Hughes, Pearce and Walsh

William Blake said, "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five senses.... If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he see all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Hughes). In other words, Behold and Become.
We experience this world through our five filters—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. It's hard to imagine what we would perceive without these filters.
There was a lot of text devoted to advanced yogic and meditative states. In one of my first blogs, I wrote "Hughes text (specifically parts of Chapter 3) reminded me of something I read in a Kabbalist text. It argued that the "real world" was filtered by our five senses. This filtering process keeps us from experience true reality." Hughes reiterates this idea again in this chapter. This concept, I believe, is central to the craft of Shamans, and advanced practitioners of yogic and meditative states.
I'd really like to know more about Buddhist and Hindu mandalas or yantras briefly touched on in Hughes' text on page 154.
In the first week of class, when we were asked to name different methods of altered states. I mentioned the "OM". In the kind of meditation I do, hemi-sync, the OM (or resonant tuning) is crucial to reaching an altered state. It's like a warp drive for meditation, allowing one to lock into the natural vibration that exist around us.
Hughes explained it well. He mentioned that many ancient (and modern) traditions teach that the origin of the whole of creation is vibration. I am so interested in the primal sound, the vibration of the Big Bang!! Fascinating!
Pearce also discusses many of the methods of ACS, commonly associated with the Shaman, Buddhist, and others, such as hypnotism and trance experiences.
Walsh, Part 7, tied right in with the Hughes and Pearce text. Walsh presented his readers with a detailed table, comparing the experiences of a Shamanic journey with the experiences of advanced yogic and meditative states. Toward the end of this section, he refutes all the outrageous claims that schizophrenic, Buddhist, and yogic states are indistinguishable.