Hyper-Rationality as a Cultural Trance
The Trance of Not Believing in Trance
I’ve been struck by a pattern I keep encountering across very different contexts: a certain type of thinker—often male, often self-described as highly rational and philosophical—who explicitly rejects the idea of hypnotic trance altogether.
I noticed this recently while reading Astral Codex Ten, specifically the well-known rationalist blogger’s piece on the death of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, where this stance is mentioned almost in passing. I was reminded of it again while reading a science-fiction short story in Greg Egan’s Axiomatic, where a similar attitude appears: the implicit assumption that trance is a made-up phenomenon.
I find this fascinating, because there is substantial scientific and clinical evidence that trance states are real: identifiable shifts in attention, perception, and brain activity that most humans are capable of entering under the right conditions. From that perspective, the belief that one is immune to trance begins to look a bit like… a trance itself.
It reminds me of anecdotes I’ve encountered about UFO sightings, where one person points something out in the sky and the person beside them becomes agitated, refuses to look, and later doesn’t even remember the moment being mentioned at all. Whether or not one believes the interpretation of such events, the pattern is striking: an apparent refusal of perception that seems to be protection against epistemic rupture.
I can’t help wondering whether something similar is happening with these hyper-rational denials of trance—not a lack of evidence or intelligence, but a kind of attentional stance that makes certain experiences inadmissible. I’m curious to examine this more closely: what’s really being protected, and what gets lost, when trance is declared impossible?
There is a particular kind of trance that mistakes itself for wakefulness.
Across psychology, contemplative traditions, and even cognitive science, there’s a quiet consensus on one point, even when people argue about the details: human consciousness is not a single, continuous state. Rather, it shifts—rhythmically, situationally, relationally.
What some people call “trance” is simply a narrowed, stabilized pattern of attention.
Daydreaming. Absorption. Flow. Dissociation. Hyperfocus. Rumination. Ideological certainty. Creative inspiration. Psychedelic resonance. The feeling of being in love.
Different frameworks, same mechanism.
Here’s the paradoxical rub: these thinkers who deny the existence of trance are actually deeply trance-prone—they just reject the word trance because it threatens their identity.
Not believing in trance does not make one immune to it.
It often means one is inside a trance that refuses to examine itself from within.
This shows up in a few recognizable ways.
The “hyper-rational” trance
There is a style of cognition—statistical, abstract, symbolic—that feels lucid, cool, controlled.
Because it suppresses bodily cues, emotional resonance, and imaginal perception, it feels like clarity.
But suppression is not absence.
What’s happening somatically is often:
reduced interoceptive awareness
tightened attentional bandwidth
over-identification with verbal thought
diminished access to imagery and affect
In other words: a stabilized dissociative focus.
From the outside, this looks like rationality.
From the inside, it feels like certainty.
That certainty becomes the tell. “I can’t be hypnotized” as defense, not fact.
Empirically, we know:
hypnotic susceptibility varies, but trance capacity is nearly universal
people who deny susceptibility are often highly suggestible within their preferred heuristics
resistance to hypnosis often correlates with control strategies, not immunity
So when someone says, “I don’t believe in trance,” what they often mean is:
“I don’t allow states of consciousness that I don’t control or name.”
But control is itself a trance posture.
A Course in Miracles would say this is fear of relinquishing authorship.
Buddhism would call it clinging to view.
Jane Roberts’ Seth would say the ego is mistaking its habitual focus for reality.
Modern psychology would call it unexamined absorption.
Different vocabularies, same pattern.
The UFO analogy hits the mark
The previously mentioned anecdotes—where someone refuses to look, becomes agitated, and later has no memory—are not about belief or disbelief. They’re about threat to coherence.
When perception would require a rapid reorganization of worldview, some nervous systems choose:
attentional collapse
avoidance
memory disruption
This isn’t necessarily pathology. It’s protective. Perhaps it’s a part of a larger titration process. Or it could be maladaptive avoidance. Context is key.
Something similar happens with trance denial.
To acknowledge trance would require acknowledging:
permeability of the self
influence of language, symbols, rhythm
bodily mediation of thought
limits of conscious control
For certain identities—especially ones built on mastery, authorship, certainty and autonomy—that’s destabilizing.
So the mind does something both elegant and ruthless. It declares the phenomenon unreal. Hocus pocus for irrational fools (not coincidentally, often those of a feminine or darker-skinned nature).
