Differences - Meditation VS Trance
Meditation and trance both offer something similar: an alteration of mentality. Some practitioners believe that meditation is a form of trance, whereas not all trance is meditation. Other practitioners believe that meditation and trance are two separate things entirely and that they put you into two different headspaces.
Meditation is not necessarily inherently related to magic. It can have correlations with healthy living, finding and maintaining serenity and peace, and learning how to calm down one’s body, especially in times of panic or stress. Many practitioners do utilize meditation, however, citing it as a great way to ground and center oneself before the magic, *and* to build or raise energy for the magic.
To ground and center yourself with meditation, it’s common to meditate on a clear mind or to meditate on the concept of grounding and centering yourself. Many people use a visualization technique to do this, known as the tree method, where they visualize roots coming from their body and growing into the ground, and branches spreading high into the sky. Other practitioners say that visualization tasks are not meditation, and they are separate things, so this doesn’t count as meditation.
Trance is usually done in magic to build energy, or connect with the aether or divinity. The most common forms of magical trance include ecstatic trance, a high-energy, usually musically inclined kind of trance that builds off of itself to raise energy for a magical working, or dissociative trance. Some practitioners consider dissociative trance to be meditation. Others consider them inherently different, with meditation being more akin to inner peace and calm, and dissociative trance being more like losing yourself completely.
Many people induce trance from music, dancing, rhythmic playing of instruments, especially drums or rattles, chanting, breathing exercises, breathing exercises that sometimes border on hyperventilating (not recommended), rocking, tapping themselves, and more.
A trance State can sometimes be considered more dangerous to put yourself into because there is sometimes a lot of movement involved. When you’re putting yourself into an altered mental state, and you’re moving around, especially on your feet, it can become easy to hurt yourself or wander off.
There is major discourse in the wider witchcraft community as to whether or not using drugs to induce trance is acceptable or even effective magically. Some practitioners include things like alcohol in their list of drugs, whereas others do not include it because they see it as benign or ritualistically helpful.
On the one hand, for most modern practitioners in most modern cultures, most drugs are illegal. This has led to a worldwide multi-cultural phenomenon of demonizing everything to do with drugs, unless they are very specific drugs obtained through medical means. This has led to a multitude of practitioners declaring that any and all drugs impair your ability to think, and thus impair your ability to perform magic to any degree.
On the other hand, the earliest known recorded use of drugs in a religious context dates back between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago in Algerian cave paintings depicting psychoactive mushrooms specifically in theorized religious contexts, as what was depicted was a human figure holding and surrounded by these mushrooms.
Drugs have been used across cultures across the world historically for religious contexts and trance states for thousands of years. Cannabis, ayahuasca, mushrooms, peyote, and more have been helping people achieve magical and religious states since almost as long as religion has been around.
Some practitioners argue that when something has been in use in the specific context for so long, declaring it suddenly bad or ineffective to induce trance or to help magically just because governments have declared these drugs illegal, is nothing more than self-serving self-soothing rhetoric meant to coddle their culturally-induced negative disposition towards drugs. They argue that it completely erases millennia of history and valid magical use.
The group against drug use in magic and trance often cites the idea that just because something has been used historically and doesn’t mean it’s necessarily correct, and that with our modern technology and information, we have learned more about these drugs than our ancestors knew, and that knowing how they affect the brain removes any mysticism or magic from the equation. They claim that this means spiritual experiences while on drugs can be nothing more than brain chemistry and non-magical.
The group advocating for drug use in achieving trance states often claims in counterpoint that knowing how something works scientifically does not stop it from also having magical connotations. One of the most common reasons behind this is alchemical magic and how, despite knowing things about it chemically and scientifically, it doesn’t stop the magic from being a part of it, too.
Some practitioners say that only naturally occurring drugs are okay to use with magic or to induce trance. They say that synthetic drugs harm the body more than help and are more addictive by nature, and that natural drugs offer a more direct line to the metaphysical due to their growing and being in our world on their own. Some practitioners even go as far as to say that natural drugs are gifts from the gods or the universe, specifically to help achieve these mental states.
No matter how you fall in the drug debate, all parties can agree that drugs alter your perception and mentality when you use them. It’s merely a matter of your own subjective morality that decides whether or not they can be a useful tool for trance induction.
I personally fundamentally disagree with the idea that using any drugs to induce trance is inherently bad. I reject this based on literal thousands of years of historical use. I feel that if a person doesn’t want to use them, that’s fine, but they don’t get to dictate whether or not others use drugs to help enter into this altered trance state.
There is also a discussion to be had about ayahuasca and peyote, cultural appropriation, and foreigners misusing and misrepresenting these drugs when the cultures that cultivate them have asked us to stop partaking and stop the commercialization, drug tourism, and bastardization of their practices.
Either way you look at it, meditation and trance are tools to help you better align with your desired magical outcome. Although some practitioners use the terms interchangeably, they are distinctly their own actions, in my opinion. If you don’t use meditation or trance in your practice, I encourage you to at least try it to see if it benefits your desired outcomes, manifestation times, or strengths.
