombinatory Cognition Geschwind Cognitive-symbolic transformation of tonic immobility.-For ( 1965) and to some extent Vygotsky ( 1962 ) the protosymbolism of the higher apes-as in recombinatory crate-stacking, incipient signing, and interest in mirrors-rests on a capacity for direct, cortically mediated translations between the structures of vision and touch-gesture, independent of limbicly based reinforcement. Vocalization is not included in ape intelligence but remains linked to mid-brain limbic areas and devoted to non-recombinatory social signalling. Man adds auditory-vocalization schemata to this integration-for Vygotsky making "thought" more fully communicative and social and making social signalling symbolic. Specifically human intelligence would be a continuous resonant translation of patterns across these three modalitie+ultimately for its own sake and independent of primary reinforcement contingencies. (Of course, the pragmatic social and technological uses thereby made possible create our uniquely open and malleable "world.") It has also long been a tenet of the psychology of perception that the qualities of vision, touch-gesture, and audition are incommensurable-each constituting its own self-enclosed "realm" based on distinct rhythms and balancing~of simultaneous and sequential processing. Although this point will be addressed in more detail elsewhere, it may be that the different sensory orders interface at two primary points---on a structural and simultaneous level in terms of those geometric form constants (spirals, bursts, lattice, and honeycomb) common to physical and psychological reality (Kliiver, 1966; Stevens, 1974) and on a more phasic, discrete and sequentially spread level in terms of dimensions like intensity and "brightness" that underlie all the senses (probably based on Osgood's dimensions). The former, manifested directly in experience as meaning per se and so not subordinated to pragmatic functioning, would constitute what Kliiver terms "complex synaesthesias," while the latter would be the classical ("simple") synaesthesias studied in relation to phoneticmorphemic physiognomy by Werner and Kaplan ( 1963). Resonance across the separate modalities could in itself be responsible for the disassembling along lines of perceptual microgenesis and "schematic rearrangements" that are criteria1 for human symbolization (Bartlett, 1932; Neisser, 1976; Hunt, 1982). However, as a kind of inverse price for the potentialities for "applied" transformations thereby opened, such translations would also engender a "crisis" or even "catastrophe" (Zeeman, 1976) at the core of human cognition. In particular, the schemata of audition-vocalization introduce an element of pure sequentiality which stretches out ahead without any of the spatialtemporal limits of vision and touch/gesture-thereby creating a being-ahead-ofourselves in time. In other words, a three-way synaesthesia also gives birth to an attempt to visualize and motorically master and fill an inherently open sequentiality. This "traumatic factor" at the core of mind and culture helps to explain the nature of that "negative capability" so prominent in discussions of creativity (Bion, 1977; Rycroft, 1979). COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY:MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 483 Along those lines we should recall 19th century views that human higher mental processes rest on a "not doing"* freezing of concrete motor response so that various anticipations ("schematic rearrangements") would be possible. This "not doing" would be the direct result (and incipient crisis) of modality incommensurability. Indeed, the imaginal involvement that seems criteria1 to hypnosis, along with highly concentrated thinking generally, suggests a kind of mini-trance or fractional tonic immobility. Our symbolic capability would bring about what in comparative evolutionary terms would be the organismic crisis of "thought." The numinous would be the full cognitive response to that gap ahead-as pure "meaning," an unfolding of semantics for its own sake, fully, completely, and independent of any specific adaptation. T o return now to existential-phenomenological descriptions of human temporality (Heidegger, 1962; Minkowski, 1970; Goldstein, 1963), the human abstract capacity opens us out towards what we only sometimes realize is the pure openness and unexpectability of time. Ordinarily this dimension is automatically filled with all manner of plans and anticipations, whose actual specific falsification we do not easily notice because we immediately construct further "typifications" (Lewin, 1936; Schutz, 1962). Only partly masked by these pragmatic anticipations, human time extends towards a "nothing" for which "death" seems both the paramount reminder and symbol. Accordingly it seems significant that various features of Otto's numinous suggest it is the "category" for time. Consider the meanings and derivations of "uncanny" ( in German unheimlich ) . Following Freud's ( 1919) analysis, "unheimlich" refers to the absolutely unfamiliar and novel, yet the term also has the irnplicatino of something familiar but hidden-just as our next encounter becomes instantly "typical" and "familiar" as it unfolds, while not having been anticipated in either its specific or often its general features. Similarly Cassirer (1955) points out that the Polynesian "mana" represents not only what is numinous and sacred but is also used for anything novel and unexpected. The numinous, as a category for that which is "wholly other," is the full expression and final reconciliation of that "negative capability" which is forced on us by the inherent recombinatory "novelty" of higher mental processes. Our predator is "death" (the openness of time), and its abstract symbolic origin explains the otherwise puzzling evolutionary discontinuity in the distribution of tonic immobility. If recombinatory, synaesthetically based imaginal processes are the product of a turning around on and re-using of perceptualmotor processes, then when "meaning" unfolds in its own terms, its "end" would be an organismic biological crisis with the imaginal re-engagement of tonic immobility as its "mechanism." The "structure" of the numinous is then a dialogic "answer" that fills and cognitively schematizes that "nothing." There are several major clues suggesting that this mystical-catatonic form of 484 H. T. HUNT tonic immobility is a symbolic re-use and transformation of a phylogenetically earlier process. (1) Religious-mystical "trance" is felt to have an abstract meaning-the numinous inclues a concept of something all-encompassing. On the other hand, there is in man a concrete form of tonic immobility that appears sometimes in soldiers in battle and victims of violent c r i m e j u s t as with any threatened, physically overwhelmed creature. This concrete tonic immobility does not involve any subjective sense of special meaning or significance, but if anything a suppression of affect-a curious indifference. ( 2 ) People do not actually die of the numinous-unlike animals in tonic immobility. However, from reports of peak experience to schizophrenia to Grof's perinatal matrices of LSD, people are convinced that dying is what is happening to them - c o m p l e t e with utterly convincing psychosomatic signs of physical distress and breathing difficulties. ( 3 ) Numinous experience that goes to its natural end and is not derailed or foreshortened is felt as redemptive and reconciling. The experience is understood as answering a dilemma of absolute proportions -with resultant feelings of bliss and gratitude. Yet the "opponent process" rebound of animal tonic immobility seems confined to arousal level not hedonic tone or meaning. The deer attacked by a wolf may well be allowed a merciful oblivion but there are no accounts of surviving creatures emerging from tonic paralysis with nurturant-approach behaviors towards the predator or of calm quiescence and positive affect, which are, however, part of the aftermath of deep religious trance. Cognitive-symbolic bases of white-light cessation experience.-If the occasioning "stimulus" for numinous and deep altered-state experience seems to lie in our symbolic recombinatory capacity, i.e., if the cause is cognitive, abstract, and emergent, what of the effect? Is the cross-culturally ubiquitous "white-light" experience of deep ecstasy-as the primary expressive vehicle of the numinous and one that is fek as an answer to the tremendum-itself abstract, or might it not be a defensive, anti-cognitive collapse? Is it a sort of "pulling the plug" on our symbolic capacity in the face of this cognitively engendered crisis we have located? Before proceeding with this still more fundamental issue, the question must first arise whether the visual-spatial "white-light" state-central to what Wel;er terms "mysticism" and to classical shamanism-is in fact the "deepest" subjective state. Specifically is i t more fundamental (or more developed) than the more socially oriented "auditory hallucinations" of the prophetical subtype of religious experience? These voices either have direct moral impact as in Max Weber's (1963) delineation of "ethical prophecy" or appear as the diffuse non-lexical expressions of echolalia, that may later be given a more indirect social interpretation. Although the speculations of Julian Jaynes (1976) rest entirely on the supposed primacy of the auditory-vocalization COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 485 type, there is considerable psychological and anthropological evidence which suggests that the most basic form of trance experience is the synaesthetically resonant sense of luminosity, often described as a paradoxically glowing darkness or void. Indeed, the present approach views this full mystical experience as directly exteriorizing the nonverbal spatial-simultaneous roots of all higher mental processes as well as constituting the "completion" of a line of metaphoric intelligence developing on its own terms and not subordinated to "everyday" adaptation. While the prophecy-possession subtype undeniably has the greater socialpolitical impact (Weber, 1963), the unitive fusion state that Weber makes criteria1 for the mystic seems to be psychologically deeper, since it can include among its preliminary stages the attributes of the auditory-possession experience, but not vice versa. Indeed the eschatologies of prophetical movements seem to transfer the void-cessation experience into a symbolically projected apocalypse not to be experienced in this life. Similarly, in her study oftrance in primitive tribal societies Bourguignon (1973) found a statistical association between the more individualistic "vision trance" and nomadic shamanistic societies, while "possession tranceo--consistent with its more conflicted and paroxysmal public "acting out," often with amnesia-was associated with more complex tribal organizations showing considerably more social stress, as evidenced by class stratification, polygamy, and slavery. In purely psychological terms "possession trance" is affected and derailed by the extreme social pressures which it must try to reconcile, and our primary concentration on "vision trance" is supported. Accordingly, what cognitive-psychological process could underlie the reconciling, releasing effect of white-light experience? The "light of the void" is described by the great mystics as somehow "catching," "containing," or "'spatializing" time. The t r e m d z m is overwhelming-almost as if the vast, open potential of the future could exceed its "bounds," burst into, and "explode" the present-but it is replaced by an emanating luminosity-darkness which is immediately knozun as the source of creation, of each moment, and of all thought. This sense of an all encompassing origination is illustrated in an account from Zen meditation: I felt as if a heavy doak had suddenly dropped from my shoulders, and found myself floating-I do not know where, in the void without any support. Moreover, I felt myself like a bright white light similar to white snow without knowing whether it was within or without, and all this enchantment of a crystalline white vibrated in absolute silence, the sole sound of which was joy; this silent sound was only felt