Episode 11 & 12 - Higher States of Consciousness
Awakening From the Meaning Crisis
NOTE: If you’re new to my exploration of this lecture series, I recommend starting with my coverage of Episode 1.
You can also view the full archive of my posts here.
Ep. 11 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1
Ep. 12 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2
Previously, John Vervaeke offered us a taste of how higher states of consciousness might be beneficial in cultivating insight. We’re going to spend this post exploring these states in more detail.
We need to integrate two types of explanations of these states:
Descriptive - How do these states work at different levels of abstraction (e.g. psychologically ). Why do people feel that these states are “more real” than their normal reality?
Prescriptive - Do these states actually provide a rational justification and guide for self-transformation? Or is their overall ontonormativity an illusion?
But why are we performing this exploration? It’s because we want a scientifically plausible explanation of what’s going on when somebody claims to be “enlightened”, like Siddhartha Gautama. Or if someone claims to have experienced radical self-transcendence like Plato. It seems that these states are often at the center of most axial traditions like Buddhism, Vedanta, Christianity, etc. But many propositions and beliefs from these same axial traditions are no longer viable to many of us today. At the same time, we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We’d like to find some way of salving their underlying practices and psychotechnologies.
Descriptive account
Framing the discussion
Before we can offer a descriptive account of these higher states, we need an appropriate framing for the discussion. For this discussion, we’ll examine the transformation that occurs in the self, our perception of the world, and the relationship between the two.
How is the world transformed?
A hallmark of these states is that people report a tremendous amount of perceptual and cognitive clarity about the world. The world suddenly makes sense in a way that it didn’t before. There’s a feeling of awe. A brightness and vividness to the world. Incidentally, this is where the etymology of the word “glory” comes from. It’s not a moral term. It was historically used in the Abrahamic traditions to describe God. Interestingly, this same brightness and vividness is what people experience within a flow state.
In this sudden burst of clarity, people often report both an expansive realization of the gestalt of the world as well as an awareness of minute details of the world. This is similar to our discussion of non-duality from a previous episode. Auguries of Innocence by William Blake captures this sentiment well:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Participating in a higher state of consciousness imbues our world with a shining vitality. The world feels pregnant with energy and significance. It allows us to experience a deep interconnectedness with everything.
How is our self transformed?
People often report a profound sense of internal peace. It’s akin to the peace of internal harmony described by Plato. As we discussed, this internal peace is deeply connected to an enhanced connectedness to reality. Interestingly enough, that’s exactly what people often report after participating in these higher states of consciousness. They report a profound sense of being connected to the true, the good and the beautiful.
While dwelling in these states, people often report fundamental changes in their sense of self:
Their egocentric autobiographical sense of self disappears, at least temporarily. It’s similar to what we feel when we’re participating in a flow state.
They report remembering or sati’ing their “true self”. They enter a different existential mode of being more connected to the underlying patterns that govern our intelligible reality.
They report a tremendous amount of energy and vitality, similar to the flow state.
There’s a profound cascade of insight and understanding, similar to the flow state.
How is the relationship between the self and the world transformed?
People experience a profound sense of at-onement with the world, sort of like the flow state. They start to feel like they’re meaningfully participating in the reality that they’re connected to. They’re so deeply conformed with this underlying reality, that they experience an identification with it. This participatory knowing is so superlative, profound and transformative, that it’s inevitably described as ineffable. That is, they can’t easily describe it in words.
Putting it all together
To provide a descriptive account of these higher states, we need to explain how these three transformations might be taking place in the mind.
Disruptive strategies
Using disruptive strategies to trigger these states seems to be a common thread in the literature. Not all disruptive strategies lead to higher states of consciousness. But it seems that all higher states of consciousness are preceded by some disruptive strategies.
A disruptive strategy is anything that disrupts our normal cognitive functioning, and our normal state of consciousness. For example, anything that breaks us out of our current frame, or alters our salience landscape.
These disruptive strategies can vary from slow long-term strategies to fast short-term strategies. Long term strategies could involve practices like meditation and contemplation. Short term strategies could involve fasting, sexual or sleep deprivation, drumming and chanting or psychedelics. It’s likely that various shamanic traditions refined these practices to trigger these higher states of consciousness.
One could even argue that the tendency of our mind to wander is an inbuilt disruption strategy. For example, imagine the myths we’ve built around taking a “break” from a problem, going for a discursive walk and getting hit with a flash of insight.
