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Pagans use these techniques and feel that they are useful for everyday life and for spiritual progress. Like anything, of course, they can be misused.
Cults get recruits tranced-out by various methods (isolation from the rest of the world, sleep-deprivation, inadequate diet, and interminable lectures that don't quite make sense) and then imprint them with the desired beliefs and behaviors. No legitimate Pagan group does that (though we can't guarantee that there aren't cults using Pagan or Wiccan trappings).
Cults also teach their members to meditate, chant, and perhaps dance for many hours at a time instead of tending to normal life activities, and furthermore to use meditation techniques and chants to drown out their own doubts or independent thinking and to block intellectual challenge from outsiders.
Pagan groups may use meditation, chant and dancing within ritual, but ritual is held only occasionally and at any rate only lasts for an hour or two. Group members will probably meditate and do ritual on their own, as will solitary practitioners who glean most of their information from books, but in both cases they will do so for limited periods of time. At any rate, no one is telling them what to do.
Pagans may do chanting and dancing in the course of a celebratory ritual to trance-out and achieve a feeling of ecstacy. But, as mentioned, this is occasional and of limited duration. (Rock concerts and raves are secular rituals of this kind that are much longer and far more intense.)
In contrast, meditation is done to empty the mind for a short time, in order to be able to hear that still small voice within. Meditation has mundane applications for relaxation and stress-reduction. It not only enables people to set aside worries and emotions for a while, but gives them practice in doing the same when faced with unusual demands and the need to focus. It helps develop a sense of the Observer within, which reminds people even when very busy or despairing or overwhelmed by life that they have a soul and are part of the eternal.
Trance is a fuzzy word used for many things, but most of the applications refer to a state whereby one’s attention is totally focused. Someone engrossed in a book or a television show is in a kind of trance. Hypnosis is a trance deliberately induced by someone who then holds your profound attention.
We have information coming at us from all directions all the time, but in trance we are concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of all else. This is entertaining with a TV show, educational with a textbook and essential for operating machinery.
Meditation is deliberately getting yourself into a state of trance by focusing on one thing — a mantra, a visualization, a single line-of-thought — or by attempting to concentrate on nothingness (which is the classical Eastern empty-mind variety). At the very least this practice momentarily rests your mind, which is otherwise rattling on day and night.
Chanting is the repetitive singing of a short, simple song. When done alone, either aloud or in your mind, it is using a mantra for meditation purposes, temporarily keeping all other thoughts at bay. It's fine for short periods to unclutter your mind, but obviously can dampen down your thinking if done for ridiculously long periods.
In a group situation, chanting gets people in sync, all breathing and moving together, their minds in the same groove, to form a sense of community and open themselves to a the ritual experience. This is comparable to hymn-singing in a church and similarly can range from slow and formal to high-energy.
Consciousness-Altering, which is the purpose of meditation and chanting, sounds kind of sinister. However, it is something that happens to us all the time in the course of normal life, though we often don't notice it or label it as such. It is useful to become aware of the process rather than being at the mercy of advertisers, politicians, and all the people and products out there vying for our attention. The more we know about how our minds work and how to pull our own strings, the better off we are — and the more authentic our allegiance when we freely give it..
Visualization is another technique Pagans often use. It’s the same thing that you do when, while reading a book or listening to a story, you have a picture playing in your mind. (Television is pre-packaged visualization). The Pagan versions are not for entertainment, but for inner exploration. Among the popular visualizations are “guided meditations” along the “paths” of the Kabbalistic tree of life, which is considered to be a “map” of the inner universe. You can find examples of visualizations in New Age, occult and human potential books. Athletes use visualization to enhance performance, and so can we all in our various fields.
To conclude: Responsible Pagan groups and sensible Pagan individuals don’t get carried away with any of these practices and don't let them interfere with normal life.