but could not be heard, because it was like the silence of snow. There were no eyes to see the light; it was rather that light which saw itself. In short, an intense visual feeling, the sound of which was absolute silence. I think I had an experience of the living formless light which is the root of all forms, although essentially free from them all. I cannot say 486 H. T. HUNT how long this wonderful experience lasted, perhaps a second, perhaps an hour, as I did not even care to look at the clock . After that everything returned to normal, that is to its worldly condition. I was then seized with a foolish desire to dance, jump and cry out, but overcame it without difficulty. I then experienced a flash of the same light (which was ultrarapid this second time) followed by the same profound and sweet serenity. However, this time I could observe its process which I now am able to reproduce at will . . . Moreover I have gained the impression that it was the recreative condition of Death itself, so I no more fear death (Luk, 1971, pp. 20-21). . . The most obvious cognitive attributes of such an experience would be the noetic sense of an abstract unity behind all diversity and the cross-modal synaesthetic emphasis. A paradoxically full "void" is felt as the direct source of all possible "formsn-so that having this ground in common any and all events are in a sense already known or familiar in advance-and this familiarity is not limiting or deadening but on the contrary open and unconstrained: With the realisation of the realm of free space in which all things are identified, anything which enters experience is known ro be unborn in irs origin. This is the attainment of the ultimate refuge. . Detached, without any tendency to slow the natural progression from unitary totality to the intimately related flash of the following moment, no doubt or fear arises, no expectancy remains unfulfilled. . . Nothing need be asserted and nothing be negated, for the perfection of the moment exdudes the possibility of detracting expression . . . (Tulku, 1973. p. 106). . . All events are thus known in advance as exemplifications of this emanating void. Light is the most primitive quale of the visual system (as the most structurally precise of the distance senses), and its metaphoric re-use should make it the most open, inclusive, and abstract symbolic vehicle. In the tachistoscopic studies of the early introspectionisteto be discussed in detail later-the various phases of luminosity are experienced first, out of which emerge global contour and then differentiated filigree. Similarly, a brightness-darkness dimension is widely regarded as the quality common to all the senses and preliminary to the more modality-specific, "secondary qualities" (Von Hornbostel, 1967; Boernstein, 1967; Marks, 1978). Only this microgenetically primitive c o r w p e n e d for symbolic re-use by our "turning around"-is open enough so that anything that happens can be known as its further development-as a "yea-saying" that cannot block or "deny" any particular specification. From this perspective--seldom fully realized-one cannot be caught "out of position" by anything that occurs, for a l l visual forms are differentiations of light. As in the following passage from Chogyarn Trungpa, anything that can occur must .fill a space of some kind and this same space is now "held" by the sensory quale of "glowing" or "emanating" void as the metaphoric vehicle for a concept of all inclusive totality: By allowing a gap, space in which things may be as they are, we begin to appreciate the COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 487 dear simplicity and precision of our lives. . . . Patience also feels space. It never fears new situations, because nothing can surprise the bodhisatma-nothing. Whatever comes -be it destructive, chaotic, creative, welcoming, or inviting-the bodhisatma is never disturbed, never shocked, because he is aware of the space between the situation and himself. Once one is aware of the space between the situation and oneself, then anything can happen in that space. Whatever occurs does so in the midst of space (Trungpa. 1973, p. 167, 1 7 5 ) . This synaesthetically mediated "insight," once "said," becomes the view that everything and anything is God's creation or an emanation from an originating void. I am further suggesting the synaesthetic translation across microgenetically preliminary patterns explains the overwhelming qualities of this "insight" and its association with an experience of "cessation" or "dying." The structural translation of the body percept into luminosity would actually entail felt "dying." How else does one's body become a glowing luminosity? I n phenomenal terms it has to "disappear." -Certainly more specific cross-modal translations do occur-involving what Kliiver terms "complex synaesthesias" and based on the geometric-contour patterns common to visual microgenesis and hallucinations. Jung's geometric mandala patterns, with their typical four-fold division (probably based on the four limbs), meditative descriptions of Chakra experience, and even the Yogic samadhi of felt fusion and identity between phenomenal self and visual patterning of the environment illustrate such more specific "complex synasthesias." Both Fischer ( 1975) and Leary ( 1964) describe how the commonly reported visual geometric "constants" of LSD become indistinguishable from a patterned body "design." This mergence seems to elicit a "sense" of totalistic meaning or portent, which lived out still more concretely would approximate the archetypal-transpersonal realms of Grof ( 1980). The direct translation of the body percept into a still more open "white light1'-while evoking the maximally abstract and open sense of significance possible for man-would also constitute a "synaesthesia" entailing just that cessation, annihilation, or "snuff out" experience described in meditative traditions, LSD accounts, and the first-person literature on schizophrenia. We could say-now from a cognitive-psychological perspective-that an "emanating void" synaesthesia is based on the assimilation of tactile-gestural schemata to the most preliminary quale of the visual system-space per se, or what, glossing Titchener, we could term "'pre-dimensional spread, welling forth." Such a state would spatialite or contain sequentiality. The organismic result would also include a felt release of motoric "energyw-the frenzy and paroxysm sort of "touchof the numinous-and a felt cessation, nirvana, or "death"-a out." The more differentiated "grasping" and "seizing" forms of synaesthesia could hold off the full sequence short of that "letting go" of classical mysticism, and which in both shamanistic and schizophrenic accounts seems to be preceded by the felt horror and uncanny dread of a "dying." The imaginally driven organismic crisis thereby created should also cause the autonomic hyper-arousal and somatic hallucinations of torture, pain, and dismemberment common to shamanism and schizophrenia. Indeed, Searles (1965) has suggested that such -somatic anomalies are concretized metaphors whose potentially creative meanings cannot yet be "stood" by the hospitalized patient. One would automatically attempt to hold off the final experience of cessation-not being able to see around it any more than we can physical death. Only something like the present holistic cognitive approach+ombining and extending Arnheim, Werner and Kaplan, Bartlett, Neisser, and Geschwind can allow us to understand the cessation-void experience in psychological but non-reductionist terms. Correspondingly it may be the very existence and features of such subjective states that offer the primary and best evidence for processes that underlie all symbolic-recombinatory cognition. Defensive Containment and Pathological Inversion of Imaginal-metaphoric Intelligence W e have understood religious mysticism as the most complete exteriorization of a crisis in meaning, engendered by the cross-modal bases of all human intelligence-so that the organismic impact resulting from such a full re-use of perceptual schemata creates a new form of tonic immobility. If so it would not be surprising that this full unfolding of an imaginal-metaphoric line of intelligence would be especially conflicted in its preliminaries, rarely attained, and open to defensive, pathological inversions. Here again we should recall the well documented overlap between creativity and schizophrenia. Claridge (1972) has suggested that creativity and psychoticism are two ends of the same dimension, precariously developed as negative capability or frozen against i t Following Boisen ( 1962 ) , the distinction between religious experience and schizophrenia would be between "spiritual victory" and "spiritual defeatwkeeping in mind that many are spared any direct engagement on that dimension, while for others, through genetic, biochemical, or early childhood disposition, "defeat" may be all but inevitable. Along these lines Minkowski ( 1970), Boisen ( 1962), Searles ( 1965), Bion ( 1977) and that unique phenomenologist of schizophrenia Paul Schreber (1903) all present paranoid schizophrenia as either an attempt to hold off a "death" or cessation experience (usually projectively metaphorized as a cosmic catastrophe) or more generally as a "spatialization" or "freezing" of the open uncertainty of time ahead. The patient seems to have succeeded-at immense personal and social cost-in holding off the full numinosity process into which he has been partially pressed. In contrast to the spontaneity and openness in COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 489 the face of new situations which seems to be the positive outcome of full mystical "enlightenment" (Luk, 1971; Trungpa, 1973), the prematurely differentiated and controlling specificity of the paranoid system, while also allowing anything to be understood in advance, does so by an insidious limitation and simplification which is the very opposite of "release" or "liberation." In Minkowski's terms there is a similar "subduction" of temporality and loss of freedom (negative capability) in anyone "captured by any inclusive and structurally detailed "system"-whether marxism, psychoanalysis, Piaget, or primitive mythology as presented by Levi-Strauss. In some sense such persons are "finishedm-while everything and anything always and immediately "fits"unless and until the "grip" of the system loosens. The extreme of this "spatial saturation" may be found in chronic schizophrenia. The following extraordinary account, quoted from Minkowski, shows a more or less simultaneous impairment of lived time, cross-modal dissociation, affective flattening, and immobilization of imaginative capacity: . . . sometimes everything is so fragmented, when it should be so unified. A bird in the garden chirps, for example. I heard the bird, and I know that he chirps; but that it is a bird and that he chirps, these two things are separated from each other. There is an abyss. Here I am afraid because I cannot put them back together again. It is as if the bird and the chirping have nothing in common with each other. This is not just a rumination on my part. This abyss . . . how can I say it: the bird and the fact that he chirps, there is such a separation between them, perhaps because I have come to unite myself there or something with time. In realiry, there is no time . . . ; it is as if (helpless he puts his head in his hands)-it is my own fault, I cannot believe that the bird sings any differently than usual. But, as I have said, this is not what counts. . I did not know that death happened this way. The soul does not come back anymore. I want to go out into the world. I continue to live now in eternity; there are no more hours or days or nights. Outside things still go on, the fruits on trees move this way and that. The others walk to and fro in the room, but time does not flow for me. . . . Sometimes when people run quickly to and fro in the garden or if the wind stirs u p the leaves, I would like to live again as before and be able to run interiorily with them in order that time would pass again. But here I have stopped, and it makes no difference to me. What does the outside world have to do with me? Everything is the same to me--trees, images, or