tions but general descriptive groupings of a variety of prac-
tices and ideas.
Ecstatic discipline. Many religious traditions maintain
that the desired state exists outside of the human realm. It
may lie in some other place such as in the heavens, across the
mountains, or at the bottom of the sea; or it may take place
in some other time, typically the past or the future. Whatever
the case, in order to reach that extraordinary state personally
or in order to be able to communicate with spirits from that
other world, the seeker must somehow cultivate the ability
to move out of his or her physical body, because that body
is limited by the confining structures of time and space. Such
out-of-the-body experience is classified generally as “ecstasy”
and is attested in a variety of religious traditions throughout
history.
The discipline needed to attain ecstasy typically includes
practices in which the seeker deprives himself or herself of
normal bodily pleasures in order to be free of his or her phys-
ical body. Such deprivational or ascetic discipline may begin
with the seeker’s withdrawal into solitude and spiritual tute-
lage under a master. It often culminates in the visitation by
a guardian spirit and subsequent transformative vision or in
an experience of death and resurrection.
Ecstatic discipline appears, for example, in North Amer-
ican Indian practices centered on what has come to be
known as the vision quest. In such a quest practiced among
the Thompson River Indians, for instance, a young man ob-
served severe dietary restrictions and fasts, cleansed his spirit
with such rituals as sweat bathing and immersion in a cold
river, purged his body of impurities by forcing himself to
vomit or by taking sacred medicines, and camped alone on
a mountaintop, where he forsook sleep for nights on end.
There he hoped to be visited by a guardian spirit who would
teach him sacred ways and lead him through the dangers of
life. The Ojibwa Indians of the Algonquin tribe near Lake
Superior demanded that a boy entering puberty set up camp
alone under a red pine tree, where he was to fast and to lie
awake for days, waiting for a vision that would allow him to
see who he was in the context of the sacred cosmos as a
whole. These visions were often described as journeys taken
into the worlds of the spirits, where the seeker was intro-
duced to divine teachers who would guide him throughout
his life.
Such ecstatic practices often included the seeker’s ritual-
ized symbolic death and resurrection. Shamanic initiates
among the Pomo and Coast Miwok Indians of California lay
on the ground and were covered with straw as if they had
died and been buried; standing up and casting off the straw,
the initiate was then known to have been resurrected from
the dead. Among the Tlinglit Indians of coastal Alaska, a
man was recognized as a potential shaman when he fell to
the ground in a deathlike trance and subsequently revived.
In some instances of ecstatic discipline, the value of an
enduring, rather than temporary, out-of-the-body experience
lies at the very center of religious ideology itself. Perhaps the
best example is that of the Tibetan traditions based on the
notion of bar do’i sems can (or simply bar do), the “intermedi-
ate stage” through which a departed soul moves over the in-
terval of forty-nine days between death and rebirth. Tibetan
priests read a series of instructions—most frequently from
the the Bar do’i thos grol (often transliterated and simplified
as Bardo Thodal, the Tibetan Book of the Dead)—to the
dying or dead person to help him through the dangers of the
bar do and to help him gain a comfortable rebirth or, ideally,
freedom from the cycle of rebirth itself.
Immediately upon death—in fact, before a person even
knows he or she is dead—a departed soul is said first to enter
the ’chi kha state, a realm of pure light and bliss. Reading set
instructions from the Book of the Dead, the priest tells the de-
ceased that this is the ultimate reality and encourages the de-
ceased to sever all emotional ties to the world left behind in
order to remain free in this state. Most spirits are afraid of
such freedom, however, and turn from it toward a second
state known as chos nyid, in which the dead person encoun-
ters wondrous and beautiful creatures. The priest tells the
person that these beings are images of his or her self that have
been constructed through the person’s own selfishness and
that the person must renounce all attachment to them be-
cause they will soon turn into demonic monsters. Fearing
these terrors, the person then enters a third state, srid pa, in
which the person panics and flees into a new birth on earth
as a way to avoid the horrors that have been experienced in
the intermediate realm. The priest attempts to keep the per-
son from moving through the second two of these realms—
and thereby allowing the person to remain in the state of
pure light and bliss—by reciting lessons and offering encour-
agement in the highly structured discipline of the long funer-
ary ritual.
Constructive discipline. This mode of discipline does
not seek in general to deprive the spiritual aspirant of un-
wanted or harmful characteristics; rather, it helps that person
perfect his or her being by building on desirable characteris-
tics that are already there.Such constructive discipline often takes the form of per-
sonal imitation of a paradigmatic figure or figures who are
said to embody desirable qualities or to have undertaken ben-
eficial actions. Many times, therefore, such discipline takes
the form of the correct performance of a ritual. “We do here
what the gods did in the beginning,” the priests report while
explaining why they officiate at the sacred rites of Vedic
India (see S ́atapatha Bra ̄hman:a 7.2.1.4). For those priests, all
work performed as part of the ritual thus becomes a disci-
plined imitation of a divine model. So, for example, the artist
who fashions the utensils and ritual paraphernalia expresses
artistry in a religious context: “Those works of art produced
here by a human being—[an image of] an elephant, a goblet,
a sacred robe, a gold figure, a chariot—are works of art only
because they imitate the art of the gods” (Aitareya Bra ̄hman:a
6.27).SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 8703