There’s some tentative scientific evidence that combining these strategies can be beneficial. This should make sense, based on everything we’ve discussed so far. Although one can imagine that there’s diminishing returns, and perhaps even negative returns of engaging in too much disruption to our cognition. It’s likely that there’s an “optimal” amount of disruption for our cognition at any given time.
De-centering
“De-centering” seems to be a powerful strategy employed by people across traditions to access these higher states. It involves shifting from an egocentric perspective to an allocentric one. An egocentric perspective is one where phenomena are described in relation to us. For example, describing the motion of a ball relative to our position. An allocentric perspective involves describing phenomena in relation to something other than us. For example, describing the motion of a ball relative to the north pole.
It makes sense that people are much more allocentric during these states, because of how intense their experience of reality is to them. When we’re in these states, it’s like the salience of our reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our own ego. Many participants of these states report a profound sense of “release”. This is an important observation, because nirvana from Buddhism means to “blow out” or “extinguish”. Even moksha from various Hindu traditions means “release”.
De-centering can be a powerful strategy when we’re stuck on a particularly messy or intractable problem. It seems that these intractable problems are often interpersonal in nature. This isn’t a surprise because our relationships are most predictive of how much meaning we find in life. And people are endlessly complex.
Anyway, suppose we’re asked to describe a problem to someone else. For most of us, our natural instinct is to do so from the mirage of our own egocentric frame. And so we remain stuck. But imagine that we’re asked to re-describe the problem from a third person perspective. Oftentimes, we’ll be able to break frame and find a solution to the problem. De-centering allows us to systematically unblock ourselves from a path to the solution.
Fluency
Some cognitive scientists have described the experience of insight as a “fluency” spike. Fluency is the overall accessibility or applicability of information. We’re more likely to trust information that’s easier for us to process and understand, regardless of its semantic content.
For example, compare:
fluency
fLuEnCY
The underlying text has the same semantic content. But most people would rate the former as “better”, would be more confident in it, and more likely to rate it as true.
John Vervaeke proposes an alternative definition to “fluency”. It’s the efficiency with which we can zero in on the relevant information. That is, it’s the ease at which the information has been formatted to help us find what’s relevant.
When we’re fluent, we’re processing information very efficiently. So an insight experience triggers a sudden spike of efficiency. This causes us to perceive the information within that experience as being more real. This spike in fluency isn’t always true for these higher states. But there seems to be a trend. It’s also likely evolutionarily adaptive. We’re more likely to be picking up real patterns if our ability to process the underlying information is enhanced.
Moving into these higher states is akin to entering a flow-like state. That is, we’re able to implicitly learn complex patterns that can’t be easily articulated into propositions. We start to experience increased fluency that allows our brain to tease apart causal patterns from correlatory patterns.
Continuity hypothesis
We’ve just discussed the close relationship between fluency and insight. We know that insight can be enhanced from within a flow state. We also know that under the right conditions, flow states can be enhanced into mystical states. Furthermore, under the right conditions these mystical experiences can bring about a profound personal transformation.
The continuity hypothesis states that there’s a continuity in the underlying machinery for all of these states. That is, the same machinery that leads to flow gets exapted to process information at higher levels of abstraction. The more we can generate smaller insight experiences, the more likely we are to generate downstream transformative experiences. If we can prime this pump, we can generate more personal transformation and the cultivation of wisdom.
Our previous discussion on flow discussed that its prerequisite is finding a match between the user’s expertise and the demands of the task. So what is the expertise that we’re flowing with? John Vervaeke argues that it’s a fundamental kind of expertise. It’s the expertise of achieving an “optimal grip” that we discussed in a previous episode. We’re constantly optimizing between the gestalt and the underlying features. We need to perform this optimization across every domain we ever find ourselves in.
For example, how do we know how far away to stand from someone in a social setting? How do we know how much to talk when conversing with someone? How do we know the right level of abstraction when describing objects in a conversation? If we see a dog on the street, we’d rarely tell someone that we walked past a cute “mammal”. Similarly, we’d be unlikely to tell someone that we walked past a cute “otterhound”. The former is too vague, and the latter is too specific. It seems that all situations in life find themselves in some sort of trade-off between too much or too little. And yet, we have the ability to optimize against this trade-off in real time. Often, it happens unconsciously at the level of participatory knowing. Being in that sweet spot means we’ve found an optimal grip on the problem. These higher states seem to be helping us improve the procedure that we use to find this optimal grip.
