Altered Consciousness

From Menletter May 2002

By Tim Baehr

You've probably heard about, read about, or experienced what is called an "altered state of consciousness." There's quite a catalog of the various kinds, which can be described by their causes: illegal and legal drugs, botanicals such as peyote and mushrooms, alcohol, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, stress, trauma, meditation, holotropic breathwork, religious ecstasy, exercise-induced endorphins ("runner's high"), high fever, orgasm, mental illness. Even chocolate and love have been implicated, and I suspect I've left a few out.

What's "altered" in an altered state? You could go through the gamut - emotion, sensation, perception, cognition. And what "consciousness" is being "altered"? Do we all have the same baseline consciousness fom which the alterations take place?

Yes and no. We inherit, as human beings, a hard-wired neurological system that's pretty much standard. But then it's constantly altered. The things we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel interact with any hard-wired neurological inheritance. Perhaps that's why, at any given time, a society or an individual may encounter the world quite differently from the way you and I encounter it.

And we must interact with the world in order to make sense of it. Much of what we understand about the physical world is conditioned by our experience of that world. In extreme cases, this conditioning can fail at a critical time. People born deaf may never acquire spoken language skills unless they gain their hearing very young. Beyond a certain age, those skills can't be acquired. A similar phenomenon happens among people who are born blind: if sight is acquired beyond a certain age, people may find it difficult or even impossible to make sense of visual sensations.

What about our sense of ourselves as human beings? We know, or can at least guess, that there's some variation - from society to society and even from person to person - in how we view ourselves. What we feel, perceive, and think about are at least partially conditioned by our upbringing in a particular society, community, and family. At any point in time, each one of us is the main character in a long story, mostly created by others.

This isn't entirely bad. Without a common story - without norms - each community could lapse into chaos and anarchy. In extreme cases, lack of interaction with others leads to death. Orphan babies could die without human interaction, even though they were fed and kept clean.

In living our stories, we're often unaware that we're immersed the story - in a constant chatter not entirely of our own making. The chatter may be in the form of words and sentences or it may be preverbal - a stream of ideas and images just before they're put into words. Most of the time, we're unaware of this chatter. It's about as automatic as breathing. But it's a huge part of what makes us conscious human beings.

It isn't entirely good. In some obvious and subtle ways, we're told who we are as men. Messages - all part of the chatter - come from people close to us such as parents or partners. The strongest messages come from the cultural collective, and many of them are toxic. Men are violent (we are? all of us?). Men are rapists (sex with our own wives has been called marital rape). Men are silly and awkward (watch nearly any sit-com). Men are poisoned by testosterone (simply not true, medically). Men are irrelevant. Men are tyrannical overlords. And on and on.

There are good messages, too, of course. Men are heroes. Men protect their families and country. Men have superior upper body strength. Men do the heavy, dirty work. And so on.

The problem with all the messages, bad and good, is that they define us from without. The messages worm their way into our consciousness. How I see myself, how I feel as a man (even acknowledging some inconsistencies) may not be who I really am. I am a character in a story I didn't write.

Altering the story - the chatter - can happen when we enter into an altered state of consciousness. We can alter the chatter quickly with drugs, changing its content or shutting it down. Changing the content through hallucinatory drugs (for instance) just substitutes another kind of chatter. We can also change the chatter by changing the circumstances of our lives. Extreme sports, danger-seeking, or even typical "midlife crisis" behavior can change the chatter. But it's still chatter, and it's just another story. Shutting the chatter down (alcohol and other depressants come to mind) also dulls or even shuts down awareness. This gets rid of the chatter, but without awareness there's no benefit.

The trick, it seems to me, is to find a way to quell the chatter and leave awareness intact. Who are we, without the messages we have internalized? What do we think when we don't think in words? What do we perceive when there's no story to tell? What do we feel when the most toxic of the messages are absent? How can we use the chatter-free awareness to rediscover our true selves?

One time-honored way is simply to sit still and pay attention. This takes a little more effort than popping a pill or toking a joint, a little less effort than biking down a mountain or jumping out of a plane - or buying a sports car and trolling for a young girlfriend.

Sitting still can be pretty hard at first, but it improves with practice. Paying attention may be even harder. Beginners are often told to pay attention just to their breathing. When distractions arise (they will!), you just observe them and let them pass you by. Can you sit still for ten minutes and "do" absolutely nothing? Try it. You may find it a lot harder than you imagined. Can you do it for twenty minutes? Once you've gotten through twenty minutes, can you do it every day?

When you are immersed in stillness, you can enter into an altered state compared to your everyday consciousness. But you're also in an "unaltered state" in that you've set aside many of the things that have conditioned your consciousness and set up the chatter in the first place. With awareness intact, you've taken the first step on a journey of discovery.

What's the payoff? Eventually you get acquainted with a self that's not conditioned by the chatter. You also get to see a world that's not being filtered through chatter. As a man, you can get closer to your male essence and discover a far richer and more complicated human being than you had imagined. You'll probably also discover that the "bad" parts of yourself aren't so bad after all and that you have perhaps been undervaluing the good parts. And having done all that, you may also find out that you can see the rest of the world, and the people in it, more clearly and with greater compassion. A lot - maybe all - of the negative judging we do comes from the chatter.

The biggest payoff, perhaps, is that you begin to see yourself without being defined by other people's expectations. When you return from your stillness, you're more genuine, more "you," and people generally respond well to that.

Notice I haven't called this practice "meditation." Somehow the word doesn't capture what I have in mind, even though, objectively, sitting and awareness exercises are definitely a form of meditation. What I want to emphasize, however, is the stillness and the quieting of mind and body. You need no special cushion, room, time, clothing, guru, or anything else. Just you in a comfortable position in a quiet place.

Stillness is hard. If you've ever tried it, you know it's far from passive. I don't expect that many men would embark on this kind of practice simply because they've read what I've said here. But store this information away somewhere in your head. There are many ways to approach the practice of stilling the chatter. If you stay attentive to the possibilities, one may click with you someday.