men. 1 only bump up against time (Minkowski, 1970, pp. 285-286). .. One might indeed describe such states as impacted mysticism, especially since within meditative traditions we find strikingly similar descriptions of the practice gone wrong. Here too, the cognitive-based opening-out sought and sort of antiachieved by some meditators involutes rather than implodingcognitive, anti-emotional "pulling the plug." Eastern (Krishna, 1967; Danilou, 1955; Goleman, 1972) and Western sources (Underhill, 1955; Maslow, 1962) mention a "despair," "apathy," "aridity" state-that may appear between initial 490 H. T. HUNT realization of "intensity ecstasy" ("pseudo-nirvana") and the completed "passivity ecstasy" of the void experience. Such accounts are strikingly reminiscent of first person accounts of affective flattening in chronic schizophrenia (Landis, 1964). The irony of the early Taoists is particularly effective in conveying this sort of reversible organization [what Angyal (1965) termed "universal ambiguity"] between fully realized meditative practice and withdrawal and affective flattening: ~ u n gShu said to Wen Chih: "You are the master of cunning arts. I have a disease. Can you cure it, sir?" "I am at your service," replied Wen Chih. "But please let me know first the symptoms of your disease." "I hold it no honour," said Lung Shu, "to be praised in my native village, nor do I consider it a disgrace to be decried in my native state. Gain excites in me no joy, and loss no sorrow. I look upon life in the same light as death, upon riches in the same light as poverty, upon my fellow-men as so many swine, and upon myself as I look upon my fellow-men. I dwell in my home as if it were a mere caravanserai, and regard my native district with no more feeling than I would a barbarian state. Afflicted as I am in these various ways, honours and awards fail to rouse me, pains and penalties to over awe me, good or bad fortune to influence me, joy or grief to move me . . . What disease is this, and what remedy is there that will cure it?" Wen Chih replied by asking Lung Shu to stand with his back to the light, while he himself faced the light and looked at him intently. "Ah!" said he after a while, "I see that a good square inch of your heart is hollow. You are within an ace of being a true sage. Six of the orifices in your heart are open and clear, and only the seventh is blocked up. This, however, is doubtless due to the fact that you are mistaking for a disease that which is really divine enlightenment. It is a case in which my shallow art is of no avail" (Giles [trans.] 1947, pp. 72-74). Given our discussion of the processes that might underlie full "realization," its defensive deflection (pre-cessation stasis) becomes inevitable and also understandable in cognitive terms: Since the open "gap" ahead of time is not a substance, the imaginal re-use of the earliest phases of visual microgenesisdescribed by both mystics and introspectionists as a paradoxically glowing ernptiness (see below)-is the only sensory "growth pattern" that could allow a total synaesthetic fusion of the qualia of sequentiality and simultaneity. Any more specific or differentiated spatial structure will necessarily fixate rather than open and "hold" without constraining. More specific forms could "handle" lattice structuring but not spirals or symmetrical but not dynamically asymmetrical (Golden Section) patterns. Yet the full synaesthetic translation of microgenetically early luminosity would also entail the cessation-dying experience: This would evoke the predominantly human form of "uncanny d r e a d (Sullivan, 1953) or automatic anxiety (Freud, 1926) widely discussed with respect to schizophrenia, although usually with reference to theories of neonatal regression rather than as an inversion of a line of development (Jung, 1961; Kohut, 1977; Winnicott, 1971). COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 49 1 From a holistic-cognitive perspective the phenomena of altered states of consciousness are "deep structure near" exteriorizations of abstract cognitive processes. Both altered states and cognition are based on a turning around on, disassembling and rearranging of perception via cross-modal translations, with the ultimate "complex synaesthesia" of language as the stabilized adaptive form of this capacity. If so, then the more microgenetically preliminary and "primitive" the pattern re-used as symbolic vehicle the more open and abstract its potential reference. Accordingly, if we try to imagine the "viewpoint" of a fully synaesthetic "glow," it would be correspondingly abstract-"metaphysically" so. Visual-gestural intersection at the roots of symbolism (Vygotsky, 1962; Geschwind, 1965) will automatically make all such spatial patterns also communicative-a kind of "talking," as with Wittgenstein (1953) on the impossibility of any truly private configuration of "mind." Similarly, for Mead ( 1934), all symbolism entails some degree of "taking the role of the ocher"presumably via visual-gestural synaesthesia and in contrast to the absence of "self-consciousness" in lower phylogentic "signalling." So if we try to imagine the sort of "person" or "being" who would actually "'talk" through the whitelight cessation experience we end with something close to classical concepts of God or of an emanating "nurturing" (i.e., animated and animating) void, or of the similarly "giving" Being of Heidegger. Stepping back for a moment, we have located cognitive-abstract qualities within the seemingly primitive physiological setting of deep trance, the classical mystical experience, and various pathological/defensive deflections of that experience. Still the more prevalent notion of non-cognitive primitivity remains. For instance, synaesthesias have been widely regarded as resting on a premodality brightness dimension which would be phylogenetically primitive and centered within the brain-stem reticular formation (Boerstein, 1967; Marks, 1978)sort of "froglight." Similarly Yogic asanas are reminiscent of the motionless frozen postures of reptiles and amphibians. All of our material might be seen by the especially toughrninded as an essentially reptilian "introverted sunbathingP'-aprimitive, noncognitive "tropism" whose function would ultimately be defensive. While this "illusionist" perspective on synaesthesias and geometric form constants will be considered more extensively on another occasion, there are still some basic points against such developmental reductionism. ( 1) Apart from other cognitive features of altered states, the light of the void experience seems to rest on the microgenesis of vi~ion-the most structurally precise of the distance senses-and so is distinct from the pre- or amodal brightness-darkness sensitivities of frogs. The many appearances of brightnessdarkness can have very different organismic valences, whereas the paradoxical light of the mystics always means "identity." ( 2 ) As an "answer" the white light-cessation experience feel^. cognitive and abstract-like the expression of 492 H.T. HUNT and contact with an intelligence. ( 3 ) At its fullest realization this experience seems to lead into an openness and spontaneity that is the very opposite of stereotyping or withdrawal. (4) If the numinous were a collapse under stress, one would expect its increase with social complexity and civilization. Yet Bourguignon (1973) found the opposite--nomadic peoples, who generally subject infants and adults to less social stress, tend to experience a more individualistic, shamanistic "vision trance," with such experience defined as available to all adults. However, the accessibility and universality of trance declines with more complex, class-stratified and socially conflicted societies and when "allowed it tends to appear as the more frenzied, vocal-auditory "possession trance." Mysticism in complex societies-as the most psychologically developed form of religious expwience (because it is centered experientially-aesthetically and not ethnically)-seems to be a re-assembling of shamanistic trance techniques within a relatively isolated and simplified social community (Eliade, 1964). DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE AND ITSVARIOUS RELATIONS TOA COGNITIVEAPPROACH TOSTATESOF CONSCIOUSNESS Actually, in one way or another, developmental models are ubiquitous in the literature on deep altered-states of consciousness-especially if we include the more traditional and current ("transpersonal") assertions of spiritual growth into a higher order along with the varieties of prirnitivization and regression suggested by more orthodox psychologizing. However, we must first consider the "developmental primitivity" hypotheses in a little more detailespecially notions of phylogenetic and/or neonatal-fetal regression, as the cutting edge of naturalistic reductionism. Nonetheless it is the specific parallels between altered-state accounts and the introspective generation of microgenetically primitive perception and affect that will offer the most conclusive evidence for this more cognitive approach. The present approach places a cognitive psychology of semantics and metaphor between these "higher" and "lower" alternatives in such a way that the genuinely primitive (microgenetic) aspects of such experience will make sense as recombinatory-symbolic processes. Ontogenetic and Phylogenetic P~imitivization The classical psychoanalytic view that major features of altered states are somehow normative in the neonatal period-a regression to "narcissism" or symbiotic identification states-now seems increasingly improbable. Kliiver's hallucinatory flux and reorganizations of the phenomenal constancies can no longer be regarded as "neonatal" in the light of Bower's (1966) demonstrations of organized space perception essentially from birth (as long established in lower vertebrates). Similarly the active, "realistic" social responsiveness shown by the neonate, along with preference for facial configurations over ab- COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 493 stract geometric patterns, seems inconsistent with any view of normative "mandala" hallucinations in infancy. If, following Deikman's ( 1971) usage, we say that these functions are deautomatized in altered states, it is also important to realize that they are already largely automatized at birth. States of deep subjectivity usually appear within a relatively immobilized setting and seem to be part of a detached aesthetic-receptive attitude, but there is little reason to doubt that the infant-n its own developmental level-is as active, manipulative, and social as it is "receptive" or "assimilative" (Bower, 1977). Given evidence pushing social "mirroring" (Bower, 1977) and cross-modal, physiognomic matching (Wagner, et al., 1981) further and further back into early infancy and the neonatal diagnosability of autism and related syndromes, it is not plausible to assume that adults' altered states are normative in the new-born. It seems more useful to hypothesize that sensitivities necessary for later symbol formation render infants especially prone to disorganization, some more than others. The predisposition towards stuporous withdrawal would create totalistic but negative experiential patterns open for later symbolic re-use to represent/evoke the abstractly generated crises of "mindM-just as, giving a Jungian emphasis to both Freud and Piaget ( 1963), the child's early personification of the parents may provide the template for later abst~actrepresentations for an all-pervasive power and force in both religion and science. More specfically it does appear that the "holding" or "containing" metaphor that seems so basic to characterizations of the light of the void experience is reminiscent of Winnicotc (1971) and Bion (1962) on the basic "form" of mothering, and "maternal" imagery is especially common and basic to the deeper mysticisms (Erikson, 1958). However, the mystic's experience is not thereby a "regression" to the infant's symbiotic mirroring (that quite possibly based on cross-modal physiognomic resonance between the mother's face as viewed and the infant's movements as felt). Instead, "holding" would later become the most globally encompassing and containing "affective" category available for