Chronarchy (chronarchy) wrote,
Chronarchy
chronarchy

A Useful Little Trance Resource

Recently, I picked up the book "Get High Now (Without Drugs)" because I was looking for some interesting, legal, and generally safe ways to vary my trancework experience and do some work with simple (yet useful) mind alteration. A lot of the stuff in the book is, as one would expect, pretty minor in terms of "getting high;" most of it focuses on optical and auditory illusions, obtaining mild stimulants through normal methods (basil and dill, for instance) and occasionally gross methods (eating live ants or drinking reindeer urine, for instance), and mild breathing exercises. All of this is well and good and often pretty cool.

The real value of the book tends to be in pretty no-nonsense (and fairly "we-were-just-as-skeptical-as-you-till-we-tried-it") approaches to what are often referred to as "altered states." Aside from a number of things that you probably wouldn't ever do (like licking toads and engaging in Florentine self-flagellation), there's some really good, hard-core trancework recommended and described in the book (glossolalia, sensory overload, book-balancing, voluntary silence, toning, postures, and binarual beats). The book encourages experimentation, and metions their website, GetHighNow.Com, which offers a lot of their visual and audio "highs" for free. For most of the audio highs, you'll want a pair of stereo earphones, since things like binaural beats and 3D sound just don't work unless you've got earphones in.

I also noticed, though, that they have iPhone/iPod/iPad and Android Apps available, that essentially provide all the highs on the site (though not all the highs in the book) within the App. This is pretty awesome, mostly because your iPod is a pretty convenient way to carry around trance induction stuff. The App (well, at least the iPod App) runs 99¢, which I really thought was a bit of a steal if you're looking for a wide variety of trance induction music. They even have a 210 bpm drumming trance induction you can use with some ecstatic body postures, and they cite Dr. Felicitas Goodman's work specifically (which always impresses me).

There are some flaws in the App (at least on the iPod; I haven't tested it on anything else), namely that the screen's backlight doesn't go off while the App is playing sound, so you could potentially drain your battery, and there's no "end tone" that you can set to "end" the trance. . . the sounds seem to just continue to loop into infinity. Still, setting an outside timer would resolve any such issues, I tend to think, and it's better for the sound to go on too long, rather than to cut itself off too short (as it does on the website).

In the end, it's kind of a cool App, and might help a lot of people with trancework. The book does a great job of showing how simple the process of obtaining an "altered state" can be (though I think some of their "highs" aren't all that much "higher" than normal). I just thought I'd pass along the recommendation.
Tags: books, trance
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