Discussion follows on the heels of discussion of marijuana use and the war on drugs.

I tried to show drug use in a somewhat different light with the Davis article on hallucinogen use, and to underscore an essential human drive with the Deikman piece (emphasizing the desire to alter one’s consciousness in an effort to achieve a state of transcendence). This will carry over into the discussions of religious groups and cults.

Touch on several themes:

Long history of visionquests and shamanism

Description of Winnebago visionquest

Description of Sun Dance of Mandan

Description of Peyote use

Description of Oregon v. Smith

Description (brief) of modern tribalism

Description of visionquest as research

The impulse to alter consciousness is primal (whether with drugs, meditation, fasting, prayer, or spinning – think of kids spinning until dizzy for the fun of it). It is also regarded as odd, deviant, and sometimes akin to madness.

A long legacy of mysticism in philosophy and literature. The vision quest has a long history, and is not restricted to Native American Indian culture. "Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob went on vision quests. Moses went on a vision quest and obtained the Ten Commandments. Christ himself went on a vision quest for forty days" (Steiger, 1984, p. 33).

• ...they came in four days to a spot whence they discerned, extended from above throughout the heaven and the earth, a straight light like a pillar, most nearly resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer...this light was the girder of the heavens...holding together...the entire revolving vault (Plato, The Republic, Bk. X, 1985, p. 840).

• It has happened often. Roused into myself from my body--outside everything else and inside myself--my gaze has met a beauty wonderous and great. At such moments I have been certain that mine was the better part, mine the best of lives lived to the fullest, mine identity with the divine. Fixed there firmly, poised above everything in the intellectual that is less than the highest, utter actuality was mine (Plotinus, the Enneads).

• After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will show you things which must be hereafter. And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald (Revelations 4:1-3, p. 983).

• Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly fell upon the earth as though mowed down. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistably to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love it, to love it for ever and ever. "Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears," echoed in his soul. What was he weeping over? Oh! in his rapture he was weeping over those stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of space, and "he was not ashamed of that ecstasy." There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over "in contact with other worlds." He longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and for everything. "And others are praying for me, too," echoed again in his soul. But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind--and it was for all his life and for ever and ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute fighter, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, all his life long, could Alyosha forget that minute (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1949, p. 279-280).

• I lost all count of time...everything appeared deformed as in a faulty mirror. Space and time became more and more disorganized and I was overcome by a fear that I was going out of my mind. The worst part of it being that I was clearly aware of my condition.... Occasionally, I felt as if I were out of my body. I thought I had died. My ego seemed suspended somewhere in space, from where I saw my dead body lying on the sofa.... Acoustic perceptions, such as the noise of water gushing from a tap or the spoken word, were transformed into optical illusions (Dr. Albert Hofmann, the Sandoz chemist who discovered LSD-25, in Tart, 1991, p.14 ).

• What I was looking at was a round object which had a luminosity of its own. Every part in it moved. I perceived a contained, undulatory, rythmical flow; it was as if the flowing was enclosed within itself, never moving beyond its limits, and yet the object in front of my eyes was oozing with movement at any place on its surface. The thought that occurred to me was that it oozed life. In fact it was so alive that I became engrossed looking at its movement. It was a mesmerizing fluttering. It became more and more engrossing, until I could no longer tell what the phenomenon in front of my eyes was (Castenada, 1973, p. 157).

• It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light (Jung, 1965, p.289).

Both the generic vision quest and the spirit--quest ordeal operate under principles of asceticism, weakening the body to open wide the spirit.

Wisconsin Winnebago vision quest:

I couldn't have been quite thirteen. We were given preliminary tutoring for several weeks on what to expect and what was expected of us. Then we were asked to go out into the woods and pick a spot where there was a stream. We were told that we must not bring food or seek out berries or any kind of food. We were also told that we must not seek shelter, but must remain exposed to the elements, to the rain or to the sun. We were to weaken our bodies and to continue praying at least three times a day for our guide.

