CI’s UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION
Laura Lee shares this excerpt from her forthcoming book
Copyright 2024 by Laura Lee

“Our contribution to changemakers working towards a better world is a practice that we find ‘gears us up’ for the challenging road ahead. Here’s how: 

Gearing Up for the Challenges Ahead: This practice is of interest to the global community of change makers for the many benefits, easy access, and peak results it offers. This is bio-hacking using our own ‘inner technology’, as first used by our ancestors when coherence, working together and mutual support was a survival strategy. It seems we’ve reached that critical juncture once again. 

Meeting the Rising Interest in ASC: For fifty years, CI has been practicing and researching the beneficial and safe altering and expansion of consciousness, activated by a simple ceremony incorporating Ritual Postures. The world is now more interested than ever in what CI offers, as indicated by the rising use of micro-dosing and biohacking, government endorsement and academic study of plant medicine and psychedelics used in therapeutic trials, and the popularity the books Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. It’s hard to be healthy in a world gone off kilter. Just as our ancestors did, we are again seeking to tap into inner wisdom to find new ways of being, as the current ways are no longer working. Our time is now.

An Ancient Practice, an Ancient Legacy: Biohacking by amplifying our own inbuilt capacity for the full expression of our human potential, is a field our ancestors well knew. We may have only remnants of the once vast store of cultural knowledge that has come down through the ages, but we have another legacy, built into our DNA. We are born to trance, with many avenues to do so. Our bodies come equipped with the capacity to expand our consciousness, our flourishing, our deeper understanding of our world and our place in it, from within. This is available to us all, a legacy easily accessed, as a storehouse of the vision, strength, and community coherence needed to set our world back on kilter. 

Adapted for Modern Times: This practice has many features making it easy, accessible and doable for we moderns. Features of the practice of Ritual Postures include: 

• Compatible with all other consciousness raising practices
• Has no belief system, no dogma
• Not a daily practice
• You can dial it up on demand
• Peak experiences common the first time out
• You can practice this on your own
• Total session in one hour on your own
• You can practice this in a group
• You can lead your own group in this practice
• Community bonding
• Never a danger of overdosing 
• One we can dial up on demand, and practice on our own, or join in a group session. It works equally well in-person and online, and we often see peak experiences the first time out.
• Generates feelings of calm, peace, joy, creativity — flourishing
• Builds community & bonding through sharing from the soul

An Embodied Spiritual Practice: Our bodies and our body wisdom is the temple for this practice. Honoring the body and its role in our spiritual journey is a step towards honoring our home planet and its health, for treating all life as sacred. The physiological shift that the body undergoes in response to the ritual is the support system of this altered state of consciousness. This practice is egalitarian and accessible to all — we all share the same capacity for this state, as it is built into the design for the human blueprint. Early lab tests at the Universities of Munich and Vienna in the 1980’s found a surge of beta-endorphins, the hormones of well-being, with a drop in stress hormones. Blood pressure decreases, yet the pulse rate rises. EEG test show Beta plus simultaneous Theta brain waves. These shifts may not be common, but they are normal, and underscores our experience of a ‘waking dream’ state. This is a hybrid state, where the waking mind remains conscious, while some part of our dreaming mind is conscious, thus expanding our awareness by in effect opening the bandwidth. Our waking mind is engaging with our dreaming mind, in a visionary state that activates many of our inner senses, from a source larger than ourselves. That we touch the hem of something beyond ourselves, is the hallmark of a spiritual journey. The correlations among our individual journeys speaks to their universal source. 

Righting our Relations: There’s a long-standing tradition among indigenous societies to reset and right our relations with oneself, one’s community, and one’s world and worldview, and there are many avenues for expanding awareness and for flourishing. Our practice has one of the longest track-records of use, as ‘ritual instructions’ are encoded in ancient artwork the world over. Our ancestors drew upon the tried and true dynamic, that change starts from within, and tapping into Nature’s evolutionary forces with direct experience is a powerful engine we can all engage. 

Direct Experience is a powerful teacher: Our practice is not a religion, but a practice, an embodied spiritual practice for our general well-being and growth. There is no belief system, no dogma. Only the direct experience of an energetic field given many names, one much larger than ourselves, known and celebrated through the ages for its universal truths. Dr. Goodman referred to it as ‘the Eternal Now’ that we need shift our body-mind-soul’s mode of functioning to access. This practice engages this field as an experiential, visionary journey that activates many of our inner senses, delivered to the inner screen of our mind, akin to the spirit journeys and soul flights known to early cultures. 

Activating our Body’s Own Endogenous, Inbuilt Entheogens: Our practice relies not on outside agents, but activates the body’s own internally produced entheogens to of the ‘waking dream’ with simultaneous Beta plus Theta brain waves: the full waking state, with some part of the dream state, where visions are received on the mind’s inner screen, along with profound personal insight and ‘downloads’, 

Flourishing: feelings of being one with the Universe, compassion, joy, creativity, inspiration, emotional resilience, and more. Practicioners speak movingly about the beneficial impact on their lives, and how they are inspired to reciprocate — being filled to the brim, to the point of overflowing with so much life force, they want to give back to the Universe. They find their own best way to help change the world for the better. 

Postures Depicted in Ancient Art: Just as Yoga has proscribed postures for meditation, we find postures proscribed, or depicted, in the collection of ancient art the world over. Ritual Postures as formulated by Dr. Felicias D Goodman is the revival of a very early, once global practice, with a long, long history of use. Part of our practice is standing or sitting for 15 minutes of sonic activation — the fast monotone beat of a drum or gourd rattle — for 15 minutes as part of a ceremony with a few time-honored, widely practiced steps. A few of the posture we use are quite similar to the classic Yoga meditation poses. Ci’s canon of postures numbers over 100 are quite varied, with the earliest postures being far older. The earliest artifacts inspiring postures we find from the Ice Age cultures of Europe, going back some 40,000, 30,000, and 25,000 years. Some postures, found again and again, span many millennia and a wide geographic and cultural range. 

The Power of Postures: We have a few theories as to why holding specific postures should have such an impact, the most popular being that just as bending an antennae tunes it to receive various ‘frequencies’ so we can bend our bodies into a posture, a shape, to receive various bioenergy frequencies. Or, try this: place your right hand over your heart, and your left hand over your navel. This is a posture we see widely in Neolithic art around the world. Might we be lining up and connecting energy meridians in the body to flow in a circuit, in this pose? The HeartMath Institute has done much research on the energetic power and flow from the heart. Holding our hands over two chakras, is in effect activating them. The solar plexus chakra, over the navel, is said to “increase sensitivity to energy and emotions, a sense of personal power and confidence, and a desire for personal growth and self-improvement.” Add heart wisdom to that, and perhaps we can dial in more compassion and inspiration to help fuel our work towards a better world. Neuroscience points to how smiling can generate feelings of happiness, or feeling vulnerable is related to the fetal position. Body language is reading the emotional states of others as evidence by their spontaneous postures and gestures. We find the body also reads and responds internally to a wide range of postures, even those held intentionally in a ceremony.

Human Flourishing: Without effort, positive emotions are a hall-mark of our practice. Participants report feeling imbued with a sense of peace, calm, joy, creativity, emotional resilience, universal love and acceptance and a sense of being at one with the Universe. While tears, angst, or emotional and physical pain can arise within the practice, it is released and resolved with very few exceptions by the conclusion of the session, giving way to flourishing.