potential re-use as the symbolic vehicle for "totalityw-based on a further synaesthetic fusion with the quale of light per se [a quale that even the newborn infant probably does not experience as such at all (Gibson, 1979; Bower, 1966)l. Such a re-use and coordination of affect, sight, sound, and body image would be developed in adulthood as the metaphoric realization of an abstract attitude within a "presentational" (directly felt, non representational) line of symbolism. Fetal regression-while inherently speculative at this time-seems to offer the only Life cycle specific, "naturalistic" template for the "wholly other" qualities of numinous trance. Indeed, this form of localization is not only found in Rank, Grof, and Laing as both explanation and phenomenology of these states, but also within the writings of Taoistic yoga (Wilhelm, 1962). Here 494 H. T. HUNT the encompassing "light of the void" would be a revival of quiescent phases of fetal sentience, while the birth trauma would be the actual source of the tremendum-the sequence reversed experientially as part of later abreaction. The hypothetical equilibrium of fetal sentience would necessarily be fragmented prematurely in a neotonous creature (Montagu, 1962) always born-in a comparative biological sense-too early. Not only does the prebirth state "fit" the "not doing" setting of trance, but it seems likely that the mammalian fetus spends its late gestation almost entirely in the rapid eye-moment (REM) state (Van de Castle, 1971)-associated with phenomenal dreaming in human beings at the least. Activation of the nervous system and functional motoric paralysis of REM constitute a potentially hallucinatory setting in its own right (West, 1975). If we permit ourselves that sort of speculation, it seems reasonably plausible that fetal REM could produce Kliiver's more simple geometric form constants, the basic "entoptic" structures of the eye and visual system. There is also really no reason why the basic form or anlage of the neonatal sociality about-to-be could not be "felt." However, if those were experienced as synaesthetically fused-so that geometric patterns conveyed an anlage of mirroring dialogue as they can in adults' altered states-then the infant's preference for facial configurations over geometric ones seems puzzling. While recent demonstrations of neonatal facial imitations essentially from birth strongly imply the beginnings of a cross-modal matching capacity, the gradual ontogenetic development of cross-modal integrations makes it unlikely that the fetus could experience the visual-tactile fusions of mandala imagery (a sort of abstract noetic face). It should also be noted that most dreaming does not contain the sort of radical reorganizations and exaggerations typical of psychedelic states (Hunt, 1982) and that the flaccid ("cataplectic") paralysis of REM is distinct from the more primitive and rudimentary tonic immobility state. Just as with infancy, the more we learn about fetal responsiveness the less plausible will be this sort of projection of the numinous. Fetal sentience and the birth trauma as its disruption seems less likely as the "cause" or "regressive origin" of numinous experience than as a totalistic form which might later be re-used as its "schematization" or "symbolic vehicle"-whether based on the re-use of an actual mnemic trace (Winnicott, 1958; Greenacre, 1952) or on a purely imaginal "as if" construction, as the complexity and "out of body" perspective of some LSD "perinatal" experiences might imply. See Hunt ( 1982) for a cognitive analysis of out of body experience. Of course, R. D. Laing (1982) is correct in pointing to the essential isomorphism of prebirth biology with deep altered states and archetypal-mythological motifs. Fetal "reality" as a naturalistic schematization of such experience has a powerful and obvious pull in a materialist and sensate era. Indeed, such a "grounding," widely held, would probably do some moral good-both COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 495 for early infant care and by finally providing a "place" for our obviously endangered "subjectivity." Yet the isomorphism between embryology and mythology must also follow if both share the general features of organismic pattern and motion as studied in the overlapping structuralisms of Piaget ( 1952), Erikson ( 1963), Reich ( 1960), or the life-forms of D'Arcy Thompson ( 1961) . One could also use events in the central nervous system, amoeboid behavior, or heart activity as a basic template on which to "map" both altered-state experience and Jung's archetypes. That the same patterns of tension, crisis, and release are everywhere follows from the organismic-holistic perspective generally (Angyal, 1965; Goldstein, 1963; Piaget, 1952). More importantly we have seen the reasons for doubting that the fetus, schizophrenic, or mystic could "feel" the same or be in the same state. Even this salutary and appropriately "off the wall" bow to classical reductionism (Laing's Trojan Horse) will still obscure the possibility that what we have taken to be "primitive" may be its own line of intellectual-~ymbolicdevelopment. Phylogenetic (or even cellular-amoeboid) localizations of the numinous have had a similar quasi-naturalistic appeal. Even more commonly than fetal sentience, phylogenetic and animal identification schematizations are a crossculturally common feature of the phenomenology of altered-state experience. They are especially common among Grof's transpersonal categories of LSD experience and tribal shamanism. Quite possibly a selected and isolated activation of "old brain" structures could allow a more or less "accurate" experience/ intuition of sentience in lower evolutionary forms. Such a model also fits with the autonomic hyperarousal of such importance in Fischer's (1975) more neurological approach, and with the prominence of "instinctual" and "bestial" impulses entailing torture, human sacrifice, and perverse sexuality in LSD, schizophrenia, and some religious ritual. Still, the same problems re-appear: the receptive-aesthetic nature of such experience seems unlikely in primitive organisms, along with the synaesthetically mediated sense of abstract noetic significance. It seems much more likely that the "animal identification" experience (and its potential accuracy) is based on ozw cross-modal capacity as the immediate source of Mead's "taking the role of the other" via a physiognomicgestural posturing of what is seen. What results would be both a schematization-symbolization and containment of the numinous and an intense but preliminary state in its own right. Of course, an imaginatively engendered tonic immobility should also have a major autonomic impact, while it has appeared unlikely that animal tonic immobility could feel numinous. Indeed, the thoroughly human "bestiality" of religious trance and ritual-as part of the frenzy and urgency of the numinous-would most likely represent totalistic symbolizations created by our capacity for imaginal recombinations, intensifications, and condensations that could also fuse (and confuse) motivational systems that 496 H. T. HUNT are more or less separate in earlier evolutionary levels. There have been several suggestions that Freud's id is uniquely human-the source of metaphoric structures which can be used or defensively acted out and which are created and driven by our capacity for self-observation-the super ego creating the id and not the other way around. The fetal and phylogenetic regression hypotheses remain primarily speculative. Given that altered-state experiences directly described in such terms are preliminary to full numinous cessation, it also seems plausible that these experiences might be defensive naturalistic "schematizations" or "containments" automatically engendered to hold off the full annihilation-rebirth process. In other words, an alternative relatively totalistic schematitation short of "I am dying" would be "I am being born" or "I am a primitive creature in crisis." Keeping in mind the demonstrated power of set and suggestion to schematize and direct experience in psychedelic settings, such experience would then unfold as a sequential articulation of "being born," "amoeboid reality," or various other "close encounters." These "other worldly" but still naturalistically structured experiences would both access and hold off "realization." Classical Introrpectionism, Microgenesir, and "Sensation" Metaphor Introspectionism reconsidered.-Altered states of consciousness are exteriorizations and prolongations (into awareness) of aspects of the normally masked or "unconscious," ultra-rapid stages of perceptual and affective microgenesis (pre-figural synthesis) (Schilder, 1942; Flavell & Draguns, 1957; Hunt 8r Chefurka, 1976; Brown, 1977). This view has two major strengths. First, unlike the fetal and phylogenetic hypotheses, there is the possibility of empirical study and evidence. The final consensus among the experimental introspectionists-especially the British group around Spearman (1923) and Cattell (1930) and the German group of Ksueger ( 1928), Sander (1930) and Heinz Werner (1961)-was that the observed phenomena of immediate consciousness elicited by "avoiding the stimulus error" were not to be understood as "elements" or "building blocks" but as microgenetically preliminary processes appearing in focal awareness. Introspection was the attempted description of the "is" of immediate consciousness as a kind of induced state without reference to the "is for" of the consensual world of "meanings" and "objects." In effect, systematic introspection functioned as a kind of natural tachistoscope for all modalities of experience, and it is noteworthy that with respect to visual stimuli introspective observation produced reports highly similar to those elicited by tachistoscopic tmncation (Cattell, 1930; Dickinson, 1926). As we will see in more detail below, there are striking but, thanks to standard textbook treatments of classical introspectionism, unremarked similarities between the verbal reports from introspectionist studies and descriptions of subjective experience with LSD, sensory deprivation, the hypnagogic period, schizophrenia, and deep COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 497 meditation (Hunt & Chefurka, 1976). Also, the attentional techniques of the introspectionists actually seem to be a more circumscribed and focused form of Buddhist "mindfulness" and "insight" meditative techniques (Goleman, 1972; Theta, 1962) shamanistic "seeing" as described by Castaneda (1972), and Deikman's ( 1971) mode of "receptivity." The second strength of this approach, identifying altered-state effects with normally ultra-rapid microgenetic processes, is that it has the immense theoretical advantage of reconciling the clearly primitive aspects of these phenomena with their symbolic and highly abstract features. The activity of systematic introspection itself is a form of Bartlett's and Neisser's "turning around" on and "schematic rearrangement" of perceptual-affective patterns (perhaps accessing the basic transformation allowing higher mental processes). In other words, if "thinking" rests on a disassembling and re-use of preliminary stages of perception and affect, then classical introspection unwittingly illustrated-by slowing and exaggerating-the "mechanism" of "thought." The relative failure in extending the introspective approach to complex thought and reasoning (the Wurzburg controversy) would then become more understandable since such processes are aheudy based on this automatic "turning around" and rearrangement (via complex synaesthetic translations), whereas the introspective transformation of perception would be a first-order generation of potential metaphor. Indeed, we will see that major introspective studies of perception and affect contain features chat do belong to recombinatory cognition, cross-modal translation, aesthetics, and metaphor . Titchener's "sensation" is not "about" perception as a function (James, 1890; Gibson, 1963). It has nothing to do with a concrete navigational orientation in the environment but instead shows the latter's transformation and replacement. Consider a spontaneous instance of "avoiding the stimulus error" -experiencing what will later