...We prayed to Manitou, the Supreme Being.

The main thought behind the rite is to completely exhaust the body as quickly as possible. One of the exercises the Winnebagos suggested was to find a place where there were rocks, so that we might pick them up and run with them from one place to another. Make a pile one place, then pick them up and carry them back again, repeating the process again and again.

You see, this exercise enabled one to busy his conscious mind with a monotonous physical activity while the subconscious mind was concentrating on the attainment of one's guide.

After a while, one would begin to see wildlife that would seemingly become friendlier. After a time, some creature would approach, as if to offer itself as a totem, or guide. It could be a bird, a chipmunk, a gopher, a badger. If the boy were very hungry, and if her were afraid of staying out in the wilderness alone, he could accept the first creature that approached and say that he had found his guide. But we were taught that if we could endure, Manitou, or one of his representatives in human form, would appear and talk to us.

I spent twelve days fasting and awaiting my guide. I had many creatures, including a beautiful deer, come up to me and allow me to pet them. The deer, especially, wanted to stay. But I had been told that if I did not want to accept a form of life that offered itself to me, I should thank it for its coming, tell it of its beauty, its strength, its intelligence, but tell it also that I was seeking one greater.

On the twelfth day, an illuminated form appeared before me. Although it seemed composed primarily of light, it did have features and was clothed in a long robe.

"You I have waited for," I said. And it replied, "You have sought me, and you I have sought." Then it faded away.

On the evening that each boy was required to appear before the Winnebago council to tell of his experience, my guide was accepted as genuine. And I don't think there is any way that any young boy could have fooled that tribal council. They knew when we had had a real experience and when we had used something as an excuse to get back to the reservation and get something to eat (Fay Clark, in Steiger, 1984, p. 34-35).

The Sun Dance was a central festival to the Oglala Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Mandan tribes of the Great Plains, associated with the buffalo hunting season of late summer and early autumn. Sponsored by one individual who had made a vow to the spirit world in thanks for supernatural aid, the ceremony lasted for about eight days and involved the entire tribe, with almost every individual participating in some aspect (Garbarino, 1988, p. 264). The following report of a Mandan ceremony originates in George Catlin, a Pennsylvania attorney born in 1796, one of the few white men to ever witness the ceremony:

Already greatly weakened from hunger and thirst and four consecutive sleepless days and nights, the candidates had holes pierced with knives through the flesh of their shoulders or breasts. Through these holes they were suspended by skewers and thongs from the center pole of the great Medicine Lodge. The vision seeker's shield, bow, quiver, and other belongings were suspended from still more skewers passed through other parts of his body, and in many instances even a heavy bison skull was attached to each arm and leg. Attendants with long poles caused his body to twirl ever faster until the candidate, streaming with blood, passed out from the pain, his medicine bag dropping from his hands and his body hanging apparently lifeless. He was then lowered to the ground and allowed to recover, but the ordeal was not over. There was still the sacrifice of the little finger of his left hand (which was chopped off and offered to the Great Spirit), to be followed by a furious race around an altar, with the bison skulls and other weights dragging behind the candidate, until he could endure no more and fell in a dead faint. With that collapse, the purpose of the ordeal...was accomplished (Furst, 1982, p. 10-11).

But history took a hand in molding American Indian mysticism. In 1883, the Bureau of Indian Affairs prohibited the Sun Dance, outlawing it as "brutal and uncivilized" (Garbarino, 1988, p. 444). This, and similar legislation, undermined the entire traditional way of life, stamping out a rich religious tradition that had been observed for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.

The Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre are the logical consequences of this upset. Wovoka, a medicine man of the Paiute tribe, familiar with the precepts taught by Christian missionaries, was impressed with the stories of Jesus Christ's Second Coming and was upset by the despair of the Indian nations. Wovoka claimed that he was the Second Incarnation of Christ, and that he carried a message to shrug off European ways and to return to traditional life. He promised that the Indians could once again be free, that they could drive off the European settlers, if they would observe the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance was slow and hypnotic, repetitious and circular, and promised to bring back the spirits of ancestors, to rejuvenate the earth and to bring back the dwindling buffalo herds. The Ghost Dance was meant to be a peaceful rallying point for the American Indian nations, but the Sioux invested it with a militant element, creating the legends of the "ghost shirts" which were impervious to the penetration of Europeans' bullets.

A band of Sioux men, women, and children, camped under guard of federal troops at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, began to dance on December 29, 1890. The American troops were familiar with the stories of mingling spirits, of the magical "ghost shirts," and were primed for insurrection. When the Sioux began to dance, an army officer ordered them to stop; when a single mysterious shot rang out (no one knows if it was a soldier or Indian), the cavalry opened fire. Two hundred Indians, including women and children that tried to run from the fray, and sixty soldiers died in the massacre. With them, died the hope to practice traditional religion (Gill, 1982, p. 166, also Garbarino, 1988, p.446).

Following Wounded Knee and the end of the Ghost Dance movement, the Plains tribes found themselves in a complex and difficult situation. They were outlawed from practicing their traditional ways of life and were left grasping for a religious identity; three main schools of thought emerged. One said to hold onto tradition as much as possible, to revive the rituals whenever possible, and to pass traditional knowledge on to progeny. A second encouraged developing an inter-tribal "Indian" culture, creating a pan-Indian identity. The third encouraged complete assimilation into the dominant white culture (Gill, 1982, p. 167).

Peyotism unified all three schools. Peyotism is a pan-Indian religion organized under the Native American Church. The church is sometimes also called the Peyote Cult.

The Native American Church has about a quarter of a million members. It combines something of the vision quest and belief in general supernatural power with the Christian Trinity; its doctrine teaches that God is a great spirit and Jesus a guardian spirit. Christian morality is woven into its precepts: brotherly love, honor, trust, the golden rule, and some ethics derived from the Ten Commandments, such as no adultery or divorce. Members believe especially in total abstinence from alcoholic beverages (Garbarino, 1988, p. 483).

The vision quest-like aspects of the church meeting appear through the use of the peyote cactus. Some of the groups will boil the cactus and drink the solution as a tea, but most chew and swallow the bitter-tasting plant. The peyote cactus, itself, is a small plant that grows in the deserts of the American southwest and Northern Mexico. It grows small tubers called "buttons" by peyote users. The chemical composition of these buttons, like most other psychoactive plants, is extremely complex. Peyote contains more than thirty different alkaloids which, together with their amine derivatives, have led noted Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes to nickname the peyote cactus, "a veritable factory of alkaloids" (in Furst, 1982, p. 111). Peyote contains two primary alkaloids, one resembling the toxin, strychnine, the other, mescaline, resembling morphine. Once absorbed by the body, each of the two alkaloid groups causes distinct symptoms in the peyotist.

The strychnine-like compounds literally poison the user, and result in nausea and vomiting (a trademark symptom of peyote use), dizziness, choking, pains and shortness of breath, hunger, cramps, and tremors; they are also accompanied by feelings of restlessness, anxiety, depression, agitation, and fear of death and dissolution. Once the mescaline-like compounds take effect, though, the practitioner is overwhelmed with feelings of euphoria, peace, contentment, contemplation, exhiliration, and enjoys pleasant fantasies. Users often find insight into their own lives and see significance and meaning in everything around them (Vecsey, 1988, p. 175-176).

Classmate’s description of peyote use:

After a period of purifying fasting, he and a friend accompanied members of the Peyote Way Church of God (a splinter group of the Native American Church) to a mesa outside of Tucson, Arizona. They drank an infusion of steeped buttons, drinking more than the regular participants.

