{"id":771,"date":"2017-08-26T11:27:46","date_gmt":"2017-08-26T11:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/?p=771"},"modified":"2017-08-26T11:30:35","modified_gmt":"2017-08-26T11:30:35","slug":"from-the-unreal-to-the-real-steve-taylor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/from-the-unreal-to-the-real-steve-taylor\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Unreal to the Real – Steve Taylor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Steve Taylor<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

First published in\u00a0New Renaissance, Vol 10, no.1, 2001.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"We all experience \u2018higher states of consciousness\u2019 from time to time, when an inner peace seems to fill us and the world around us seems magically transformed. Everything seems much more real and more beautiful, we feel like we\u2019re actually part of our surroundings, and there seems to be a meaning in things which we aren\u2019t normally aware of. The world seems a benevolent place, with a harmony in it, and we may even become aware of a kind of force or presence which seems to pervade all things.<\/p>\n

We also have a sense that we\u2019re seeing the world in a wider and truer way that normal, as if a veil has been pushed aside and we\u2019re catching a glimpse of how things really are.<\/p>\n

Studies have shown that, while these \u2018higher states of consciousness\u2019 can occur for no apparent reason, they are often \u2018triggered\u2019 by certain things: they often occur when we\u2019re amongst natural surroundings, for example, or when we do meditation and yoga, or after periods of emotional turmoil and depression. They also sometimes occur after or during sex, when we do certain sports (such as long-distance running), and people who suffer from epilepsy often experience them in the moments before seizures.<\/p>\n

\"\"Mainstream science and psychology have never really known how to deal with these experiences. Since Freud interpreted them as a regression to the ego-less state of early childhood, psychologists have tended to treat them as undesirable pathological states. They\u2019ve been seen as a form of schizophrenia, in which the normal \u2018healthy\u2019 ego stops functioning and loses the ability to differentiate between itself and the world \u2018out there\u2019.<\/p>\n

Recently neuroscientists have put forward explanations of them too. Noting that they often occur in times of crisis, one theory suggests that they\u2019re caused by an \u2019emergency response mechanism\u2019 in the brain. This is the part of the brain which is \u2018switched on\u2019 whenever we\u2019re in dangerous situations, which makes us aware of the significance of the danger so that we can respond to it in the right way. However, sometimes this mechanism can be activated accidentally \u2013 in times of high emotional or physical stress, for example, so that our brain reacts as if we\u2019re in an emergency situation and everything we see seems to be powerfully real and full of significance.<\/p>\n

Another theory is that these \u2018spiritual\u2019 feelings might simply be the result of natural selection. Religion makes human societies more stable and cohesive, and so gives them a better chance of surviving. So perhaps \u2018spirituality\u2019 was simply a illusory sensation (created by certain brain chemicals) which was \u2018selected\u2019 by nature because it gave rise to religious beliefs and so helped to create stable and cohesive societies.<\/p>\n

What all these theories have in common is the assumption that there\u2019s something aberrational about higher states of consciousness, or mystical experiences. They\u2019re pleasant but illusory feelings which are caused by a malfunctioning of the brain or the psyche. It\u2019s taken for granted that our ordinary state of being is the ideal state for us to be in, and one which tells us the absolute truth about the world we live in. Anything that deviates from the state, and which shows a different \u2018reality\u2019 to us must, therefore, be unhealthy and illusory.<\/p>\n

But in actual fact it makes a lot more sense if we take the exact opposite stance to this \u2013 if we say that it\u2019s our ordinary state of consciousness which shows a false reality to us, and it\u2019s only in higher states of consciousness that we glimpse \u2018reality\u2019. In other words, it\u2019s our ordinary consciousness which has something \u2018wrong\u2019 with it, and only higher states of consciousness should be considered normal and healthy.<\/p>\n

Native Peoples and Children<\/h2>\n

\"\"The strange thing is that there are some peoples in the world who seem to naturally live in what we could call a higher state of consciousness, or at least something close to it. Peoples like the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines seem to perceive the world around them in a much more real way than modern Europeans or Americans.<\/p>\n