turn out to be "a fly on one's lips" as a fascinating, exquisitely complex design, dynamic with strikingly aesthetic physiognomic properties. In one sense it is most certainly "primitive," but at the same time it is also a t r a n s f o ~ m a t i obased ~ on a contemplative "not doing" orientation that may well be criterial for higher mental processes. This introspectivemeditative shift would be beyond the capability of lower organisms, whose need systems seem to be geared to modality-specific "functional tones" (Von Uexkull, 1957) and who seemingly could not "afford" such an aesthetic, delayed, or "useless" sensitivity. Accordingly, it is especially interesting that James illustrated systematic introspection with the example of verbal or semantic satiation-in which repetition produces a loss of ordinary semantic reference and leaves behind a "pure" sound or visual line pattern. The "sensations" left after loss of ordinary verbal reference, however, are still physiognomically and synaesthetically expressive, as 498 H. T. HUNT seen in introspectionist studies of experience during verbal satiation (Severance 8r Washburn, 1907; Don & Weld, 1924) and in the work of Werner and Kaplan ( 1963). It seems significant that both general approaches to human cognition as inherently novel and more circumscribed studies of "creativity" suggest that the potential for such novelty must rest on a destructive quality-a disassembling of previous "dominant" meanings for the sake of subsequent "schematic rearrangements." Smith and Raygor (1956) report that word associations to satiated word sounds show the same atypicality and "distance" found with normal word-association responses in the highly creative. "Avoiding the stimulus errorw-as a form of semantic satiation-shows a necessary phase of recombinatory thought, especially its more "presentational" (Edelson, 1975) or metaphoric side. Some introspectionist research and its relation to u cognitive psychology of the numinous.-The work of Charles Spearman (1923) and Raymond Cattell (1930) is a useful place to begin a more specific empirical linking of "ordinary" introspective consciousness and altered states of consciousness. Their best experimental "subjectification" or "primary sentience" accounts were elicited by a passive, relaxed a t t i t u d e V t r a n c e like" and "hypnoticu-that sounds very much like the methods and effects of "mindfulness" meditative traditions (Shattock, 1960; Thera, 1962). Sullivan ( 1953) derives his concept of a prototaxic mode from Spearman's primary sentience. Indeed, the introspective descriptions of Cattell's observers' approximate standard alteredstate accounts. They include allusions to what we can only regard as brief feelings of strangeness and the uncanny, sense of timelessness and loss of spatial localization, derealization, and depersonalization, ineffable portent, synaesthesias (these including not only the "classical" positive varieties but also the more ubiquitous form identified by Werner [I9611 in which the subject is aware of a "pattern" that can not be localized within any specific sensory modality), and the probably related sense of fusion between the observer's "body percept" and the stimulus object. The latter effect would be an ultra brief version of classical "samadhi" and has also been mentioned in the experimental literature on visual contemplation ( Deikman, 1966; Hunt, 1971) . Cattell's observers asserted that for a brief instant "they" did not exist apart from their fusion with a sentience pattern which had no objective external reference and no sensory modality-even though the occasioning stimulus ( a tone, an object or color patch, a smell) was sensory. There is no reason to suppose that at one time such experience could have been developmentally normative-ontogenetically or phylogenetically-since no creature could afford such a failure in concrete discrimination and orientation. Similarly, especially if we keep in mind Smith's (1957) warning with respect to tachistoscopic studies that the effects reported are reflections and modifications of background pocesses COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 499 never intended for focal awareness, there is no reason to believe that similar altered-state experiences are somehow always going on unconsciously in the form experienced by introspectors and meditators. Again, we are dealing with a transformation into consciousness of microgenetically preliminary processes. This transformation is created by an immediate introspective intent (Hunt & Chefurka, 1976) that is itself reminiscent of Neisser's "turning around" and which elicits expressive vehicles of presentational symbolism. Along these lines Cattell's report of a delay in GSR preceding the richest primary sentience reports from the experienced introspectors suggests the sort of motoric inhibition long held criteria1 for thought. Even more striking are the parallels between Nafe's (1924) study of "feeling" (pleasure and unpleasure in response to diverse sensory stimuli) and body-image transformations from religious-mystical ecstasy. Nafe's observers were expecting that "affection" would be ultimately analyzable in terms of touch-pressure qualities, but they were clearly surprised and initially uncomfortable with the "as if," almost poetic and often paradoxical usage necessary to describe the nonlocalized "expansion" and "contraction" patterns that they came to call "bright" and "dull" pressures (as the tactile roots of pleasure and unpleasure, respectively). The brief moment-prolonged by the passive introspective set and the unexpected nature of the stimuli-before "like" or "pleasure" was a "sense" of expansion and rising that had a kind of quasi or "as if" "volume" but was not felt as ordinary body sensation: Massive is a good word in the sense of spread out indefinitely. It seems bigger than my body, and my body is in it. . . . The spread is indefinite. There is something expansive without limits. . . . P is very much like warmth; similar extent, but different qualities. . . . It was a big swell (Nafe, 1924, pp. 518, 525). Localization in terms of the body image was paradoxical. If there was a sense of body boundaries during "bright pressure," it was felt to rise up within the body and/or pass outward so that the body would be felt as somehow inside the sentience pattern. However, in its most complete development there was no body percept at all-just the expansion of a "something": It occupied a lot of space but I don't know what space. . . . These things are odd: they seem so definitely there that I feel I should be about to touch them but the trouble is you're not connected with them, you are not there in the sense that they are. . . I think the thing that bothers me is the way I seem to be disassociated from the experience; that is, it seems just as real as a sensory quality, just as existential and just as independent of me, but as a conscious organism I'm not even there. . . . It's as senseless to talk about pressures you don't feel anywhere as about a color volume you don't see. If you could have a pressure out in the air that would be it, not localized and with no reference to one (Nafe, 1924, pp. 537-538). . These observations are remarkably close to what Laski ( 1961) calls the 500 H. T. HUNT "quasi-physical" aspects of ecstasy-"quasi" because just as with Nafe it is often impossible to determine whether body-image changes are felt "hallucinatorily" or metaphorically-with accounts ranging from the primarily metaphoric ("I was uplifted," "surge of f a i t h ) to "as if" descriptions with a clear perceptual aspect ("It was as if I had no body"), to the sort of hallucinatory distortions based on intense heat, motion and light that are prominent in the Tantric meditational literature (Chang, 1963). Laski's list of quasi-physical sensations likewise includes "up" words and phrases (floating, buoyancy, surging), "inside" words ("an enormous bubble swelling in my chest," a moving sensation inside the body cavity), light and heat words (flashing, shimmering), enlargement words (swelling, bursting), and liquidity and motion words (bubbling up inside, flowing, melting, expanding, bursting). These "tactile" descriptions are also reminiscent of the microgenesis of visual glow to be discussed below. Both very mild, introspectively transformed feeling and the most intense mystical-peak ecstasy seem to occupy their own "space," independent of the body percept or indeed as its microgenetically primitive alternative. This would be the open imaginal "space" tapped by metaphor via the complex synaesthesias at the basis of what Milner ( 1957) terms the imaginal body. Here again there is no reason to think that such experience is solnehow "going on all the timeB'-even ultra rapidly in the "background of awareness. Rather the "expansive," "shimmering" "bright pressure" appears when the ordinary "functional" orientation is replaced by an aesthetic-experiential attitude. Later studies by W. A. Hunt (1933) and Young (1927) showed that bright and dull pressures were introspectively created alternatives to the muscular relaxations or contractions entailed by incipient approach or avoidance reactions. If the observers were not introspectively set for this "feeling" aspect, then they noticed ordinary, non-metaphoric body sensations. It would have to be the abstract "turning around" of systematic introspection that transforms concrete functional processes into aesthetic-physiognomic qualities . This transformation is not part of the ordinary psychology of emotion or movement. The only process with which it is consistent is the recombinatory cognitive capacity posited more or less in common by Bartlett, Neisser, Arnheim, and Werner and Kaplan. The final set of early introspectionist studies comes from Titchener's laboratory in the 1920's. There were several attempts to describe luminosity, glow, and lustre (Martin, 1922; Bixby, 1928; Kreezer, 1930) as the most basic sensory quale. These protocols show the same paradoxical, contradictory features, use of "negatives," assertions of ineffability, and statements that descriptions are "absurd" that appear in classical mystical accounts of void-luminosity sentience. The following accounts of glow and lustre come from Bixby's observers: COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 501 (Zinc) The surface is streaked with alternate light and dark points, like pinpoints, and it is as if there was a light behind and shining through. (Shell) The lustre lies behind that surface and detached from it. In other parts, where the lustre is best, there is no surface; there isn't much of anything there except the lustre. (Lead) A soft non-surfacy mass in which you see both light and dark without either being separable from the other. (Shell) The lustre comes as a soft, glowy mass of light that at the same time contains within itself a diffuse darkness (Bixby, 1928, pp. 139-142). Here the "glow" of things is basically non-localizable in terms of navigational space--it is neither two- nor three-dimensional but somehow prior to bothcombining that Titchener called the "pre-dimensional spread" as the ur-quality of space and the corresopnding "pre-temporal welling f o r t h of time. Like the mystics' "dark luminosity," these qualia had to be characterized by what they were not. Similarly, introspective observations with the tachistoscope (Dickinson, 1926)-with observers instructed to attune themselves to what happened before that which they had already reported-pushed back into visual microgenesis to the pre-contour stages of luminosity. The introspection protocols seem completely isomorphic with accounts from Tibetan Buddhism (Chang, 1963; EvansWentz, 1958; Guenther, 1971, 1976). On the most preliminary level of visual experience (closest to "nothing") was a diffuse grey luminosity, predimensional and translucent. It resisted discursive description but was compared by the observers to the first lighcing of the sky before dawn-the same comparison used in Tibetan accounts for the light of the void. This unlocalizable "passive" luminosity was followed by what seems to be a close parallel to Laski's more fiery light of "intensity ecstasy": there was a sense of something "riding out" as a "kick of light," "shooting