John Vervaeke proposes that entering these higher states is akin to entering a flow state about our ability to optimally grip to the world. Instead of optimally gripping one object within a particular problem, we find purchase on an optimal grip on the whole world and to ourselves. It’s our most comprehensive attempt to make sense of the world in a participatory way.
De-automatization and finding good invariances
The nine dots problem was an excellent example of how our frames get built automatically and unconsciously. Our automatic framing of seeing the nine dots as an instance of the connect-the-dots problem blocked us from solving it. To solve the problem, we needed to de-automatize our cognition and break out of the unhelpful frame.
The strategies we’ve discussed above seem to enable this de-automatization. They do it by disrupting our cognition from using any frames we’ve built so far.
The noise they inject into the problem also helps us understand what’s truly invariant in the problem. For example, consider the problem of picking up a cup. If we move around the cup, we notice lots of things changing except the cup. That’s why we assume that the shape of the cup is “real”.
Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/latest/dg/model-fit-underfitting-vs-overfitting.html
But there’s both helpful and unhelpful forms of invariance. Adding variance to the data helps us to find deeper invariances in reality. But sometimes, we can “overfit” to spurious patterns in the world that aren’t true. For example, consider the diagram above. Ideally, we’d like to find a fit like the “balanced” pattern in the middle. But if we’re not careful, we can self-deceive and overfit to noise in the data.
What if this process of generating invariances finds not just one error, but a whole system of errors? By fixing those errors, we’d have the ability to enact a profound developmental change within ourselves. This is similar to how children learn to “grow up”, by realizing that objects they can’t see are still there. It opens up a whole new world for them. Perhaps this “growing up” is what enlightenment is, but on the broadest possible scale of our being.
Metastability
At some point, we went from being a zygote to becoming a more complex organism. Our cells were differentiated into different organs in the body. But somehow, our body was able to integrate these different organs together to form the whole. We’re complex because we’re both highly integrated and differentiated. This complexification affords us new abilities. Because we’re highly differentiated, we can do things now that we couldn’t as a zygote. But because we’re highly integrated, we don’t fall apart as a system when we do so.
At any given moment in time, each part of the brain is either integrating new things or differentiating them. But there’s some evidence that psilocybin seems to change this dynamic. When provided with a sufficient dose, the brain is able to enter a state called metastability. It’s when both integration and differentiation are happening simultaneously across many different regions of the brain. It’s a massively complexifying operation. Parts of the brain that previously hadn’t talked to each other start talking to each other. It’s likely that other pathways into these higher states (e.g. meditation), also trigger such metastability.
The way we grow and self-transcend is by complexifying. That is, differentiating into new domains, but remaining integrated as an organism. When we enter these higher states, this complexification is happening at the level of our cognition. It affords us new ways of making sense of the world.
Our self as the “glue” for the world
There’s research showing that our conceptualization of the “self” functions as a sort of glue. By making things relevant to ourselves, we can then make them relevant to each other. This allows us to “glue” them to each other. The self is a powerful set of functions for differentiating and integrating information together.
This powerful machinery for complexifying ourselves can be exapted. What if we took this capacity to glue things together and exapted it to the world? That would take machinery that was previously self-focused into something that could reveal a deeper complexity in the world. Perhaps this is what’s happening within these higher states of consciousness. Perhaps this is why the world seems to come “alive” to us. That we’re left feeling that we’ve seen so deeply into it.
Putting it all together
Our goal was to provide a descriptive account of these higher states of consciousness. That is, to explore how they might be working at various levels of our mind. And to explain why people find these states so compelling.
We’ve gotten some intimations of what might be going on. It’s possible that the same machinery that induces flow is being exapted to induce these higher states. And that the expertise that’s being flowed on is our ability to optimally grip the world. A central aspect of flow is to be in a feedback loop where old frames are constantly broken, and we’re constantly re-orienting to the world. This seems to explain why disruptive strategies are a crucial part of participating in a higher state of consciousness. During flow, we’re constantly breaking and making frames, simultaneously integrating and differentiating information. Perhaps this is also something that’s happening in these higher states.
Perhaps all this is happening at enhanced fluency, making the whole experience feel more real than normal reality. It causes the world to feel deeply imbued with a sense of meaning and wonder, precisely because it’s increasing our connectedness to the world.
Prescriptive account
We’ve spent some time describing how these states come about, and how they likely work. But why should we believe that these states contain wisdom? Why should we believe that we’re not engaging in self-deception by paying attention to what we learn within them?