Whereas we normally perceive natural things as \u2018objects\u2019 with no life inside them, to them all things are alive. They seem to be able to sense a spiritual essence in things, a kind of force which pervades all of reality and unites all superficially separate things into a one-ness. (This is what Indian philosophy calls Brahman, and which Native Americans sometimes call the \u2018Life Master\u2019 or the \u2018Great Spirit.\u2019) These peoples also don\u2019t seem to experience the sharp duality between the individual and a world \u2018out there\u2019 which is our normal state. They seem to naturally experience a degree of the sense of connectedness and belonging to the world which is a facet of what we call higher states of consciousness.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also strange that we seem to experience a degree of this kind of vision of the world as children. The idea that children live in a higher state of consciousness than us may seem absurd, but it\u2019s certainly true that, as children, we experience the world in the same intensely real way which native peoples do. As children we find the world an incredibly fascinating place, we stare in awe and wonder at \u2018humdrum\u2019 things which adults no longer bother giving their attention to, and we feel a powerful natural delight in being alive. Because our ego\u2019s haven\u2019t yet become strongly developed, we also have a natural sense of connectedness to the world \u2013 instead of being \u2018in here\u2019 with the world \u2018out there\u2019, we are, in a sense, \u2018out there\u2019 with the world. This has been confirmed by the studies of the American psychologist H. Werner, who \u2013 in Comparative Psychology of Mental Development \u2013 notes that the perceptions of both native peoples and children are \u2018more vivid and sensuous, and de-differentiated with respect to the distinctions between self and object and between objects.\u2019<\/p>\n

What this suggests is that, rather than being a kind of aberration, there is something natural and normal about higher states of consciousness \u2013 perhaps even that they are our original state. It\u2019s almost as if something \u2018went wrong\u2019 in our development, which caused us to lose it.<\/p>\n

The Ego and the \u2018Familiarity Mechanism\u2019<\/h2>\n

\"\"As I see it, there were actually two things which \u2018went wrong\u2019. The first was the development of a strong sense of ego. The archaeologist and geographer James DeMeo has shown recently that the ancestors of modern human beings such as the Indo-Europeans and the Semites originated in an area which he calls \u2018Saharasia\u2019 \u2013 the enormous belt of arid land which stretches from North Africa, through the middle East, and into central Asia. 6,000 years ago and before, however, the area wasn\u2019t arid at all, but was a fertile grassland, full of human and animal life. But at around 4000 BCE, beginning in the Near East and Central Asia, it started to dry up. Rainfall decreased, rivers and lakes evaporated, vegetation disappeared and famine and drought took hold. This created massive social devastation, and also seems to have caused a kind of \u2018psychic transformation\u2019 amongst the peoples who inhabited the area. Whereas before they had been peaceful and egalitarian, now they became extremely war-like and oppressive. According to DeMeo\u2019s research, this is the historical point where war, male domination, caste or class systems and a negative attitude to sex and the human body become common.<\/p>\n

Our ancestors seemed to have developed their strong and sharp sense of individuality in response to this environmental disaster. The hardship which filled their lives as their environment began to change \u2013 as their crops began to fail, as the animals they hunted began to die, as their water supplies began to fail and so on \u2013 must have encouraged a spirit of selfishness. In order to survive, people had to start thinking in terms of their own needs rather than those of the whole community, and to put the former before the latter. In addition, the new difficulties they faced must have brought a need for a new kind of intelligence, a practical and inventive problem-solving capacity. They were forced to think more, to develop new powers of self-reflection, to begin to reason and \u2018talk\u2019 to themselves inside their heads. And they could only do this by developing a stronger sense of \u2018I\u2019. After all, self-reflection is the \u2018I\u2019 inside our heads talking away to itself. If you want to be inventive or to deliberate or plan ahead, you have to have an \u2018I\u2019 to think with. And these two factors may well have been responsible for our strong sense of ego.<\/p>\n

The second thing which I believe \u2018went wrong\u2019 is connected to this. There seems to be a mechanism in our minds which \u2018edits out\u2019 the real-ness of things once we\u2019ve been exposed to them for a while. For instance, when we go into a room with a terrible smell in it we feel nauseous and are amazed that the other people can stand it \u2013 but after a few minutes we seem to \u2018switch off\u2019 to the intensity of the smell and it no longer affects us as much. The same thing happens on a larger scale when we go to a foreign country for the first time, or when we move house into a new area \u2013 everything around us seems to be much more real and to clamour for our attention. We can really sense the new atmosphere and the exciting new sights and sounds. But this intensity of perception only lasts for a short time: after a few weeks (or perhaps a few months at the most) we get used to the new environment, it becomes familiar and even dreary to us \u2013 as, again, something inside us seems to \u2018switch off\u2019 to its reality.<\/p>\n

