Trance Zero
The Psychology of Maximum Experience
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Psychotherapist Adam Crabtree shows how we live our lives caught up in a series of trances. For example, when we read we become less aware of the sounds around us, temporarily losing touch with our environment and sense of time. The same kind of effect occurs when we are deeply engaged in a conversation, lost in our own thoughts, enthralled in a creative moment, or immersed in lovemaking.
While trances are necessary, enabling us to function at our jobs and in relationships with others, we can become trapped by them, and thus lose our ability to fully experience our lives and surroundings. In Trance Zero, Crabtree shows how to transcend the trance states that limit our everyday lives. He explains how to access a higher intuitive state, Trance Zero, which is characterized by being fully awake to the real condition of our existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crabtree's thesis--that trances are an integral part of daily existence--is startling, yet his definition of a trance is so broad that his theory is unfocused. He posits that there are relational trances (i.e., being absorbed in one's feelings and thoughts about another person), situational trances (resulting from immersion in an activity) and inner-mind trances (meditation, daydreaming, hypnosis or simply being "lost in thought"). Finally, in group-mind trances, one is swept up in the emotions of one's family, workplace, church or other social group. Crabtree, a psychotherapist, is a former Roman Catholic priest and Benedictine monk who holds a graduate degree in philosophy. He also ran a therapeutic community in the 1960s and '70s. This eclectic experience makes for some fresh observations on the psychodynamics of cults, the benefits and potential pitfalls of recovering repressed memories and the damage families inflict on individual members. He does, however, come off as a latter-day Wilhelm Reich when he dismantles what he calls "The Little-People/Big-People Delusion," our tendency to worship authority or status figures. His claim that Western culture keeps us all in a trance-like, conformist state is reminiscent of Gurdjieff. His theory shades off into vague mysticism when he sets the individual's goal as "Trance Zero," a Zen-like state of contextually appropriate absorption that allows us to make contact with the "Ultimate Self," our inner pathway to the divine. However, his highly personal but somewhat derivative system of looking at ordinary experience may find a readership of adventurous spiritual seekers.
