4.2: Intentional Trance Formation

You are always in one trance or another. You are angry when your attention is captured by a stimulus that evokes anger. In fact, your current trance is determined by the stimulus that has captured your attention at the moment. Not all stimuli are equally salient; some are more attention grabbing than others. Highly salient stimuli have the potential of eliciting a state change without your conscious intention or awareness.

Stimulus Salience refers to how effective a stimulus is at capturing your attention, not necessarily how important it is. Perceiving a rattle snake at your feet would likely change your motivational state. Even if you really wanted to maintain your focus on this text, it would be difficult to ignore the snake. The fact that threatening stimuli are highly salient is adaptive, and consequently we are descended from the organisms that noticed threatening stimuli; those that did not are not our ancestors.

So a rattle snake in the room with you is both salient and meaningful. But for an individual with snake phobia even the thought of a snake – which is not objectively threatening – can elicit a powerful motivational state. In this case the snake is salient, but meaningless.

Reward refers to the pleasurable aspects of drinking or using a drug. Reinforcement refers to the effect the substance use has on autonomous behavior. The Karma of repeatedly experiencing powerful reinforcement from substance use is that the stimuli associated with getting or using the substance become highly salient. They will catch your attention even when you don’t want them to and, if you allow yourself to attend to them, they can elicit a trance that promotes relapse. To follow the path of greatest advantage you will have to develop the strength to avoid or escape the influence of the many meaningless but highly salient stimuli you are bound to encounter.

To produce the version of you that is most appropriate for the challenge you face, focus your attention on the stimulus [object, thought, or image] that elicits the intended trance. That may not sound very difficult, and you certainly have the faculties required, but as you may have guessed, executing in real-time requires some preparation.

There are many benefits to developing the ability to intentionally alter your subjective reality in real-time; here our interest is to cope with stressors and temptations that would motivate relapse. How you perform in such situations largely depends upon your subjective reality at that moment ─ the heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona. But appraisals such as “heroism” do not exist in the objective world, only in the mind of the beholder.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you invent. To be sure, your overt behavior has become part of world history ─ and so can never be undone ─ but the trance that gave rise to it was purely subjective and did not exist until you created it.

So why not create a fiction that is beneficial to you and consistent with what you stand for instead of creating fictions that produce bad outcomes for you? That is the point of intentional trance formation – to intentionally transform objective reality – your overt behavior, accomplishments, and relationships with others – by creating subjective realities that promotes these outcomes.

As you follow your intended path you are likely to encounter high-risk situations where you will be tempted to be pulled off of your path by local conditions. This kit has used several metaphors for this conflict as suggested by terms such as willpower, mental strength, battle, tactics, and strategies. Regardless of the metaphor, we want this conflict to resolve in your favor.

Warrior Metaphor:
How the conflict among stimuli that are competing for your attention plays out determines your subjective reality. For your intentions to be effective in real-time you will have to be able to focus on what you choose despite the pull of highly salient stimuli that would promote relapse. Just as you would strengthen muscle power by lifting weights against the downward pull of gravity, so you can strengthen willpower by focusing on an intended target despite the pull of distracting stimuli. This exercise is called meditation.

Thought Experiment: Counting your breaths ─ Visualize or sub-vocalize the number “1” during your first exhale, the number “2” during your second exhale, and so on. You will find that your attention tends to wander away, the exercise is to bring your attention back to the target. If you forget what number you are up to, just continue with the number “1.” Each repetition of returning your attention to the intended target is analogous to lifting a dumbbell. If meditation is analogous to lifting weights then hypnosis is analogous to working out with a personal trainer, and the high-risk situations you encounter are your sparing partners – opportunities that help you develop the abilities required to escape dependence and follow your path of greatest advantage.