Altered States of Consciousness: There’s Nothing Supernatural About It | Jamie Wheal | Big Think
So when you're considering non-ordinary or altered states, one of the first questions is, what do they feel like? What's actually going on in those places and spaces? And one of the challenges in coming up with a good and consistent answer—not just for a specific state like meditation or a flow state or a psychedelic state—is what qualities do they all share?
Because each of those communities of practice, over decades, centuries, and even millennia, have accumulated their own storytelling or content about what the states they access are, what they mean, and where you're supposed to go through them. So, for instance, if you were a Buddhist meditator, you would be instructed in all sorts of stages, levels, and progressions of non-ordinary states of consciousness, ranging from waking state all the way to white light void to Buddha consciousness, et cetera.
If I am a peasant farmer in India and I have a non-ordinary state experience, I might experience Ganesh, the elephant God, in a rice paddy. If I'm a peasant in Mexico, I might experience the version of Guadalupe Hidalgo. If I'm a coder in Silicon Valley, I might experience the matrix and code mode—this is ones and zeros streaming all night as I bang away on my keyboard.
And the reality is that underneath those experiences are far more alike than the wrapping paper, the narrator wrapping paper of what people see based on culture, custom, and biography. What we attempted to do was create a functional framework that lets us talk about these things as apples to apples and really see the similarities.
What we realize is that because of the neurobiology, there are four qualities that tend to arise pretty consistently, regardless of which door you go through to get into these non-ordinary states. And they are selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness, or STER for short.
Selflessness tends to happen because the areas of our brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex but including additional networks that connect, often turn off or completely light up. Either way, they knock out our everyday waking sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness. So we end up momentarily lost—our inner voice lost, our inner critic lost, our Jiminy Cricket lost—and we are in a state of not thinking about our thinking.
Timelessness happens for a similar reason. As basically different parts of our brain light up and turn off, our ability to calculate time gets knocked out because it is a comprehensive measurement; it doesn't just occur in one single location in the brain. So, when we start knocking out parts of the networks, we lose our chronometer.
All of the neurochemistry, brain focusing, attention, learning, and focus—all of that drops out of daydreaming about the past or the future—and we get absolutely sucked into the immediate present moment, so a feeling of timelessness comes with it.
The effortlessness is that it's no longer about what I'm trying to do; it's not about exerting grit or willpower, which a lot of people have been talking about and writing about these days. It's literally almost, in the biblical sense, sort of "not my will but thy will." I feel myself swept along, and it can be I'm just self-propelled and it feels awesome, or it's terrifying, but I don't have a choice.
But either way, it's not me plotting one foot in front of the other to get to a goal I've decided. So, that's the effortlessness. The final bit is the richness. That's arguably the whole shooting match because when I knock out my self-consciousness, I don't have a voice inside my head second-guessing or filtering.
When I'm not in the past or the future, I'm just in the deep present, and when I am effortlessly being propelled, the next thing that consistently seems to happen is we have access to far more information than we do in our regular waking state. That is when we go from conscious processing, which is very limited and narrow, to unconscious processing, which is faster and vaster.
Dr. David Eagleman, who is at Stanford, who's a friend, a colleague, and a board member of ours at the Flow Genome Project, constantly makes that case that really it's as if our conscious mind is sort of like the headlines of tomorrow's newspaper reporting on the reality of today. When we get into non-ordinary states, because of all the shifts in brain function, hormones, and neural electricity, we have access to more of that information in real time, and the results often feel supernatural.
People in the past, historically, have assigned this to the gods, to their muses, to fate, to possession, to angels—you name it, we pretty much exhaust the gamut of all the ways we could say, "This is just too much, this is too cool, it's too inspired, it's too informed to possibly be me." So we've assigned it supernatural origins.
But in reality, we now know it might just be super-hyphen-natural. It's just us in an optimized state. It's big data for our minds.