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“Altered states of consciousness” has different meanings and values for different people.  Many think of the states induced by alcohol, marijuana, peyote, and a long list of other drugs.  Sometimes the alteration can be beneficial, either for relaxation or removing some blocks to a problem solution.  Sometimes the alteration can be detrimental and even deadly, not just to the partaker but others.  The too common example of detrimental is the drunk driver.

I have found the best ways to alter my state of consciousness are done without any exterior aids.  These are distraction, sleep, and meditation.

If I go away from a problem for a while the answer may “sneak up” on me.  One of my most common problems is forgetting names, something that seems to be occurring to me more and more.  If I see or talk to someone I may just draw a blank on their name.  The face and voice are familiar, but I just can’t think of the name.  Not always, but often, I think of the person’s name right after parting or an hour or a day later.

This reminds me of a definition given by my high-school English teacher:

Wit: That which someone else has at a party that you have on the way home.

But not all is lost in my memory.  I have memorized several songs in foreign languages: some languages I can speak or understand a few hundred words, some languages I have no idea what the words mean.  If I forget some of the words, I can often remember them again with a few runs-through with the score.

As I type these words, a cascade of thoughts, some distractive, some only slightly relevant, keeps popping up in my head.  As many Reader Weekly columns are a chat with the readers, I’ll pop in a few of these pop-ups every few paragraphs.

Where was I?  Oh, yes, songs in foreign languages.  Many people tell me, “I was never good at foreign languages.”  I often ask them if they know the chorus to the “Witch Doctor Song”.  I bet that chorus has now popped into your head with no additional clues.

Panic and frustration are distractions to clear thinking.  I couldn’t figure out where I put the sketchy notes for this column.  I searched all kinds of files.  I picked up scrap after scrap of notepaper.  Finally, my brain plowed through the panic to tell me to look in my folder of Reader Weekly columns.  I had been ignoring the file because its name included a future date!

Sleep can do wonderful things for our brains.  First, it just lets our conscious minds relax for a few hours.  Second, it lets our subconscious minds keep working on their backlog of problems.  Third, if we wake at the right time, it can provide solutions or misdirections that we hadn’t considered before sleep.  Fourth, it can let our brains go off in all kinds of impossible fantasies.

Recently I was working on some writing that wasn’t going well.  In the middle of the night I woke with some key sentences in my head.  I immediately wrote them down and easily went back to sleep.  Delightful surprise!  The sentences made sense in the morning and helped me complete the writing.

Conversely, those “illuminating” thoughts can be deceiving.  A few years ago I woke up in the middle of the night convinced a minister friend had died.  As far as I know, he is still alive.  Every so often there is a report of somebody having a premonition about something and that thought became reality.  But how often do people have premonitions that don’t come true; these probably far outnumber the former but rarely get reported.

Several years ago the Unitarian Church of Germantown (Pennsylvania) organized a large set of adult education classes.  We took at least two, both on the mind.  I think one was called “altered states of the mind” and the other “meditation”.

The first gave primarily a sense of relaxation.  I only remember three things about the class: a view of the room, a woman who said she always fell asleep during the exercises, and one particular exercise.  The leader “walked” us down a set of steps in a cave to a river.  A boat was there for us to board and float down the river.   Once in awhile I use this imagery to relax.

The second gave us exercises to get into a meditative state.  That is, our bodies would relax and our minds would go quiet for about twenty minutes.  The trick was to start relaxing at the top of our heads and let a flow of relaxation go down our bodies.  Once I got this technique mastered, my whole body would feel slightly numb.

The major distraction in the class was the teacher!  She encouraged those who believed they had previous lives to speak up.  She talked about the energy flow going around the circle.  One fellow often walked out at this point.  One time while sitting right next to her, I put in my mind the image of the devil statue from “The Exorcist” standing right between her feet.  The “energy flow” never stopped!

I’ll stop the writing now.  I’ll try meditating before I send this.

It sort of worked!  I slept a bit and I couldn’t get a kink out of one knee.  But I am much more relaxed!

You can find more of my wierd thoughts at http://magree.blogspot.com