Every so often one runs into a book articulating ideas that resonate so strongly with your own experience AND help bring many divergent-seeming concepts and human experiences together in one "unified" theory that your worldview is significantly broadened and/or deepened. (One of my first Big Bang books that brought that type of experience was Wilber's A Brief History of Everything. Another was In Over Our Heads by Robert Kegan, though that was much less broad in its scope, focusing primarily on the development of the individual.)

We now know that the human mind has a primal need for unified theories that deliver a coherent lens through which to view/reduce reality, even if they're delusional (which nearly all are on some level). Elucidating this phenomenon via a clearly argued unified theory is the work of John F. Schumaker in The Corruption of Reality. This is one of those theories that presents such a valuable working frame for exploring and understanding human behavior that I hope its contents become memetically viral at some point.

Primary arguments:

The human mind is predisposed to incorporating reality-distorting suggestions that ideally serve to increase functionality of both the individual and society. Suggestibility is enhanced profoundly using methods of trance induction such as music, certain drugs and/or dance/movement that have repetition or monotony as their shared modality (e.g. religious chanting or the plant-ingesting, drumming shaman or the rocking of a schizophrenic).

Throughout human history, up until the last hundred years or so, religion has been the predominant (almost pervasive) carrier of the rituals and memes that serve to enhance adaptability. Because the West has lost its religious rituals to a large extent (even within churches as they attempt to modernize), and therefore the ability to reconstruct reality in ways that assist the human organism in creating meaning, we see an increase in unconscious self-hypnosis and psychopathology.

In essence, true religiosity often benefits the individual and society through successful delusion.  The success of religion hinges on its overarching ability to establish group thinking that enables one to fit into norm-ality while at the same time incorporating positive distortions of reality that serve to increase the feeling of individual and social control in an otherwise chaotic world. Psychopathology attempts to do the same, but it is often maladaptive without the added support of the group to root the belief system. Psychopathology generally involves self-hypnosis followed by self-suggestion, whereas successful religious delusion is mediated by the group or the religious leader and therefore more successful and stable. All delusion, though, is ultimately self-driven; the religious rituals and memes are only successful when they are repeated by each individual in the group.

One of the reasons we are seeing the breakdown of religions is the prevalence of competing and largely irreconcilable memes; no one meme is safe from attack. This breakdown is resulting in the watering down of memes in the collective consciousness and the loss of stable reality distortion. From the book (p 122):

"Today, self-consciousness about emotion and loss of control, combined with religious ambivalence, is creating religious induction techniques that are unable to promote a workable degree of dissociation. As a result, congregations are unprepared for the distortive suggestions that should, under correct conditions, become the religious beliefs that benefit us in so many ways, both individually and collectively. Ultimately, they are deprived of the reality-biasing cognitions that, when subsequently self-suggested, constitute the normal delusions that combat psychologically toxic elements of primary reality.

"Non-Western cultures with intact religious systems generally have the trance induction methods that enable indoctrination with distortive suggestions, however symbolized or indirect these might be during the official indoctrination procedure. The religious beliefs, or functionally errant cognitions, that crystallize from these suggestions are useful because they are unworldly and nonsensical, just as religion was always meant to be by definition. As healthy religion removes people from this-world interpretations, they benefit from a sense of ultimate meaning and the illusion of ultimate knowledge."

With the disintegration of many previously successful religions comes confusion and struggle to create new ways of coping, new ways of achieving positive delusions that build meaning and order in an otherwise chaotic world. And this transition time is fucking rough. Escape routes - means of dissociating - from primary reality have been firmly established; nearly all of them can be alternately healthy or destructive ways of coping, depending on how they are utilized: television, drugs, alcohol, food, sex, exercise, traditional religious thinking, New Age spirituality, psychopathology (eating disorders, OCD, etc.)

The point here is that both the highly functioning person who successfully employs healthy means of dissociating from the awareness of chaos and lack of personal control is doing so for the same reasons as the low functioning person who uses less successful means: reducing discomfort and preventing breakdown. Ideally, one moves past mere survival into the much-lauded realm of actualization, still incorporating tools for trance-induction, dissociation and self-suggestibility that support the abilities to cope with and adapt to an ever-changing environment.

What really added to the strength of this frame for me involved incorporating what I have learned about the experiences of long-term meditation and insight into human reality from an internal (1-p) perspective, reported by others somewhat consistently for over two thousand years. Based on this frame that delusion and suggestibility are inherent to the human mind, it seems to me that concentration and insight meditation are methods for directly encountering these phenomena. At the higher levels of meditative absorption, one may experience visions or other sensate hallucinations that arise spontaneously out of mind. These are not real in an objective sense, but are very real subjectively. Experiencing a transcendent state - being in trance - may help one create meaning, adapt more successfully and achieve some sense of happiness. These benefits are likely due to the ability of the mind to assume that these experiences are more real than reality. Even the advanced meditation practitioner, who knows that these are simply mental formations, likely benefits nonetheless from the positive emotions that are part of such experiences.

And with this new frame of reference, my worldview has flowered again to encompass more truth.

Now I'm going to go get me some healthy trance on. It's all about skillful means, right?!