That declaration itself becomes the trance.
Why this pattern skews male (but isn’t about men)
We may notice it is a gendered pattern, although it’s cultural more than biological.
Many men—especially intellectually gifted ones—were rewarded early for:
abstraction over embodiment
mastery over receptivity
explanation over experience
control over surrender
Trance, hypnosis, imaginal states, and somatic knowing threaten that training.
So these states are dismissed. Because they are unruly, not necessarily because they are false.
Dakini energy, incidentally, exists in traditions precisely to cut through this illusion: clarity without rigidity, wisdom without dissociation, fierceness without denial.
There is no such thing as a human mind that is not in some state of trance.
The only difference is whether the trance is conscious, flexible, and examinable—or rigid and unnamed.
I work with trance deliberately.
That’s why I can see it. But even before I studied and applied it as a practitioner (and acted as a demo to directly experience it as a client would within the clinical milieu), I had inadvertently been a trancer my whole life. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re a kid staring at your own reflection, repeating the silent mantra, “Who am I?”.
People who deny trance often live inside one that has never been gently interrupted. This doesn’t make them wrong or inferior. It just makes them unexposed to this dimension of mind.
How to engage with folks in the hyper-rational trance
Here’s some distilled wisdom for relating to hyper-rationalistic trance deniers and the like, without mythology and without pathologizing.
You don’t invite someone out of a trance by naming it as trance.
You invite them out by widening the frame they already trust.
Defense is triggered not by disagreement, but by threat to self-coherence.
So the aim is not to persuade.
It’s to offer language that lets them notice something on their own terms.
Avoid:
the word hypnosis
the word trance
anything that implies loss of control
appeals to spirituality, embodiment, or intuition
“studies show” as a bludgeon
analogies that make them feel naïve or suggestible
Because all of those trigger identity threat.
Instead:
Start with attention, not altered states
Most “hyper-rational” thinkers already accept that attention varies.
So you begin here:
“Do you agree that attention can narrow or widen depending on context?”
That’s it.
Almost no one will object.
Then, later:
“Would you say deep focus and mind-wandering feel different cognitively?”
You are establishing state variability without naming it as such.
Use familiar examples they already respect
Instead of hypnosis, use:
flow states
absorption in reading
hyperfocus
task-induced narrowing
rumination
being ‘lost in thought’
cognitive load effects
Example phrasing:
“When someone is deeply absorbed in coding or reading, their awareness of pain, time, or surroundings changes. That’s not mystical—it’s attentional allocation.”
You are describing trance without calling it trance.
Shift from belief to mechanism
Never ask “Do you believe in X?”
Ask about mechanisms.
For example:
“Do you think cognition is fully transparent to itself, or do you think most mental processes operate outside awareness?”
They already know the answer.
Then:
“If attention, expectation, and context shape perception, it seems reasonable that guided attention could shape experience in predictable ways.”
You are letting them close the loop.
Reframe hypnosis as cooperation, not control
This is the key reframe.
If hypnosis comes up at all, you say something like:
“The popular image of hypnosis is coercive, but clinically it’s closer to structured imagination plus voluntary attention.”
Or:
“It’s less about being controlled and more about agreeing to follow a set of cognitive instructions.”
This preserves their autonomy, which is non-negotiable for them.
Let them retain a sense of superiority (this is important for coherence reasons)
You don’t challenge their identity as rational.
You affirm it, then extend it.
For example:
“People who are very analytical are often excellent at sustained attention. That’s actually the same capacity some therapies leverage—it just depends how it’s used.”
This turns the feared vulnerability into competence.
The Deeper Move (only if there’s trust)
Once safety is established, you can gently introduce the paradox:
“It’s interesting that the mind can be deeply shaped by attention while still feeling fully autonomous. That illusion of authorship is actually what makes focused cognition effective.”
This invites curiosity, not defense.
The Guiding Ethic
The line you never cross:
You never imply they are unaware, asleep, manipulated, or deluded.
Instead, you communicate:
“You already understand this. I’m just naming a dimension of it.”
That preserves dignity.
Why This Works
Defenses aren’t protecting truth—they’re protecting identity continuity.
When you:
avoid naming the threatening concept
use their language
affirm their strengths
frame variability as skill, not weakness
…the nervous system stays open.