out" or expanding from the center of the visual field-"rolling out" to create the "space" within which the initial lines of contour could appear. Tibetans and introspective observers agree on the use of analogies like clouds, smoke, moonlight, and stages of sunrise. It would be most plausible to conclude that the light-of-the-void is based on a direct experiencing of the visual microgenesis of light as described by the introspectionists, which in deep meditation has been prolonged, stabilized, and opened to synaesthetic cross-modal translation. The latter would entail felt annihilation and would make these paradoxical dark glows into the most open and ultimately abstract possible metaphor. Its full realization would be a cognitive "answer" to the open nature of time as created by human recombinatory cognition. Of course, there are myriad expressive qualities in the 'lights' of different times and places, each evoking the most pervasive possible tone of that specific setting and all linked by a common, unifying micro-history. The quality of luminosity in a situation can evoke utterly different meanings then, but they H. T. HUNT are, each one, "total" and linked by their common source-just as the many different gods come to have overlapping features at their more abstract levels of formulation. It is useful to recall Gibson's (1979) rejection of the tachistoscope as an artificial transformation that tells nothing about functional perception. Perhaps the tachistoscope has more to do with cognitive "disassembling" and "schematic rearrangement" than the "ambient array." If so, the tachistoscope already is Crovitz's ( 1970) "cognoscope"-his imaginary device to study cognition as the tachistoscope supposedly studies perception. From Gibson's ecological perspective, Titchener's "pre-dimensional spread, welling f o r t h is not a basic quale of space but a curiously abstracted transformation-a re-use of perceptual processes. Ic is, however, strikingly resonant with Heidegger on Being, Buddhism on the void, and Christian and Gnostic creation imagery. As "meaning" there is nothing else it could be "of." The microgenesis of light (more generally of space in, let's say, the blind) is the only possible metaphor (and "cause") for a concept of an all encompassing source, emanating from just beneath the surface of "things," while also filling ambient space, paradoxically unifying and containing the opposites of light and dark, not localizable in terms of "navigational" space and time, and felt, in Heidegger's language, as "giving" or "presenting" all more specific forms. Similarly, Titchener's tachistoscopically created pre-spatial spread wells forth and transforms itself into contours and detailed representational arrays. Extending Gibson's approach into metaphor, as the synaesthetically based re-use of perceptual microgenesis, the luminosity quale will be "resonant" with a "something" in semantic space, which will be based on a structure so open that it "becomes" the sense of "everything": the immediate metaphoric basis for the concept of a metaphysical absolute (Findlay, 1967). As synaesthetically mediated meaning visual microgenesis becomes the immediate vehicle for something Like the Buddhist "form is emptiness and emptiness is form." States of Consciousness in Religious-Mystical Experience and Their Relation to Cognitive Theory The place of consciousness in cognitive psychology.-We have developed a cognitive psychological understanding of mystical consciousness as a synaesthetic-imaginal re-use and transformation of the visual microgenetic sequence by which luminosity gives birth to form. Correspondingly such experiences represent perhaps the most direct exteriorization of the basic processes of metaphoric intelligence. Accordingly we are left with "weak and "strong" versions. For the former, religious-mystical and related states of consciousness show us the "presentational," spatial-gestural, synaesthetic-metaphoric side of COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY:MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 503 recombinatory cognition-with its own inherent line of potential development. As with recent related discussions of "primitive" tribal thought (Cooper, 1975), narcissism (Kohut, 1977; Winnicott, 1971), and "primary process" thought (Edelson, 1975), our culture has come to regard this line either as "primitive" or "epiphenomenal" with respect to language, perhaps because that is how we leave it. In the "strong" view such phenomena are rare bnt uniquely direct exteriorizations of the actual metaphoric roots of all human recombinatory cognition-revealing its normally unconscious origins in Arnheim's "visual dynamics" and geometricalizations and their synaesthetic translations into movement and vocalization. Visual microgenesis becomes the template of all meaning. Perhaps, however, a word might first be in order on how such subjective phenomena-with their striking cognitive attributes--could be evidential for the basic processes of mind. In his later writing William James (1912) suggested that there could be no way to establish any distinction between "consciousness" and "world since any empirical attributes located for the one inevitably apply to the other. By implication consciousness must be more than his earlier "stream" since that system (the mind or the world?) which gives rise to all possible metaphors could not be encompassed by those pertaining to "water" alone. We are left with the notion of two configurations of "consciousness": one manifested for its own sake and ultimately developed as the light of the void experience and the other subordinated to the pragmatics of the social and physical order, realized as Schutz's (1962) "everyday life-world," and based on the sophisticated multiplicity of "ordinary language." Whatever the nature of "consciousness" or "mind," we are within itconstantly "turning around" on ourselves--for fun and profit-within its apparently ubiquitously reflexive (social-symbolic) structure. Following here one of the founders of the Soto Zen tradition (Cleary, 1980, p. 19) "consciousness has no independent nature and cannot be grasped." Indeed, "consciousness," like an inherently elastic encompassing medium, must mold itself to any fist that would "grasp" it (and which in some sense is in turn its reflexive manifestation). The more deliberately and firmly me try to "grasp" mind, the more clearly we will register each wrinkle on each knuckle, and thereby again miss the encompassing medium itself. There can be no place to stand outside this process-for anything we do or think or discover must (also) manifest "mind." In this regard, however, the spontaneous transformations of "consciousness as such" (altered states with their cognitive metaphoric attributes) will provide a unique and necessary perspective on that "medium" in contrast to the more specific "applications" to which the exferkental-psychological "grasp" must perforce limit itself. The most developed of these "subjective" 504 H. T. HUNT states-as found in the religious-mystical meditative traditions, psychedelics, and schizophrenia-seem to show us the immediate basis for Neisser's "turning around" and Mead's "taking the role of the other." They are "deep structure" near. How near remains to be fully determined, but the "strong view" would argue for identity. A "cognitive psychology" cannot afford to leave out such "first person" evidencesince ultimately it will still have to be coordinated with any future development of our beloved "objective" methods. States of conscioasness as showing the "deep stracture" of fecombinatory cognition (the shong view).-James ( 1902 ) suggested that mystical experience is an exaggeration of the ordinary "sense of significance"-in more recent terms an exteriorization of processes constituting what Gendlin ( 1962 ) has termed "felt meaning." If so, a cognitive psychological approach to altered states offers the closest possible view of the "deep structure" or "semantics" of symbol formation. This approach is of course consistent with the view that metaphor is not epiphenomena1 to language but causal, since the complex synaesthesias of these states would constitute the "mechanism" of metaphor. Gendlin's "felt meaning" is the ordinarily unarticulated "sense" of meaning accompanying all symbolic cognition-no matter how formal, logical or specialized its development. In any given situation "felt meaning" may or may not need to unfold to a point of sufficient differentiation for explicit communication. Indeed, each moment of "felt meaning" is open and preliminary enough to offer multiple, "plurisignificant" avenues of completion, while definite enough to be immediately experienced as an "understanding" that will also exclude certain other "felt meanings." Going further in the present context, thought would be a "complex" or "structural" synaesthesia, ultimately guided by the unifying sequence of visual microgenesis and based on the various geometric "form constants" emerging from luminosity. These potentially experiential phenomena would show how "felt meaning" operates and how it comes to have the characteristics Gendlin ascribes to it. Only spatial patterns-with their simultaneously presented range on a microgenetic globality/complexity dimension and the various reciprocal transformations involved in the phenomenal constancies--can provide the noncognitive template for those transformations (deletion, substitution, expansion, condensation, addition, permutation) that are criterial for recombinatory processes. As with current thought on the mechanism of human evolution via "feta1ization"-birth at more rudimentary and so open stages of mammalian (primate) embryology-this is likewise a "neotonous" model of cognitionsince the further "back cross-modal translation can push into visual microgenesis, the more open and abstract the symbolic reference. What the philosopher of metaphysics subordinates to subsequent linguistic articulation, the mystic underges directly-at great cost-as the numinosity-cessation experience. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 505 This is "regression in service of the ego" only if all human thought involves such a "regression." It does not help particularly to suggest that the white-light experiences and complex synaesthesias are a kind of language. Rather complex synaesthesias are the semantic "deep structure" of language--the source of a capacity for symbolic reference which can be expressed and developed along two lines windirectly (and so "usefully") as language and technology, directly and "aesthetically" towards classical mysticism. Language does not explain altered states of consciousness; rather these phenomena exteriorize that aspect of language and thought-"felt meaningu-which separates us from computers (Searle, 1980). Meta$hmic-synuesthetic pocerres a5 their own line of cognitive development (the "weak" view).