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By: Aernoudt Knecht – Print Article: 
It can be a challenge to change your perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, because most of them work on a subconscious level, and were ingrained into your body, through experience. Let’s take a look at how this works, and what practices give us access at that level.
What if you could directly access your subconscious, or your unconscious mind? You see 95% of who you are, is a set of memorized perceptions, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs. That’s why changing yourself, changing your mind, changing your life, can be so frustrating. It’s like standing on the proverbial tip of the iceberg, where you can decide, with your conscious mind, that you want to go into thát direction, and start pedaling with all you have. But if the whole mass of the iceberg, which is mostly below the surface, is moving into thís direction, then it’s not really going to happen.
So then, how do you access this dominant, this huge and submerged part of yourself? Well, humanity has developed very specific techniques, through the ages, to do just that! Usually these techniques involve some form of a meditation practice, where you drop from the busy beta frequencies in the brain, to the slower regions of alpha consciousness, alpha frequency. This is a practice that’s very well known in spiritual circles, and in my workshops and trainings I usually want to take this just a step further, and to drop a little deeper. Usually when we do this in daily life we fall asleep, and we use lose our consciousness completely, but if you create the right setup, and if you create the right circumstances… and this becomes especially powerful if you utilize things like sensory deprivation, movement, breath and sound… then you can drop from alpha consciousness, into the deeper regions of theta consciousness, without losing your awareness completely. Theta consciousness, or trance, has also been referred to in psychology as the creative zone. It’s a very open and playful state of mind, where children reside in all the time, and where also deep deep learning takes place.
So now, this is where it gets really exciting, because once you do have access to these deeper layers, to these altered states, then the question of course becomes: what are you going to do you? You might have a very strong intention, about wanting to create some change, about rewriting the automated responses in your system. You see, all of our negative and self-sabotaging thoughts, behaviors and attitudes, are not just habits. These were usually born out of some form of a traumatic experience, some negative kind of an experience, that was very powerful, and very overwhelming. So in order to make any kind of a change, you need to create an equally positive experience, equally powerful, and also equally overwhelming! This is one of the reasons why, in our practice of trance dancing, we dance!
With trance dance you can create such an overwhelmingly positive experience, that it holds the potential to be a positive life-changing event, and overwrite some of the negative and self-sabotaging programming. For an outsider a trance dance can look as if the dancers are losing their minds. But, provided the ritual is being facilitated well, quite the oppositie is happening. On the level of the mind, it’s actually a MENTAL CLEARING UP, that’s taking place.
To WAKE UP, is a verb that is nowadays hijacked by those who point us at the ways in wich we are enslaved by an elite. But in spiritual work, WAKING UP used to describe the process of becoming more aware of your projections, your ego, and to bring things to consciousness, and connect with who you really are, at a deeper level. We humans project our inner world upon the outside world, constantly. Our superstitions, beliefs, and tainted views on reality, are mostly unconscious, and are often fuelled by emotions. Waking up means looking inside. Not escaping reality, but facing your thoughts, your your fears, your projections.
And I promise you… this journey inside, through darkness, will bring you true spiritual awakening! You will discover that life IS deeply spiritual, that everything IS connected, and that you are ONE with ALL of it… but not coming from fancy stories, that your ego needs to believe, but from what Terence McKenna called “the felt presence of direct experience”.