The first day passed quickly. Prone on the top of a sun-baked mesa, my colleague says that the sun leapt across the heavens, chased by a racing moon, by darting shadows cast by the rocky terrain. He says that the entire first day was a sort of temporal hallucination, that the whole day seemed to have lasted between five and twenty-five minutes.

But the vision, the mystic experience, lasted longer than a day. My friend says that he hallucinated for two days straight, feeling "like I was on mushrooms for a week," and feeling somehow different and ethereal for a full month, before the effects wholly passed.

On the second day, my friend says that he (like both Carl Jung and Black Elk) left his body lying prone on the mesa and flew through the reaches of space. He says that he grew larger than the moon, passed the moon, brushed against it and felt each bump and crater against his arched back, and ultimately flew onward to the sun, where he met the Sun God.

I discussed the list of mystical characteristics with him and he claims that he experienced almost all of them. He says that the experience was "totally real," and that he is unable to view three dimensional space in the same way that he used to. He says that the experience cannot be expressed in words ("How do I describe the feeling of touching beams of light that has peeled off of a mesa?") and that he felt unified with all things ("I put dirt in my mouth because I saw no reason that I couldn't eat it. It was from the earth and so was I.").

The most recent dispute over peyote use arose through the case, Employment Division v. Smith. It began when a drug rehabilitation center fired two of its drug-and-alcohol-abuse counselors, Alfred Smith and Galen Black, for ingesting peyote during a Native American Church peyote meeting. The center fired the two men for violating the center's prohibition rule on drugs and alcohol. Smith and Black claimed that their employer had discriminated against them on the basis of their religion. A settlement was reached. The center paid the two men some of their lost earnings, and Smith and Black agreed not to insist on reinstatement (Laycock, 1989, p. 876).

The men then applied for unemployment. Originally, the Oregon courts awarded the unemployment, following the precedents set in prior trials. Most of these trials had dealt with persons who had refused to work on the Sabbath (Hentoff, 1990, p. 16). The Oregon Employment Appeals Board, however, reversed the decision and, in so doing, touched off a legal firestorm. After a great deal of back and forth litigation, the case of Employment Division v. Smith finally wound up in the United States Supreme Court. The question asked was, "Should peyote use be protected under the Constitution, making it legal even in states which do not exempt religious use of peyote?" The case was decided on April 17, 1990, and was little publicized but of monumental importance.

The case was won by the state of Oregon on a split decision, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing on behalf of Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Rehnquist, White, and Stevens. Justices Blackmun, Marshall (since retired and replaced by Justice Thomas), and Brennan voted against the ruling, finding for Mr. Smith (It is interesting to note that Justice Clarence Thomas is quite conservative while Marshall was quite liberal; the case would likely be decided 7-2 tody, instead of 6-3). Their decision means that peyote use is not protected by the Constitution. Scalia claims that all existing laws are presumed to be valid and that the free exercise of religion does not relieve an individual from meeting the obligations of existing laws, even if these laws are a serious infringement on this individual's religious beleifs or practices (Wohl, 1990, p. 1).

While this seems to come dangerously close to opposing the First Amendment's promise of liberty: There shall be no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. But even more frightening than the ruling is the precedent which Scalia has set.

In 1963, during Sherbert v. Warner, the "compelling interest" test was established as a tool to determine the viability of encroaching upon an individual's relgious practices. In order to justify the imposing on an individual's beliefs, three criteria had to be met. The state had to determine if it was, in fact, infringing on an individual's beliefs; the state had to prove that the infringing law would serve a compelling governmental purpose which merited the burden it placed on the individual; and, lastly, the state had to prove that the infringing law was necessary to achieve this compelling purpose (Neff, 1990, p. 17).

Scalia chose to ignore the "compelling interest" standard. Nat Hentoff, writing in The Progressive, says that Chief Justice Antonin Scalia, "abetted" by his fellows, has destroyed the compelling interest test (Hentoff, 1990, p. 16).