-While not contradicting the notion that altered states of consciousness exteriorize semantics (turn language inside out), the more modest hypothesis is that they show the processes underlying the "presentational" side of the human intellect (based on synaesthetic translations of spatial microgenesis as its guiding template). First, as we have only begun to show here, altered states of consciousness tell us something about the processes of metaphor. Second, they have something essential to d o wich the manifest novelty and creativity of recombinatory thought. A line of development ending in the void experience would involve a direct attempt to "spatialize" the uncanniness and uncertainty of "time ahead." On a more differentiated level basic geometric form constants, specific polyvalent condensations, imaginal super-impositions and ultra rapid scintillations would all "allow" major "recombinatory" features. Such processes-suitably isomorphic with the "immediacy" or "speed" of thought-would be "primitive" only with respect to their seqilential articulation-since in Piagetian terms they already come with the reversibility that must so gradually unfold wich verbal-motor thinking via increasingly rapid "steps." Geometric-synaesthetic forms and condensations need no such "reversibility" because they are based on the simultaneous presentations of contradictory condensed patterns (Hillman, 1977; Hunt, 1982)with an implied felt unity from the microgenesis of luminosity. Certainly Arnheim (1969) has reminded us that visual imagery need not be concretely mimetic but can also be nonmimetic and abstract, and Kliiver's "form constants" provide just the spontaneous realizations that Arnheim had to infer. Finally, we could suggest that an explicit "turning around" on or "taking the role of the other" with respect to microgenetically "primitive" spatial qualia will create a broader sense of context, setting, or perspective than ordinarily possible to a more pragmatic, narrowed use of intelligence. The most abstract or developed form of spatial intelligence appears as the full realization of the light-of-the-void, which as the broadest possible setting or "physiognomy" ( a 506 H. T. HUNT sense of pure openness that "lets be" all within it) cannot be undercut by any other (necessarily more specific) setting. It would also provide the "stability" so lacking in the earlier more preliminary stages of this developmental line (i.e., the bizarreness of imagery condensations and fluctuations, Jung's strife of archetypal opposites). This imaginal-synaesthetic line most directly confronts "negative capabilgenerates/is drawn to novelty and all that is linguistically atypical, ity'-it problematic, or "marked." Ordinary language deals with such material as "un" or "not" normative, while the basic attribute of creative imagery is the sense of the "uncanny-the "neither this nor that," the "not any of this." Whereas this imaginal l i n m n l y potentially culminating in the void-luminosity "realization"-is inherently attuned to the unknown, ordinary language use helps maintain the form of an expectable "everyday reality" (which is strikingly plastic and malleable in actual content) by using our recombinatory capacity not in its own terms but to continuously re-establish a sense of the "familiar" and "unmarked-what Schutz (1962) calls the "and so on" quality of the everyday life-world. W e have a cognitive, specifically human line of development-manifested most directly as "altered states of consciosuness." Through "surface" condensations, imaginal-synaesthetic scintillations and super-impositions, and "deeper" geometric "form constants" and "luminosities" anything can be "seen" in terms of anything else. As the experiential-aesthetic line of recombinatory development it wodd be blocked by and lag behind the more clearly functional and sequential forms of verbal-motor intelligence. These latter would "use" and "use up" spatial synaesthesias as part of their own deep structure. The manifest unfolding of the imaginal Line must also face an inherent and self-inhibiting strife-both from the collisions of "opposites" entailed by its polysemy and from the cessation-annihilation state resulting from a full synaesthetic translation of body scheme into luminosity. The cross-culturally common forms of religious mysticism and shamanism attest, however, to the importance of these manifestations as providing the maximum intelligence of "context." The various established "arts" show indirect, relatively preliminary and so more socially useful and accessible stabilizations of these expressivesynaesthetic processes, while the end state of the various mysticisms shows both their more direct, full unfolding and underlying template. Of course, the reader might prefer that we refer to such processes as a "right hemisphere intelligencep'-as in the related approach of Roland Fischer (1975)-but, believe it or not, such a conclusion seems premature and too speculative. First, there is always the possible confusion of anatomic localizations-specializations of "performance" with deep competence (as Schanfald [I9821 has demonstrated in her studies showing the potentiality for seemingly COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 507 normal dream recall in both severely aphasic left-hemisphere brain damage and severe right-hemisphere damage). Along these lines we simply don't know how 'right' and 'left' might interact in the normal generation of "felt meaning." Our processes do "sound" like they come from "the right" but on a more functional level it is clear that imaginal physiognomies can both lead and be primed by verbal expression. Second, as a psychologist-who has had no direct dealings with "brains" worth recounting-I think it is most immediately promising to see what can be done with a cognitive psychology based on subjective states. Objectivity-Sz~bjectwity? What then of our initial concern that a naturalistic psychology of the n u m i n o u s w i t h its phenomenology of an absolutely real knowledge of the origin and purpose of existence--must render that insight merely inward and subjective? While we have shown the inevitability of such experience given a certain approach to cognitive psychology, have we only demonstrated the inevitability of a kind of symbolic "illusion"? Perhaps the "numinous," as the symbolic "response" filling the "nothingness" of time ahead, is a sort of cognitive pacifier? Or have we perhaps only made a psychological analysis of contemporary nihilism into a crypto-religion? Yet the facing into our negative capability (and something rather like our secularized contemporary nihilism) seems to be at the experiential core of all religious-aesthetic-ethical systems (as "creature feeling") and the full development of the numinous void realization as "answer" seems to make immense and overwhelming demands on individual and society: mystical and prophetical salvation movements are "radical." Their immediate impact (at least) does not "pacify." But what of the more basic issue that nonetheless the numinous must-in our era-be "all in the mind" (and merely s o ) ? When both mathematics and the physical universe (Bronowski, 1971; Hofstadter, 1979) are regarded as "reflexive," then surely-given its concrete sensory features-the synaesthetically mediated microgenesis of luminosity (as that which encompasses temporality) is no more "subjective" than it is "objective." If thought re-uses the qualia and processes of perception, then where is it-inside or out? W e can say that ''thought'' is "withdrawn" from concrete reality-"abstracted"-but we can equally say-in a more Gibsonian vein-that thought is a synaesthetic resonance with the geometric structures of things-since the same "form constants" (lattice, spirals, bursts, and arcs) that appear in "psychedelic" imagery and hallucinations (and sacred art) also appear on all levels of physical reality (Stevens, 1974). Accordingly, if numinous awareness rests on a metaphoric and abstract re-use of luminosity phases of microgenesis, then our most "abstract" experience is "read off" or "implied" by an embodiment of the most 508 H. T. H U N T preliminary (normally unavailable) stage of the most structurally precise of the senses. The early introspectionists' tachistoscopic studies show that such luminosity is as close as sensation can come to the occasioning physical stimu b s . Given the naive realism that has animated so much of psychology, such luminosity sentience becomes the closest that experience can get to the physical energies impinging on the receptors-to the "thing in itself" (i.e., the "stimulus") for that psychology which began with Fechner and Wundt. So we c o u l d - a s easily as using words like "inward," "subjective," "illusion"-say that the numinous-with, after all, its "wholly other," "objective" phenomenologyis a maximally intuitive Gibsonian "read off' or "information pickup." After all, it isolates and re-uses the most basic property of the stimulus array-the "spread" of open space. The numinous is a "taking the role of the other" with respect to the origins of visual microgenesis, i.e., what you wotzld "say" if you were light. It is a cognitive-metaphoric formulation based on a fundamental property of the physical order. There is nothing else this cognitively abstracted quale can be "of" than "creation," "totality" or "existence per se." Those who become able to "take the role of" open luminosity and let it guide their lives would be living and thinking at least as veridically as those following any other doctrine of "realism." What they lack in sequential, specific, socially pragmatic and technical capacities they would make up for by "perspective"-a certain sensitivity to the "context" of living. REFERENCES ANGYAL,A. Neurosis and treatment: a holistic theory. New York: Wiley, 1965. ARNHEIM, R. Visual thinking. Berkeley: Univer. of California Press, 1969. ARNHEIM, R. Art and visual perception. Berkeley: Univer. of California Press, 1974. BARRON,F. Creative person and creative process. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969. BARTLETT, F. Remembm.ng. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univer. Press, 1932. BION, W . R. Learning from experience. London: Heineman, 1962. BION, W. R. TWO papers: the grid a d caesura. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Imago Editora, 1977. BIXBY, F. A phenomenological study of lustre. J. gen. Psychol., 1928, 1 , 136-174. BOERNSTEIN,W . Optic perception and optic imageries in man. Inter. J. Neurol., 1967, 6, 147-181. BOISEN, A. The exploration of the inner zuorld. New York: Harper, 1962. BOURGUIGNON,E. Inrroduction: a framework for the comparative study of altered states of consciousness. In E. Bourguignon (Ed.), Religion, altered stntes o f conscioirsness, and social change. Columbus: Ohio State Univer. Press, 1973. Pp. 3-35. BOWER,T. The visual world of infants. Sci. Amer., 1966, 215, 80-92. BOWER, T. A primer o f infant development. San Francisco: W. H . Freeman, 1977. Bowam, M. Retreat from sanity. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1974. BOWERS,M., & FREEDMAN,D. "Psychedelic" experiences in amre psychoses. Arch. gen. Prychiat., 1966, 1 5 , 240-248. BRONOWSKI,J. The identity of man. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1971. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 509 BROWN, D. A model for the levels of concentrative meditation. Int. 1. d i n . & exp. Hyimosis. 1977, 25, 236-273. .. CASSIRER,E. T h e phioso*hy o f symbolic forms. Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univer. Press, 1955. CASTANEDA,C. Journey to lxtlan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. CATTELL,R. The subjective character of cognition and the presensational development of perceprion. Brit. 1. Psychol., 1930, Monogr. 14. CHANG, G. (trans.) Teachings o f Tibetan Yoga. University Books, 1963. CHAPMAN, J. The early symptoms of schizophrenia. Brit. J . Psychiat., 1966, 112, 225-251. CLARIDGB, G. The schizophrenias as nervous types. Brit. J . Psychiat., 1972, 121, 1-17. CLEARY,T. (Ed.) Timeless spring: a Soto Z e n anthology. New York: Wheelwright, 1980. COOPER,D. Alternative logic in "primitive thought." Man, 1975, 10, 238-256. CROVITZ, H. Galton's walk. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. DANIELOU, A. Yoga: the method of re-integration. New York: University Books, 1955. DEIKMAN, A. Implications of experimentally induced contemplative meditation. I . neru. ment. Dis., 1966, 142, 101-116. DE~KMAN, A. Bimodal consciousness. Arch. gen. Psychiat., 1971, 25, 481-489. DEJONG, H. Experimental catatonirc. Baltimore, M D : Williams & Wilkins, 1945. DICKINSON,C. The course of experience. Amer. I . Psychol., 1926, 37, 330-344. DON, W., & WELD, H. Lapse of meaning with visual fixation. Amer. J . Psychol., 1924, 35, 446-453. DYKES, M., & MCGHIE, A. A comparative study of attentional strategies of schizophrenic and highly creative normal subjects. Brit. I. Psychiat., 1976, 128, 50-56. EDELSON,M. Language and interpretation i n psychoanuIysis. New Haven, CT: Ya!e Univer. Press, 1975. ELIADE, M. Shamanism. New York: Pantheon, 1964. ERICKSON,M., & ROSSI, E. Experiencing hypnosis. New York: Irvington, 1981. ERIKSON, E. Y o u n g mun Luther. New York: Norton, 1958. ERIKSON, E. Childhood and society. New York: Norton, 1963. EVANS, R. Tirchener and his lost system. J . Hist. behau. Sci., 1972, 8, 168-180. EVANS-WENTZ,W . (Ed.) Tibetan Y o g a and secret doctrines. London: Oxford Univer. Press, 1958. FINDLAY,J. The logic of mysticism. Religious Studies, 1967, 2, 145-162. FISCHER,R. Cartography of inner space. In R. Siege1 & L. West (Eds.), HaI111cinations: behavior, experience, and theory. New York: Wiley, 1975. Pp. 197-239. FLAVELL,J., & DRAGUNS, J. A microgenetic approach to perception and thought. Psychol. Bull., 1957, 54, 197-217. FREEDMAN, D. On the use and abuse of LSD. Arch. gen. Psychiat., 1968, 18, 330-347. FREUD, S. (1919). The "uncanny." In Collected papms. Vol. 4. New York: Basic Books, 1959. FREUD, S. (1925). