The Bāul Fakir Tradition and Sahajiya Altered States

Record summary

Bāul practitioners combine elements associated with Vaiṣṇava, Sufi and tantric traditions, using song, bodily discipline, guru transmission and ideas of the “inner person” to pursue direct realization. Some accounts describe visionary, ecstatic or unusual bodily experiences, but the tradition is better approached as a living altered-state and consciousness culture than as a collection of psi experiments. It matters for comparison of music, emotion, embodiment and social trance. Its history is syncretic, locally diverse and partly reconstructed through colonial-era recordings and later literary idealization.