Don't stifle a child's imagination!!!!!

"Suppose a group of people were to experience a non-ordinary event that would not fit their conceptual frame of possibility - that agreement on which their normal world hangs together. They would call the event an hallucination, or folie a deux, and so keep their categories for the norm intact, lest their ideation collapse and they fall into chaos." (Pearce 112) I have to assume that this statement can also be applied to an individual experience, but the fact that Pearce used "group" and not "a person" was interesting. Most of us have this innate need for normalcy - normalcy as defined by our society - and will go to great lengths to preserve it. As Pearce points out, we will write off something we can't define, explain or categorize as a hallucination. The idea of something being contrary to our idea of normal is too much for many of us to process rationally. He goes on to talk about individuals who are able to enter trances and some other ASCs. Most of the adults who are able to do so were encouraged to be imaginative as children by their parents. Not only was this practiced encouraged by their parents, but their parents were even active in this imaginative process. They learn that these practices are accepted and throughout their lives they are able to cultivate their abilities to enter ASCs for creative/imaginative purposes. Pearce goes on to discuss the various experiences of the Balinese, Ceylonese and Aboriginal peoples. All sound as if they are rather extreme ways to achieve such ASCs, however the experiences found within those ASCs are "extreme" in themselves. Walsh discusses individuals' progression through the stages of consciousness and relates it to the stages of cognitive development throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood (251). To reach the more "extreme" ASCs, one must evolve and pass through the gross and subtle states, on to the causal and nondual.