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. London: Hogarth, 1961. FURST, P. The roots and continuities of Shamanism. Arts Canada, 1973, No. 184-187, 33-60. GALLUP, G. Animal hypnosis: factual scams of a fictional concept. Psychol. Bull., 1974, 81, 836-853. GBNDLIN,E. Experiencing and the creation o f meaning. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. GESCHWIND, N. Discoonexion syndromes in animals and man. Brain, 1965, 88, 237-294, 585-644. GIBSON, J. The useful dimensions of sensitivity. Amer. Psychologist, 1963, 18, 1-15. 510 H. T. HUNT GIBSON, J. T h e ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. GILES, L. (trans.) Taoist teachings f r o m t h e book o f Lieh T z u . Murray, 1947. GOLDSTEIN,K. H u m a n nature i n the light o f psychopathology. London: John New York: Schocken, 1963. GOLEMAN,D. The Buddha on meditation and states of consciousness. J . transpers. Psychol., 1972, 4, 1-44. GREENACRE, P. The predisposition to anxiety. Trauma, growth, personality. New York: Norton, 1952. GROF, S. LSD psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980. GUENTHER, H. (trans.) Gampopa's 'Jewel ornament of liberation'. Berkeley, CA: Shandala, 1971. GUENTHER,H. (trans. and commentary) Longchanpa's 'Kindly bent t o ease us.' Vol. 3. Emeqville, CA: Dharma, 1976. HEBB, D., & THOMPSON,W. The social significance of animal srudies. In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook o f social psychology. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: AddisonWesley, 1968. Pp. 729-774. HEIDEGGER,M. Being and time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. HEIDEGGBR, M. O n t i m e and being. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. HILLMAN, J. An inquiry into image. Spring, 1977, 6, 62-88. HOFSTADTHR,D. G d e l , Escher, Bach: a n eternal golden braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. HOROWITZ, M. Hallucinations: an information-processing approach. In R. Siege1 & S. West (Eds.) , Hallucinations: behavior, experience, theory. New York: Wiley, 1975. Pp. 163-195. HUNT, H : A phenomenological and an experimental approach to altered states of consclousness. Un~ublished doctoral dissertation. Brandeis Univer... 1971. HUNT, H., & CHEFURKA,C. A test of the psychedelic model of altered srates of consclousness. Arch. gen. Psychiat., 1976, 33, 867-876. HUNT, H. (with OGILVIB, R., BELICKI, K., BELICKI, D., & ATALICK,E.) Forms of dreaming. Percep. mot. Skills, 1982, 54, 5 59-633. H W , W . A. The meaning of pleasantness and unpleasantness. Amer. 1. Psychol., 1933, 45, 345-348. JAMES, W. T h e principler o f psychology. Vols. 1 and 2. New York: Dover. 1890. JAMES, W. T h e varieties o f religious experience. Garden City, NJ: Dolphin Books, 1902. JAMES, W. Does 'consciousness' exist? In Essays in sadical empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green, 1912. Pp. 1-38. JAYNES, J. T h e origin o f consciourness in the breakdown o f t h e bicameraL mind. Toronto: Univer. of Toronto Press, 1976. JUNG, C. G. T w o essays o n analytical psychology. Collected works o f C. G. l u n g . Vol. 7. New York: Pantheon, 1953. J m G , C. G. Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Pantheon, 1961. KATZ, D. Psychological a t k . New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. K L ~ ~ V EH. R , Mescal and mechanisms o f hallucination. Chicago: Univer. of Chicago Press, 1966. KOHUT, H. T h e restoration o f the self. New York: Internat. Univer. Press, 1977. KOSSLYN,S. The medium and the message in mental imagery: a theory. P~ychol. Rev., 1981, 88, 46-66. KREEZER, G. Luminous appearances. I. gen. Psychol., 1930, 4, 247-280. KRISHNA,G. Kundalini. New Delhi: Ramadhar & Hopman, 1967. KRUEGER,F. The essence of feeling: outline of a systematic theory. In M. Reymert COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 511 (Ed.), Peelings and emotions. Worcester, MA: Clark Univer. Press, 1928. Pp. 58-87. LAING, R. D. T h e voice of experience. New York: Pantheon, 1982. LAKOFP,G., & JOHNSON,M. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Univer. of Chicago Press, 1980. LANDIS,C. Varieties of psychopathological experience. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964. LASKI, M. Ecstasy. Bloominmon. - . IN: Indiana Univer. Press. 1961. LEARY,T., METZNER,R., & ALPERT,R. P~ychedelicexperience. New York: Academy Ed., 1964. L ~ w I N ,K. Principles of topological psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936. LUK, C. C h m and Zen teaching, first series. London: Rider, 1960. LUK, C Practical Buddhism. London: Rider, 1971. W S , L. T h e unity of the senses. New York: Academic Press, 1978. MARTIN,M. Film, surface, and bulky colors and their intermediates. Amer. I. Psychol., 1922, 33, 451-480. MASLOW,A. Towmds a psychology o f being. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962. MASLOW, A. T h e farther reaches of human nature. New York: Viking, 1971. MCKELLAR,P. Imagindion and thinking. London: Cohen & West, 1957. MEAD, G. H. Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: Univer. of Chicago Press, 1934. MILNER,M. O n not being able to paint. New York: Internat. Univer. Press, 1957. MINKOWSKI,E. Lived time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer. Press, 1970. MONTAGU, A. Time, morphology, and neotony in the evolution of man. In A. Montagu (Ed.), Culture and the evolution o f nun. New York: Oxford Univer. Press, 1962. Pp. 324-342. MOODY,R. Life after life. Atlanta, GA: Mockingbird Books, 1975. NAPE, J. An experimental study of the affective qualities. Amer. I. Psychol., 1924, 35, 507-544. NHISSER, U. Cognitive psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967. NEISSER,U. Cognition and reality. San Francisco, CA: Freeman, 1976. NIETZSCHE,F. T h e will to power. New York: Random House, 1967. O S ~ D C. , Semantic differential techniques in the comparative study of cultures. Amer. Anthropologist, 1964, 66, 171-200. 01T0, R. T h e idea of the holy. New York: Galaxy Books, 1958. PANIO, A. Psychological processes in the comprehension of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), M e t e h o r and thought. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univer. Press, 1979. PAvLov, I. P. Conditioned reflexes. New York: Dover, 1960. PIAGEIT, J. T h e origins of intelligence in children. New York: Internat. Univer. Press, 1952. PIAGET,J. T h e child's conception of the world. Patterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1963. RANK, 0 . Art and artist. New York: Agathon Press, 1932. REICH, W. Selected writings. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1960. RICOEUR,P. T h e rule o f metaphor. Toronto, Ont.: Univer. of Toronro Press, 1977. RIEKER,H. T h e Yoga of light (Hatha Yoga pradipika). Los Angeles, CA: Dawn Horse Press, 1971. RING, K. Life at death. New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1980. RYCROPT,C T h e innocence of dreams. New York: Pantheon, 1979. SANDER, F. Structures, totality of experience, and gestalt. In C Murchison (Ed.), Psychologies of 1930. Worcester, MA: Clark Univer. Press, 1930. Pp. 188-204. SCHANPALD, D., PEARLMAN,C., GREENBERG, R., & KLEEFIELD, J. Effects of aphasia H. T. HUNT and visual-spatial related brain damage on dreams. Presented at meeting of the Association for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep, Mexico City, 1980. SCHILDER,P. Mind: perception and thought i n their constructive aspects. New York: Columbia Univer. Press, 1942. SCHREBER, D. Memoirs o f my nervous illness. London: Dawson, 1955 (1903). S C H ~ Z A. , On multiple realities. In T h e problems o f socllrl reality: collected papers o f Alfred Schutz. Vol. 1. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962. Pp. 207-259. SEARLE,J. Minds, brains, programs. Behav. Brain Sciences, 1980, 3, 417-457. SEARLES,H. The differentiation berween concrete and metaphorical thinking in the recovering schizophrenic patient. In H. Searles, Collected papers o n schizophrenia am! related subjects. New York: Internat. Univer. Press, 1965. Pp. 560-583. SELIGMAN, P. T h e Xpeiron o f Anaximnnder. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1962. SELIGMAN,P. The numinous in religion, art, and analytical psychology. Philosophy Dept., Brock Univer., 1976. SEVERANCE, E., & WASHBURN,M. The loss of associarive power in words after long fixation. A m w . I . Psychol., 1907, 18, 182-186. SHA'ITOCK,E. A n experiment i n mindfulness. New York: Dunon, 1960. SIEGEL, R. The psychology of life after death. Amer. Psychologist, 1980, 35, 911-931. SIEGEL,R.. & JARVICK,M. Drug-induced hallucinations in animals and man. In R. Siegal & L. West (Eds.), Hallucinatio~s: behavior, experience, theory. New York: Wiley, 1975. Pp. 81-161. SMITH, D., & RAYGOR, A. Verbal satiation and personality. J . abnorm, soc. Psychol., 1956, 52, 323-326. SMITH, G. Visual perception: an event over time. Psychol. Rev., 1957, 64, 306-313. SOLOMON,R., & CORBIT, J. An opponent-process theory of motivation. Psychol. Rev.. 1974,. 81,. 119-145. SPEARMAN,C. T h e M u r e o f intelligence and the principles o f cognition. London: Macmillan, 1923. STEVENS,P. Pattern i n nature. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. SULLNAN,H. S. T h e interperjonal theory o f psychiatry. New York: Norton, 1953. THERA, N. T h e heart o f Buddhist meditation. London: Rider, 1962. THOMPSON,D. O n growth and form. Cambridge, M A : Cambridge Univer. Press, 1961. TITCHENER,E. B. Description vs statement of meaning. Anter. J. Psychol., 1912, 23, 165-182. TITCHENER,E. B. Systemtic psychology: Prolegomena. New York: Macmillan, 1929. TRUNGPA,C. Cutting t h o u g h spiritual materialism. Berkeley, CA: Shambhala, 1973. TULKU,T. Calm and clear. Berkeley, CA: Dharma, 1973. TULKU,T. Time, space, and knowledge. Emeryville, CA: Dharma, 1977. UNDERHILL,E. Mysticism. New York: Meridian Books, 1955. R. T h e psychology o f dreaming. New York: General Learning Press, VAN DECASTLB, 1971. VAN DUSEN,W. T h e natural depth i n man. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. J. I n the shadow of man. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, VAN LAWICK-GOODALL, 1971. E. The unity of the senses. In W. Ellis (Ed.), A sourcebook o f VON HORNBOSTEL, Gestalt psychology. New York: Humanities Press, 1967. Pp. 210-216. VON UEXKULL,J. A stroll through the world of animals and man. In C Schiller (Ed.), Instinctive behavior. New York: Internat. Univer. Press, 1957. Pp. 5-80. L. Thought and language. Cambridge, M A : M.I.T. Press, 1962. VYGOTSKY, COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: MYSTICAL, ALTERED-STATES 513 WAGNER,S., WINNER,E , CICCHETII. D.. & GARDNER,H. "Metaphorical" mapping in human infants. Child Devel., 1981, 52, 728-731. WEBER,M. The sociology o f religion. Bosron, MA: Beacon Press, 1963. WERNER,H. Comparative psychology of mental development. New York: Science Ed., 1961. WERNER,H., & KAPLAN, B. Symbol formation. New York: Wiley, 1963. WEST, L. A clinical and theoretical overview of hallucinatory phenomena. In R. S i e g l & L. West (Eds.), Hallucinations: behavior, experience, theory. New York: Wiley, 1975. Pp. 287-311. WHEELER,R., & CUTSFORTH,T. Synaesthesia and meaning. Amer. I. Psychol., 1922, 33, 361-384. WILHELM,R. (trans.) The secret of the golden flower. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World., 1962. WINNlCOTT, D. W. Birth memories, birch trauma, and anxiety. In Collected papers. New York: Basic Books, 1958. Pp. 174-193. WINNICOTT, D. W. Plrrying and reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971. WITTGENSTEIN,L. Philosophical investinations. New York: Maunillan. 1953. WOODY, E., & CLARIDGB,G. Psychoticism and thinking. Brit. 1. soc. clin. Psychol., 1977, 16, 241-248. YOUNG, P. Studies in affective psychology. Amer. 1. Psychol., 1927, 38, 157-193. ZEEMAN,E. Catastrophe theory. Sci. Amer., 1976, 234(4), 65-83. Accepted Pebruary 9, 1984.