Scalia says that making legal exceptions for religious beliefs is a "luxury" that our country, with so many religions, cannot afford. He said that people can still turn to the protection found within the structure of State government. A logical problem with this, however, is that religious practices which are not widely engaged in do not have the political swaying power required to gain the favor necessary under Scalia's ruling, and that these groups will be at a "relative disadvantage" in state political processes. Scalia conceded the point, saying that such a relative disadvantage is an "unavoidable consequence of democratic government" (Hentoff, 1990, p. 16).

Justice Harry Blackmun, who voted against Scalia, said that Scalia's analysis was "distorted" and lamented:

The Court's decision today effectuates a wholesale overturning of settled law concerning the Religion Clauses of our Constitution.... I do not believe that the Founders thought their dearly bought freedom from religious persecution a "luxury," but an essential element of liberty--and they could not have thought religious intolerance "unavoidable," for they drafted Religion Clauses precisely to avoid that intolerance (Hentoff, 1990, p. 16).

It reeks of the censoring of the Sun Dance. This is a wonderful example of religious beliefs in collision, of cultures clashing into one another with violence. It is also serves to remind the cross-cultural psychologist of the importance of history, of watching recurrent themes emerge time and time again throughout the ages.

Researchers have written extensively about the contemporary proliferation of Ph.D. and M.D. programs (Hartle and Galloway, 1996) and about the swelling tide of over-educated scholars who can find no market for their abilities (Smith, 1991). "Why on earth go to graduate school?" many have asked (Bowbrick, 1994; Fraser, 1994). Some have focused upon the economic disadvantages of pursuing postgraduate education (Dauton, 1997), and while boom-and-bust models may satisfactorily explain some academic decision-making, personal and intrinsic factors also influence the decision to join either the academy or the workforce (Bolles, 1982). In a deeply anomic age when members of the counterculture turn to body piercings, brandings, and tattooing for a sense of ritual (Vale, 1989), the pursuit of the Ph.D. can be reasonably interpreted as a rite of passage (Renouff, 1989). The Ph.D. may, in fact, be the contemporary cultural analogue of the traditional Native American vision quest.

Vision quests are typically associated with American mystics such as Black Elk (1969) and Carlos Casteneda (1971), but the vision quest is not restricted to the Americas. Indeed, Jesus Christ himself went on a vision quest into the desert for forty days (Luke 4:1-2). Yet while the vision quest is a universal human phenomenon, it assumes different forms within different cultures. In contemporary Western societies, where rational thought is valued over irrational thought, where science is generally prized over religion, where education equals success, and where knowledge is power, it should come as no great surprise that our cultural rendering of the vision quest manifests itself within our academic institutions.

In the traditional Native American vision quest, an individual went alone into an isolated place, away from the tribe's camp, to find a spiritual guardian or totem, and to receive a secret name. Because the spiritual guardian could appear in the form of any (super)natural being, the seeker had to concentrate and be continuously attentive. This extreme focus resembles a state of Zen meditation, sanmai, in which each successive instant is perceived with naked clarity (Johnston, 1970). The vision quest, furthermore, had to be undertaken with reverence and humility, often following a period of preparation and purification. The seeker could neither eat nor drink nor sleep nor build shelter against the elements for the duration of the quest, which often lasted for three or four days. The hardships of asceticism weakened the body to open wide the spirit, and placed the earnest seeker in an altered state of consciousness (Tart, 1991), facilitating a variety of religious experience (James, 1902) normally barred by one’s waking consciousness. The seeker could then hallucinate, communicate with one’s spirit guardian, and perhaps receive a secret name. Although there seem to be many culturally mediated variables, the visionary experience can be identified by common features (Deikman, 1966; Ludwig, 1966). Johnson has identified seven:

• Obscured sense of time
• The approach to oneness
• The appearance of light
• The granting of insight
• Esctasy, love, and bliss
• An effect on health or vitality
• Effects on living (in Steiger, 1984, p. 38).

