The conditions we’ve been talking about previously (Sacrifice & Effort, Silence, The Flow State) are all geared towards accessing higher states of consciousness. These states may give way to transcendent experiences, and these might lead to transformative experiences, but this is not necessarily the case: you could achieve a state of connectedness to nature, for example, by fasting and meditating for a week, but this needn’t take you to a transcendent experience or a deep transformation of life. However, all transcendent experiences require attaining a higher state of consciousness. So, while not all higher states lead to a transcendent experience, all transcendent experiences stem from a higher state of consciousness. Let’s define these.
What Characterizes a “Higher State” of Consciousness?
What do higher states of consciousness feel like? How can they produce deep, long-lasting transformations in people? Higher states of consciousness make people believe (or live) an intense connection to the nature surrounding them. This feeling of universal belonging is a huge meaning-building structure for human beings. It can transform someone’s existence because it gives them a role in the cosmos, makes them feel integrated to something bigger and more important than paltry material existence on this plane of reality.
This process has been thoroughly described in studies about higher consciousness. We’ll be focusing on 3 elements: How the external world is perceived during states of higher consciousness, how the self is perceived, and how both these two, the world and the self, interact.
In this post, we’ll be considering our perceptions about the external world. We’ll get to the other two in subsequent posts.
So, how is the world experienced when you attain a higher state of consciousness? Here are some ideas.
Feeling of clarity/brightness
Verbal reports from subjects having experienced a higher level of consciousness always begin with talk of “awakening”, feeling “alive for the first time” and “seeing everything clearly”. As we said in previous entries, the difference between “psychedelic” substances (like peyote) and “drugs” (like alcohol) is that the first ones seem to awaken you to a “realer than real” reality, while drugs make you feel drowsy and disconnected, as if you had built a barrier between your perception and reality.
In the case of higher states of consciousness, this “clarity” -perceiving pure reality- is often associated with a “bright light”. This kind of “glowing” is easily traceable to all kinds of spiritual ecstatic experiences, without regard to culture, tradition or epoch. This is why Gnostics believe everyone has the “original spark” inside them, because ever since we had rational human beings roaming the earth, there have been accounts of this “bright light”.
This “bright light” leads to a feeling of “clarity”, of interconnectedness, of unity (again: consult any spiritual practice out there). Curiously, the process of “clarity” evolves on different levels: the subject can feel integrated to everything, capable of perceiving the world as a whole, while also being able to analyze the smallest minutiae of existence. He can, at the same time, see the universe as a whole and see the intricate relations in the smallest things, like a drop of water.
Beauty is all around us
The “awakening” experienced not only refers to the subject’s feelings of elevating themselves, Matrix-like, out of a cell that imprisoned them. The feeling of being awake applies to all the world around them. Everything is breathing, alive, interconnected. This oneness, this connection, fills the subject with a sense of unimaginable beauty. Everything around them is “beautiful” because it plays a role and is connected to the oneness. Things are “beautiful” in a Platonic sense: Harmony and Balance produce Beauty, and Beauty is “Truth” for Plato, as we’ve already discussed.
This perception, of one whole, integrated reality, can lead the subject to reinforce his spiritual beliefs or even shun his atheism in favor of another ontological framing of reality. This is due to the non-verbal experience of “knowing” that there is something bigger out there. Not only because the clarity, beauty and interconnectedness of everything seem to have been designed or programmed, but also because of the sensation of being in contact with a higher consciousness, that knows something. However, rarely do you find accounts of direct encounters with this “higher consciousness”, but the psychedelic field is full of reports of visions of angels/aliens/creatures/hobbits/etc that want to “communicate” with the subject, although they rarely remember the teachings once the session is over.
Another manifestation of this “higher conscience” that designs and orders everything appears in controlled experiments with substances like DMT or LSD. Rick Strassman, in his book The Spirit Molecule, reports the experiences of a handful of subjects being injected DMT intravenously (if you don’t have time to read the book, you can watch the terrible, trippy documentary about his book on Youtube). At high doses (like, enough-to-kill-a-horse, dose) the confused and terrified experimental subjects reported seeing all kinds of gods and weird shit, but also, the famous psychedelic spiral/fractal everyone has experienced.
I have many reserves about Strassman’s work, the key one being, if you think you can reproduce an ayahuasca ceremony by strapping a guy down and injecting him full of DMT, you haven’t understood the first thing about ayahuasca. Be that as it may, it’s pretty uncontroversial to say powerful psychedelics like DMT or LSD induce perceptions of spirals/fractals.
So obviously, the question is, if everyone all around the world and in different eras is seeing the same thing, maybe this is the real thing, the thing at the root of it all (said the stoned college student, as he passed the joint). At this point, the conversation gets a bit too stoner for me, but I do think it’s a legitimate question. In any case, the perception of these fractals isn’t a passive activity, since the subjects report feeling that there was something “intelligent” behind all these patterns.
Let’s stop here. Next time, we’ll take a look at the changes on the “self” that a higher state of consciousness can induce.