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The self-report of one case, by the veteran author of this article, provides suggestive materials for analysis, discussion, and future research.Ĭorporal punishment of children is a frequent child-training technique in many societies in the ethnographic record. The notion of ASCombat and typology is grounded in 4 years of veteran-engaged research in community-based healing approaches. As a preliminary analytical framework, we associate ASCombat to the widely studied altered states of consciousness as a way to advance understanding on the use and effectiveness of psychedelics and collective healing in the veteran population.
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This article introduces the concept of altered states of combat (ASCombat) to refer to the specific mind-set soldiers experience in combat. While new medical treatments are being developed, it is also clear that veterans themselves are experimenting in collective, ritualistic, and community-based ceremonial uses of psychedelic medicine. These “treatment-resistant” veterans are at high risk for self-harm. Thus, religion and art has allowed for subjective knowledge to become represented in symbols and artefacts, which renders the subjective knowledge concrete, memorable and shareable.įor veterans with moral conflicts brought on by war work, evidence-based approaches designed for posttraumatic stress disorder tend not to attend to resulting spiritual and ethical forms of suffering. Together, forms of subjective knowledge make up symbolic systems that feed into overarching subjective knowledge systems, or cultures and worldviews. This in turn allows for an immersive focus on sensory inputs, and becoming connected to something bigger than oneself, a state that is especially conducive to providing meaning and new perspectives with regards to the human condition. Individual differences in subjective cognition are proposed to lie in absorption, or the propensity of individuals to allow for a state of the experiential, more porous self, through reduced boundaries of the rational, bounded self. Subjective knowledge is processed through subjective cognition – experiential or intuitive thinking, narrative processing, and meaning-making. Forms of this knowledge comprise feelings, experiences, and beliefs, which can arise from naturally occurring experiences or can be induced through religious rituals and artistic performances. In this article, we propose that the arts and religions are symbolic systems that capture subjective knowledge, or knowledge about the world that is specific to human experience or the human condition, both concerning the self (existential subjective knowledge) and others (social subjective knowledge). Religion and art have been incredibly important in human evolution but, we argue, are often not taken seriously as an important source of knowledge. One of the authors is on maternity leave and a final version of the article should therefore be available at the end of 2022. We have retracted this article because it needs substantial reworking.