The hallucinatory vision of the Native American was indistinguishable from the enlightenment that accompanied it. While Zen scholars have separated the two, describing a state of hallucinations and visions called makyo, which is overcome to reach the enlightenment of satori (Johnston, 1970), Zen’s similarity to the Native American vision quest is striking. The satori of the Zen Buddhist, the samadhi of the yogi, and the ecstasy of the Christian visionary all closely resemble the insight obtained through the vision quest. As does the insight sometimes gained in the modern Ph.D. process.

A variation on the vision quest, the Sun Dance festival is referred to by some as a "spirit-quest ordeal" (Furst, 1982). Sacred to the Oglala Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Mandan tribes of the Great Plains, and associated with the buffalo hunting season of the late summer and early autumn, the Sun Dance was outlawed as "brutal and uncivilized" by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1883 (Garbarino, 1988, p. 444). George Catlin, a Pennsylvania attorney, was one of the few outsiders to ever witness the ceremony. He described the Mandan Sun Dance:

The spirit-quest ordeal includes several characteristics of the traditional vision quest, such as the four days of preliminary sleeplessness and fasting, and the pushing of the physical body beyond its limits of endurance in order to receive the vision. The account also bears similiarities to the Ph.D. research process. Those who dangled from skewers are considered "candidates" for a vision, just as would-be doctors of philosophy are considered "candidates" until the dissertation is written and the viva voce examination is passed. Both Ph.D. and Sun Dance candidates seek a vision by undertaking a period of exhaustive preparation. The Mandan endured four grueling days of fasting and sleeplessness before participating in the dance. The doctoral scholar, on the other hand, often invests nearly a decade to undergraduate and graduate study preparing for the dissertation and the viva. This is not to suggest that graduate students suffer the same hardship as the Mandan candidate, but it may be the case that extreme physical punishment accelerates the attainment of the altered state, granting a vision-state within mere days, whereas the Zen Buddhist or the academic scholar--using the mental disciplines of meditation or scholarship--typically require years or even decades to reach an equivalent vision-state.

The Mandan candidate--if fortunate--would be rewarded with a spiritual vision, and would enjoy greater status within his tribe. Similarly, the scholar--if fortunate--will successfully synthesize his or her research into a major piece of work (Hockey, 1995) that demonstrates the researcher’s ability to think consistently, coherently, and that adds something original to the academic community (Phillips and Pugh, 1987). The Ph.D. thereby grants greater status within the academic community.

The Winnebago tribe of Wisconsin also enjoys a long and rich legacy of vision quests. Even modern Winnebago adolescents sometimes participate in the tradition. Clark describes his own experience:

The weeks of tutoring might be likened to a Ph.D. student’s years of undergraduate education. Such preliminary training provides a necessary foundation for the vision seeker, but the quest for a vision remains a fundamentally personal journey. Csikszentmihalyi captures the spirit of such tutoring with the Italian adage, "Imparta l’arte, e mettila da parte (learn the craft, and then set it aside)" (1996, p. 90). Teachers--whether tribal elders or university professors--are restricted in what they can impart to their students for such deeply personal journeys (Utley, 1993; Hockey, 1994a).

Clark also mentions the isolation so characteristic of both the vision quest and Ph.D. research (Filer, 1994). The hardships of academic isolation are so pervasive that Hockey (1994b) has distinguished "intellectual solitariness" from "social isolation." Intellectual solitariness is term he uses to describe the condition of understanding little of the research conducted by other students, even students within one’s own discipline. Social isolation is the term used to denote the absence of social support networks and peer interaction. Both are inherent to Ph.D. work and the research process. Storr (1988) has written a particularly lucid examination of isolation, showing it as both blessing and curse, and a blessed curse often necessary in the lives of great visionaries.