This \u2018familiarity mechanism\u2019 \u2013 as we could call it \u2013 affects our perceptions of everything. We spend almost all our time surrounded by things which we\u2019ve seen or experienced thousands of times before and whose reality we have, therefore, been de-sensitized to. In other words, we look at everything in the world through a veil of familiarity. In fact this is the main difference between us and children : children haven\u2019t developed this \u2018familiarity mechanism\u2019 yet, the reality of the phenomenal world hasn\u2019t been \u2018edited out\u2019 to them, which is why they perceive the world in such a real way, and why it\u2019s such a fascinating place to them.<\/p>\n

Our ancestors probably also developed this mechanism in response to the \u2018Saharasian\u2019 environmental disaster. It may partly have been a kind of \u2018concentration aid\u2019. It \u2018turned off\u2019 their attention to their surroundings so that they could focus their attention more on their survival problems, helped them to \u2018narrow down\u2019 the field of their attention to particular things, so that they could become more practical and technically skilled.<\/p>\n

Once this mechanism developed it must have aided the development of the ego too. As the reality of the \u2018outside\u2019 world was switched off to our senses, our attention became focused inside ourselves, so that we developed a more pronounced inner life and a greater sense of duality between our selves and the world.<\/p>\n

Ordinary Consciousness<\/h2>\n

\"\"These are the two main factors which have gone into the development of our normal consciousness. The \u2018familiarity mechanism\u2019 means that the world is a fairly dreary place to us \u2013 and also an inanimate place, so that we see stones, rivers and even the earth itself as inert chemical machines, and so that we aren\u2019t aware of the spiritual essence which flows through all things and makes them one. And our strong sense of ego means that we experience a strong sense of disconnection to the world, and live inside ourselves instead of actually in the world.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s hopefully clear by now that the assumption that this normal consciousness is perfectly healthy and gives us a \u2018true\u2019 vision of the world is completely wrong. This consciousness is the result of a \u2018fall away\u2019 from the more intense and fuller consciousness of native peoples and children, the end result of a process of limiting and filtering our awareness of reality, so that what we\u2019re left with is a vision of the world which, far from being \u2018correct\u2019, is actually only a kind of false shadow reality.<\/p>\n

In other words, our normal consciousness is really a kind of \u2018sleep\u2019, which we\u2019re so used to that we don\u2019t even realise we\u2019re in it. And the importance of higher states of consciousness is that when we have them we \u2018wake up\u2019. When we meditate, when we\u2019re alone in nature or when we go long-distance running (or any occasion when we experience higher states of consciousness) we often manage to free ourselves from these limiting mechanisms. I haven\u2019t got space here to explain how this happens in detail (I try to do this in my yet-to-be-published book, Waking Up From Sleep), but it\u2019s mainly because, in these moments, the channels through which we normally give away our vitality (or life-energy) close down. We normally give our vitality away by being active, by thinking, and through the work we have to do to process the sensory material which around us. But when we meditate, for example, we\u2019re completely inactive, our senses are closed to the external world and our minds are (hopefully) no longer filled with thought-chatter; as a result we retain our viality. And this means that, since the essential purpose of the \u2018famliarity mechanism\u2019 is to save attentional energy, there\u2019s no need for it to function, in the same way that you no longer need to save money when there\u2019s a lot of it in your bank account. So for once our perceptions become free of the famliarity mechanism, and able to perceive the incredibly beautiful, animate and harmonious world which is normally hidden from us.<\/p>\n

What this means is that we shouldn\u2019t treat higher states of consciousness as illusions \u2013 instead we should see them as temporary glimpses of reality. And it\u2019s also important to remember that these glimpses don\u2019t have to remain just temporary. After all, this is what spiritual practice is all about: turning the \u2018peak experience\u2019 into the \u2018plateau experience\u2019, turning these temporary \u2018waking up experiences\u2019 into a permanent state of wakefulness. Spiritual development is (from this point of view at least) a process of gradually \u2018undoing\u2019 the development of the ego and of the familiarity mechanism, which eventually leads to a permanent higher state of consciousness. Every time we sit down to meditate, every time we do yoga, or when we manage to detach ourselves a little more from external sources of happiness or to make our lives less active or less hedonistic, we take a step closer to reality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Steve Taylor First published in\u00a0New Renaissance, Vol 10, no.1, 2001. We all experience \u2018higher states of consciousness\u2019 from time to time, when an inner peace seems to fill us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,25,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-awakening","category-nonduality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":777,"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions\/777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/issp.nu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}