If one considers the three tier system posited by the shamanistic world view, which can be seen to have rough correlation with Paul MacLean's TRIUNE BRAIN (as a loose theoretical construct, rather than as necessarily a scientific one), one can theorize both the possibility of ascent and descent from the here and now of everyday bodily awareness.
Either one ascends by detaching from the body (and from the immediacy of its emotional needs) or one descends still more deeply into the inner structures of bodily drives and dispositions (most conventionally called 'the unconscious').
The term, "dissociation", which in this case involves, in one instance, transcendence (moving away from the body without losing the existence of the body) or, alternatively descending more deeply into it (without losing the possibility of returning to normal consciousness of bodily states within the here and now) does not, therefore, imply emotionalism. (NB. The meaning of "dissociation" is definitively pathological according to contemporary psychology, nonetheless the ingestion of psychoactive drugs was to enable the spirit to fly away from the body, in traditional shamanic lore.)
Rather, it implies obtaining a distance from oneself, through experiencing doubling (involving the body as it understands historical time and place, along with one's state of experiential ascent or descent in relation to the body).
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