Clark’s account mentions the ascetic renunciation of food and shelter. The stereotype of the starving student living in a garret room and surviving on bread crusts is a romanticised fiction, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It is fact, however, that students seldom have large discretionary incomes, and it also fact that many students cut corners on food and lodging in order to finance their tuition and books. Perhaps poor diet or frosty college rooms somehow facilitate academic insight, although in all likelihood, it is the scholar’s sustained concentration that prompts his insight. Clark describes the repetitious prayers and the intense focus on the search for one’s guide in the vision quest. This parallels the academic’s total immersion in papers and books, the constant seeking of understanding that ultimately allows the student to assimilate all that has been read. Clark continues:

This is an extremely important point, and one that will be taken up in greater detail later in this paper. The notion of a conscious, discriminating mind and a subconscious, intuitive mind, is relevant not only to the vision quest, but also to the academic pursuit of the Ph.D. (Irwin, 1994). The intuitive unconscious is every bit as important in original academic work as the rational conscious. Indeed, "the aim of science is to create a rational expression of the connection between seemingly unrelated sense experiences, but one who scorns (or lacks) the power of intuition will never rise above the ranks of journeyman calculator" (Sayen, 1985, p. 154). Clark continues:

The power over animals is one of the characteristics of the mystic state identified by Farges (1926). While it is important not to overextend the metaphor, totemic animals that offer themselves in succession could be interpreted as equivalent to academic hypotheses or theories. A lone researcher might choose to carve out a narrow solution to a very narrow problem, just enough to satisfy the requirements for the Ph.D.. Many do exactly this (Hockey, 1995). But some ambitious researchers want to understand something grander. Such ambitious researchers want a better totem. They seek to answer large and nagging inconsistencies within their disciplines, and sometimes change the entire paradigm (Kuhn, 1970).

Clark mentions the appearance of light which is characteristic of the visionary experience (Johnson, in Steiger, 1984). But light is also a commonly-used metaphor in academic understanding. Good students are said to be "bright" or even "brilliant," while bad students are said to be "dim." Scholars talk about states of "enlightenment" or "illumination" and ignorant people are said to be "kept in the dark." Cartoonists even indicate an idea by drawing a light-bulb over the thinking character’s head. This is not so ridiculous as it might seem. "Albert Einstein claimed that he had his first insight into relativity theory when he considered what he 'saw' when he imagined chasing after and matching the speed of a beam of light" (Kosslyn, 1987, p. 149).

Clark’s narrative concludes with his report before a tribal council. The same variety of interrogation by authority characterizes the viva voce, that oral examination each Ph.D. candidate must pass. In the viva voce, the candidate must present his or her research findings to a number of experts--generally authorities from within the candidate’s academic discipline--and convince them of his or her competence. The number of examiners varies according to the institution, as does the scope of the questions they might ask, but they have the power either to recommend the candidate for the Ph.D. or to fail that individual. The Ph.D. examiners are their discipline’s tribal council, and are responsible for determining whether or not the candidate’s vision was both genuine and meaningful. They are the gatekeepers who determine whether or not the Ph.D. student may change status, thereby earning the right to place the coveted title, "Dr.," before one’s name.

There seem to be common characteristics in the form of the vision quest. There also seem to be similarities between the Native American’s vision quest for spiritual insight and the Ph.D. student’s quest for academic vision. But the question remains: How do the characteristics of isolation, asceticm, focus, and repetition combine to catalyze a vision?

Csikszentmihalyi (1996) describes a five stage model of the creative process:

• preparation
• incubation
• insight
• evaluation
• elaboration

The first stage of the creative act is that of preparation. In the case of the Sun Dance festival, preparation consisted of the physical preparation of poles, skulls, and skewers. Preparation also consisted of cultural learning about the Sun Dance, either by talking to other candidates or by watching the event as a spectator in earlier years. This education provided the candidate with a sense of what he might expect as a participant; this is important, as the ambiguity of altered states often requires a learning period to successfully interpret them (Becker, 1963). The preparation for the Winnebago vision quest was explicit: "We were given preliminary tutoring for several weeks on what to expect and what was expected of us." The preparations for a Ph.D. are also explicit. Students are trained in taught coursework and/or supervised by senior academics (Hockey, 1994a), learning research methods, library research, and--hopefully--how to construct an argument. This preparation provides the vision-seeker with the raw materials to advance to the second stage of the creative act: incubation.

