Thoughts this morning
Humans have evolved with the capacity for trance and other altered states of consciouness.
Trance is the aspect of consciousness most amenable to spiritual experience.
There is an anthropomorphic element to most eidetic or visionary experience.
Meditation and Ritual are expressions of skillful means to enter trance states/samadhi.
Phenomenology (and the practical elaboration of this theory via Eugene Gendlin's Focusing), are avenues to explore and examine these states via embodied experience.
Hypnotic trance is not counter to "genuine" spiritual experience- instead it is our evolved capacity for receptivity to spirits, which are imaginal, or aesthetic yet autonomous phenomena. Not all trance states are necessarily spiritual in nature.
Entrainment and Heart Rate Variability coherence are means by which the state of the healer impacts the state of the patient.
Yoshio Manaka's elaboration of the X-signal system can be applied in terms of this coherence, and information transfer.
There is ample evidence that the activity of consciousness has the potential to dramatically influence physical, material expression, and this may include optimal gene expression or what is understood as Jing in Chinese medical terminology.
Such influence is non-rational and communicated via sign, symbol, and metaphor through the interaction of the mind, and its physical receptors (including the nervous system, endocrine system, and organic tissue). This is an aspect of what I term physiosemiotics.
As everything has semiotic potential, then objects can be employed to create states of coherence.
Mental states also have the capacity to produce material effects and influence matter, even to the point of generating (what we think of as) objects.
In fact, mental and material are not two, but in reality only two sides of one: not yin and yang, but yin/yang. It is a matter, not of seeing yin and yang, but rather seeing through yin/yang.
These effects provide the means for change, development, and evolution.
If we apply developmental and evolutionary models such as espoused by Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser, then further human evolutionary potential is probable.
The evolution of consciousness, driven by states of trance or samadhi, is an inherent aspect of the material world (including but not limited to human bodies) and its potential further evolution.
It is of critical importance for the trance/samadhi state to be integrated into daily, waking, active consciousness.
Given that the material world is itself an expression of that same consciousness (which can be termed Dharmakaya, or Sachchidananda), and that the activity of this consciousness is expressed through signs in more-or-less material manifestations, then consciousness expresses itself through recognizable patterns both internally and externally.
These patterns are fruitfully approached through the lens of Yin/Yang and the Three Yin/Three Yang of the Six Conformations.