Plausibility
If we want to evaluate the prescriptions that arise from these states, we need to first unpack the notion of “plausibility”. This word can often mean one of two things:
Highly probable.
Makes good sense. Stands to reason. Should be taken seriously.
We’re going to use the latter definition for our discussion here. Most of the time, we don’t base our actions on certainty. They’re based on plausibility.
We take a given model or claim about the world as being “trustworthy” if it can be reproduced by many independent and converging lines of evidence. For example, if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
We often also want claims that can be generalized to many new domains. We normally call such models “elegant”. That is, the model has unlocked some deep invariance within reality that can be exploited in lots of different situations.
We need to balance the convergence of a model with its elegance.
If we have a lot of convergence without any elegance, we get triviality. For example, “there are ducks in Australia” is trivial because I can easily check whether there are ducks in Australia. But it doesn’t really tell me anything deep or sweeping about the world.
If we have very little convergence with lots of elegance, we get far-fetched claims. A lot of conspiracy theories fit this pattern. They can explain everything about the world, if we’d just be willing to concede that the British royal family are actually space lizards.
A claim is plausible, if it balances convergence and elegance. And if its information can be processed fluently.
Note that plausibility isn’t the same as certainty. In fact, there’s virtually nothing that we can be certain about. Not even science offers us certainty. Science is valuable because it offers us a procedure for self-correcting plausibility.
For example, suppose that we’re scientists and we consider the following questions:
Will clipping my toenails slow down climate change?
Will feeding the pigeons in California influence the Australian elections?
Will painting a canvas green cause it to rain?
Why don’t we feel animated about rigorously testing these questions? It’s because they’re absurd and don’t make any sense. The set of testable questions is infinitely large. But very few are plausible.
Science is about performing inference with the best explanation. If we have some phenomena, we can write down some explanations for it. We can decide what’s “real” by finding the best explanation from this set. However, we’d have to test all possible explanations to make ourselves deductively certain. But there’s an infinite amount of explanations. So we can never be truly certain.
Science is progressed by correcting our self-deception with plausible statements. Plausibility is indispensable not just to science, but our very being in this reality. That’s why our brain attempts to optimize itself around it. In some sense, optimizing for plausibility is the best we’ve got.
Higher states of consciousness optimize the processing that affords us an optimal grip on the world. As we get an increasingly better grip on the world, we find ourselves converging different sources of information to produce elegant explanations for the world. That is, we find ourselves optimizing to find states that are highly plausible. All this is happening at a deep and unconscious level. Specifically, at the level of our consciousness and the construction of our salience landscape. These higher states are “optimal”, in the sense that they’re disrupting this unconscious machinery to find a procedure for optimal gripping that’s most plausible to us. In some sense, optimizing for plausibility is the best thing that we can do.
If these states are set within an appropriate family of practices, within an appropriate wisdom tradition, they can be extraordinarily good guides. They might also be extraordinarily poor guides if improperly entered. That is, without an appropriate framework to shepherd these changes of consciousness. For example, I think it’s a terrible idea to engage with psychedelics outside of an appropriate spiritual framework. And outside the appropriate intention.
Closing thoughts
It seems that these higher states are powerful guides on personal transformation and the cultivation of wisdom. But people often come back from these states with bizarre claims. For example, people on DMT often commune with machine elves. People seem to often produce contradictory propositions. For example, some people come back and joyously pronounce that there is no god. Others will pronounce that there is a god. The propositions generated from these states seem to be largely useless.
These states are not about propositional transformation. They’re about participatory transformation. These states don’t seem to endow some secret metaphysical knowledge of reality. Wisdom is the capacity to quickly and effortlessly zero in on the relevant information, within the environment that we’re participating in. These practices optimize the unconscious machinery that cultives wisdom. We need to find a way to take the wisdom from these states, and combine it with a rational discourse that’s independently established via our best science and philosophy. If we manage to put the two together, we’ll have properly salvaged what these higher states have to offer us. Or rather, we’ll have properly salvaged what the axial revolution has to offer us. As John points out, we shouldn’t confuse the rationality of wisdom with the rationality of knowledge.
Imagine if we somehow found a path of enhanced meaning in life coupled with an enhanced sense of understanding. Suppose that following this path provided tangible improvements to our lives. That would give us tremendous confidence that we’ve found a path to self-transcendence and wisdom.