Incubation is the period in which the discriminating mind is silenced or put to work on other tasks while the intuitive mind is free to ruminate on the task at hand. In Clark’s account, the vision seekers silenced their conscious minds by focusing on the monotonous task of piling stones. Similarly, Zen Buddhists attempt to silence their conscious minds in order to reach a state of sanmai. The Ph.D. researcher may read countless journal articles or transcribe interviews or run computer programs that seem to go on without end, but all the while, the researcher’s subconscious mind is wrestling with the larger research question, seeking insight. Perhaps it is not the conscious and subconscious mind that are at work, but right and left hemispheres. The human brain is divided into roughly parallel hemispheres, connected by a bundle of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body while the right hemisphere controls the left side (Kimura, 1973). The hemispheres appear to be specialized. Although brain organization varies at the individual level, general functions can be assigned to each hemisphere. Speech is found in the left, as is mathematical and logical ability. The right hemisphere is responsible for the identification of patterns, and is instrumental in visual thought and imagery (Sergent, 1990). While one must not lapse into the too-neat dichotomies of early hemisphericity research (Ornstein, 1972), it is possible that the discriminating powers of the logico-analytic left hemisphere might be suspended in the incubational state of the vision quest, permitting the more-holistic right hemisphere to experience an "irrational" vision. This becomes even more plausible when one has been prepared to receive a vision and expects it, and when one’s powers of judgement are dulled by sleep deprivation, fatigue, hunger, thirst, or exposure. With the conscious mind silenced, raw and pre-verbal concepts within the subconscious can combine and recombine without censure or overt manipulation. This can lead to the climactic step in the creative act, insight.

With amorphous concepts shifting around beneath the threshold of awareness, with images or ideas combining in rapid combination in the right hemisphere, eventually concepts or images associate in a novel way (Eysenck, 1995). This is the moment of insight and the aha! of the creative process. It is the moment in which the vision is realized. It is the moment in which the seeker of the vision comes to know. And while irrational, Dionysian visions are different than Appolonian knowing by logic and reason, intuition can be a legitimate means of coming to know (Irwin, 1994).

Once the vision is attained , the discriminating properties of the left hemisphere are again employed. Mednick (1962) has suggested that creative ideas could result from novel combinations of two or more ideas that have been isolated from their common associations. But Eysenck (1995) has written that rich associations are only part of the creative act. The fourth step in the creative act must be taken: evaluation. In addition to generating novel associations, an individual must be able to evaluate them as relevant or irrelevant to the task at hand. The young man on a vision quest must ask himself if what he is experiencing is genuine contact with a spiritual guardian or if it is merely the effects of sleeplessness. The Ph.D. candidate must ask herself if the insight will satisfy the academic demands of her dissertation. Only those insights which are deemed legitimate by the faculties of reason will be carried to the final stage of the creative act: elaboration. The elaboration of vision lies in effort. It is that 99% perspiration of Edison’s genius which supports the 1% inspiration. Once the vision is judged sound, the visionary must set to work, reinforcing his vision with facts. Clark had to articulate his experience for the Winnebago’s council of elders. The Ph.D. candidate must convince a panel of examiners of the worth of her work.

Finally, as Johnson (in Steiger, 1984) noted, one of the effects of the vision--perhaps the most important of the seven characteristics--is that it creates a lasting effect on living. The visionary who has received a secret name enjoys a different status within his tribe, a doctor of philosophy enjoys a different status within the walls of the ivory tower. This isn’t merely nominal status, either, but has been conferred because the visionary has actually been changed. The vision quest pushes the seeker beyond endurance, but the insight reconstitutes the visionary, leaving him or her stronger and wiser than any individual who never dared to dream.