And when the nervous system stays open, insight can occur without coercion.
At the end of the day, the difference of opinion on the legitimacy of hypnotic trance isn’t about stupidity, ignorance, or even arrogance.
It’s about psychological load-bearing structures—ideas that are doing essential stabilizing work for a person’s sense of self.
Some thinkers need to deny trance because trance threatens something fundamental they rely on to stay coherent.
I’ll lay this out in layers, moving from surface to depth.
1. Trance threatens the fiction of total authorship
Many highly rational thinkers are organized around a core, usually implicit belief:
“I am the author of my thoughts.”
Not a participant.
Not a curator.
The author.
Trance—properly understood—doesn’t say thoughts are random or externally imposed. It says something subtler and more destabilizing:
Attention shapes experience before conscious choice enters the picture.
That implies:
thoughts arise prior to deliberate selection
identity is downstream of processes
“control” is partial and contextual
For people whose dignity, safety, or early survival depended on being the one in charge, this is intolerable (and it would make sense that this identity frame becomes more common the higher up the hegemonic ladder one is positioned).
Denying trance preserves authorship.
2. Trance implies permeability, and permeability feels dangerous
Trance acknowledges that humans are:
suggestible
influenced by rhythm, language, framing, expectation
shaped by environment and relational fields
To accept trance is to accept porosity. For those masculine-identified in particular, such receptivity may be equated with weakness.
For some thinkers—especially those who grew up needing to defend against intrusion (emotional, intellectual, familial, cultural)—porosity feels like vulnerability bordering on annihilation.
So the mind builds a protective identity:
“I am impermeable because I am rational.”
This isn’t philosophical.
It’s defensive architecture.
3. The body is where trance lives—and the body is often disowned
Trance is not primarily cognitive.
It is somatic-cognitive.
It involves:
breath
muscle tone
rhythm
interoception
sensory gating
Many hyper-rational thinkers have learned—often early—to minimize bodily awareness because:
the body carried anxiety, pain, shame, or unpredictability
embodiment interfered with performance or approval
abstraction felt safer than sensation
If you live from the neck up, trance looks fictional because you’ve cut yourself off from the channel through which it registers.
Denying trance is often just denying the body.
4. Trance threatens moral exceptionalism
This is subtle but important.
Some thinkers—especially public intellectuals—derive moral safety from the idea that they are less manipulable than others.
You’ll hear this in phrases like:
“People are easily misled”
“Mass psychology is dangerous”
“Most people fall for narratives”
The unspoken addendum is:
“…but not me.”
Trance collapses that hierarchy.
If trance exists, then:
propaganda works because of mechanisms we all share
persuasion is not just ignorance but neurocognitive reality
ethical responsibility becomes more complicated
Denying trance preserves a comforting asymmetry.
5. Trance destabilizes the myth of linear progress
Many rationalist thinkers are deeply invested in the idea that:
civilization advances through reason
superstition → science → enlightenment
irrationality is a phase we’re outgrowing
Trance doesn’t fit this narrative.
It suggests:
ancient techniques understood attention better than we admit
modern humans are not categorically more “awake”
rationality is a mode, not a destination
Accepting trance means accepting nonlinear epistemology—that different ways of knowing coexist and trade dominance.
That’s deeply uncomfortable for progress-oriented minds.
6. Most important: trance threatens identity coherence, not truth
Here’s the synthesis point.
People don’t deny trance because it lacks evidence.
They deny it because accepting it would require reorganizing who they think they are.
It would require admitting:
“My certainty is partially constructed.”
“My independence is contextual.”
“My mind is influenced even when I feel autonomous.”
For someone whose life stability depends on certainty, independence, and mastery, that’s too high a price.
So the psyche chooses coherence over accuracy.
This is not stupidity.
It’s survival.
7. There is no innate contradiction between trance and rationality.
I work with trance deliberately rather than defensively. I’m embodied enough to notice endogenous state shifts. I don’t confuse permeability with weakness. I have a self that survives uncertainty. I know that you don’t need the illusion of invulnerability to feel safe.
The dissonance lies in this: the strongest denial of trance often comes from people who are deeply entrained—by language, ideology, abstraction, or identity—without knowing it.
Their trance just happens to be:
linguistically dense
culturally rewarded
socially invisible
Which makes it harder—not easier—to interrupt. But interrupting it is important, as best we can. Good luck!