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b"Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com\\n\\xa0\\nS3E24 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\\n\\xa0\\nMark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm your host Mark.\\nYucca: And I'm the other one Yucca.\\nMark: Today, we are going to talk about something that is very central to pagan practice of all kinds. And that is trance.\\nYucca: Right. And this is something that we see in paganism. We see it in a lot of other religions as well. It seems to be a very like, a very important experience for. being in that space, having those transformations, when really important things are happening, there's often a trance state.\\nMark: Right. The attainment of altered states of consciousness is often something that is viewed as holy. In various religions or is viewed certainly as transformative or divinely inspired or or divinely provoked. There are a lot of different frameworks for understanding what this is, but there are so many examples all over the world of people using various different kinds of techniques in order to enter a trans state.\\nYucca: Right. And since we are non theist, we're not coming at it from a, from the divine perspective. So we're looking at it, we'll look at it from a more neuroscience perspective and the usefulness of it as well, because it really is very useful.\\nMark: right, right. The, and I guess the, where we need to start with that then is to talk about what it is.\\nYucca: Right,\\nMark: trance is kind of a. It's a general term that isn't used by many other religions, other than paganism to describe a particular neurological state. And you can get to that neurological state through a lot of different approaches. Repetitive motion is one of them listening to very dreamy kinds of music with beautiful harmonies in it can take you into that state.\\nYucca: Mm-hmm\\nMark: Um, and it's the state that's characterized by being very much in the present. So you're not thinking about. Your list of things to do or about worrying about the future or any of that?\\nYou're very much in the present moment. Also with a very kind of emotional openness and a sense of focus, a sense of of experience that you're having.\\nYucca: Right. And, and I, a word that does get used in, in the common cultures, often in the zone, right. When someone talks about being in the\\nMark: That's exactly right. Another term that is used by people like sports, psychologists is flow.\\nYucca: zone, that's actually a trance state, right?\\nMark: When you, when you are in a flow state, you're very creative, you have access to your subconscious You're not distracted by thoughts of other times or other obligations. You're really in a, kind of a peak optimal state for for working with your own creativity and your own psychology.\\nRight.\\nYucca: right.\\nMark: So there are other, oh,\\nYucca: Oh, I was gonna say, this is something that I see. Young children do very, very naturally. They get into a state like that. And it's something that later on, we don't tend to practice as much. We kind of train ourselves out of it, but I think that there's, there's something very instinctual about it, that humans.\\nThat we, we gravitate towards that. We really do that when given the opportunity to\\nMark: There's something about trans that is play.\\nYucca: mm-hmm\\nMark: Because it's creative. In, in many cases now, in, in the case of some religious traditions, trans states are very narrowly defined as only being allowed to be particular kinds of experiences. And so there isn't as much creativity associated with them. But we'll be talking later on about how to induce these trans states.\\nBut when you think about, Hildegard Von, BGAN having her, Amazing sort of visions of the Virgin, Mary and all these angels and saints and all that kind of stuff. That's very much a trans state. Now the odds are good that in her case she was probably epileptic and One of the, one of the characteristics of epilepsy is that people can go into a, kind of a phasic trans state"