ALTERED STATES

The altered state of consciousness, or ASC, can be found throughout the paranormal. It is the dream state, the trance of the medium, the state achieved in hypnosis, and maybe even the state we achieve when tired and suffering extreme emotion, when many paranormal events occur.
It is a state when our calibration of the senses seems to collapse and the mind creates its own ideas, often externalising them into the real world through hallucination. But it is also the path of the mystic.

WILSON AND MASLOW

British writer Colin Wilson gives us the best description of this state with his understanding of ‘close-upness.’
To Wilson, man has a very small view of reality; he sees the world from a ‘worm’s eye view’, unable to complete a world picture in his mind. Such close-upness causes a natural state of ‘upside-downness’, causing man to concentrate too much on trivia and having a negative mind-set. However if man could break the circuit he would ascend to the ‘bird’s eye view’, where everything would be brighter, connected and full of meaning.
To explain what he means, he cites psychologist Abraham Maslow and his ideas on the ‘peak experience’. Such an experience is a moment of joyousness, a sudden realisation of there being more in the world.
Typically, Maslow cites a soldier returning from war, seeing a woman for the first time in months and realising they are different from men. The experience is subtle but full of deeper meaning.

DEFINITIONS

What Wilson and Maslow are getting at is a form of mystical experience. It is what Zen Buddhists call ‘satori’; what yogis describe as ‘samadhi’; what Buddha knew as ‘nirvana’, or Christian mystics such as St Teresa of Avila called ‘orison’.
It is a moment when a person appreciates the Divine. Even physicists such as Raynor Johnson knew it. He classed normal consciousness as seeing the world through five narrow slits in a tower. The mystical experience lets us view the world from a huge hole in the roof.
The writer G K Chesterton called the feeling ‘absurd good news’, whilst William James called it a feeling of ‘aha.’ In 1969 the biologist Sir Alister Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford, which has studied over 4,000 cases.
British polls shown in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1979 advised that many churchgoers had experienced it, whilst a 1987 poll from the National Opinion Research Centre in Chicago said that 13% of Americans had.

EXPERIMENTAL MYSTICS

The experience is, it seems, universal. But what is it? A number of experimental mystics decided to reach the state through the taking of drugs. Chemist Humphrey Davy used laughing gas. Of the experience, he wrote: ‘I existed in a world of newly connected … ideas. I theorised. I imagined. I made discoveries.’
P D Ouspensky wrote of everything being linked together, and: ‘In order to describe the first impressions … it is necessary to describe ALL at once.’ Meaning – information – came flooding in to the point that he said: ‘A man can go made from one ash tray.’
As for mystic R H Ward, he wrote: ‘I saw the meaning of the universe, of life on earth, and of man.’

INFORMATION UNIVERSE

We are speaking, here, of the mind reaching a source of total information, overwhelming the recipient. We are talking of a connection, in the deep mind, with a totality of everything.
Some physicists would understand the idea. Many are convinced of an ‘information universe’, where, at the subatomic level, all the information within the universe is contained.
Physicist David Bohm went further. To him, this information is holistic. At the information level, the universe folds in upon itself to the point that the individual particle is as one with the universe. The part and the whole are one and the same.

CELLULAR CONSTRUCTION

To skeptics, such an intuition as had in a mystical experience is simply a delusion. There are times, such as near death, when life flashes before you, giving hints of a totality of knowledge. But it is simply the brain playing tricks on you.
One central reason for such skepticism is the lack of a ‘mechanism’ to allow a possible holistic information universe to invade the personal mind. However, recent studies of the cell have identified a specific cytoskeleton.
This is made of the protein, tubulin, and forms microtubules, which have been found to resonate. This structure is so small that it has been theorized that it could somehow ‘connect’ with the subatomic, thus allowing its principles into the human.

ALTERED STATES

The above is admittedly contentious, but points to the possibility that a ‘connection’ with a wider information source is not out of the question. Indeed, such a connection must occur or we, as lifeforms, are disconnected from our fundamental atomic make-up.
Another skeptical argument to the ASC is that, if we can access it, why do we not do so in normal life? Yet studies of the ability show time after time that connection is made at such a time as outside information is shut off or reduced.
This suggests that the invasion of information through the senses overpowers any ability to intuit information internally. Only when the outside world is shut off do we descend into another, more holistic, psychological state.

TWO WORLDS

In this state, we can access a different form of information, a totality, and it is often through the ASC that paranormal abilities arise. This makes sense, in that much paranormality is about a connectedness between man to other men, and his environment.
But the altered state also tells us something else. The home of intuition, it is the world tapped by the artist, the poet, the religionist, as well as the mystic. It is a holistic existence in which we can exist, in which we can be as one with the gods.
Alternatively, through the senses we have built another world – of science, of specialization, of separateness. This is the world in which we exist most of the time, and it can be so lonely.
It would be a comforting thought to realize that, to counter the failings of the material world, we can also, for a time, exist elsewhere. The mystical experience – the altered state of consciousness – is a marvelous declaration what we are not alone. We can be, as a species, as one with the totality of the universe.

© Anthony North, July 2007

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