States of Consciousness
Charles T. Tart
4. The Nature of Ordinary Consciousness
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro'
narrow chinks of his cavern. |
| | William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell |
The prejudice that our ordinary state of consciousness is natural
or given is a major obstacle to understanding the nature of the
mind and states of consciousness. Our perceptions of the world,
others, and ourselves, as well as our reactions to (consciousness
of) them, are semi-arbitrary constructions. Although these constructions
must have a minimal match to physical reality to allow survival,
most of our lives are spent in consensus reality, that
specially tailored and selectively perceived segment of reality
constructed from the spectrum of human potential. We are simultaneously
the beneficiaries and the victims of our culture. Seeing thins
according to consensus reality is good for holding a culture together,
but a major obstacle to personal and scientific understanding
of the mind.
A culture can be seen as a group which has selected certain human
potentials as good and developed them, and rejected others as
bad. Internally this means that certain possible experiences are
encouraged and others suppressed to construct a "normal"
state of consciousness that is effective in and helps define the
culture's particular consensus reality. The process of enculturation
begins in infancy, and by middle childhood the individual has
a basic membership in consensus reality. Possibilities are partially
shaped by the enculturation that has already occurred. By adulthood
the individual enjoys maximum benefits from membership, but he
is now maximally bound within this consensus reality. A person's
"simple" perception of the world and of others is actually
a complex process controlled by many implicit factors.
One of the greatest problems in studying consciousness and altered
states of consciousness is an implicit prejudice that tends to
make us distort all sorts of information about states of consciousness.
When you know you have a prejudice you are not completely caught
by it, for you can question whether the bias is really useful
and possibly try to change it or compensate for it. But when a
prejudice is implicit it controls you without your knowledge and
you have little chance to do anything about it.
The prejudice discussed in this chapter is the belief that our
ordinary state of consciousness is somehow natural. It is a very
deep-seated and implicit prejudice. I hope in this chapter to
convince you intellectually that it is not true. Intellectual
conviction is a limited thing, however, and to know the
relativity and arbitrariness of your ordinary state of consciousness
on a deeper level is a much more difficult task.
Consciousness, not our sense organs, is really our "organ"
of perception, and one way to begin to see the arbitrariness of
our consciousness is to apply the assumption that ordinary consciousness
is somehow natural or given to a perceptual situation. This is
done in Figure 4-1. A man is looking at a cat and believing that
the image of the real cat enters his eye and is, in effect, faithfully
reproduced on a screen in his mind, so that he sees the cat as
it is. This naive view of perception was rejected long ago
by psychologists, who have collected immense amounts of evidence
to show that it is a ridiculously oversimplified, misleading,
and just plain wrong view of perception. Interestingly, these
same psychologists seldom apply their understanding of the complexity
of perception to their own lives, and the person in the street
does so even less.
While there are a great many simple perceptions we can very well
agree on, there are many others, especially the more important
ones in human life, on which there is really little agreement.
I would be that almost all adult, non-institutionalized humans
in our society would agree that this object in your hand is called
a book, but as we define more complex things the bet gets riskier.
If you go to a courtroom trial and listen to the testimony of
several eyewitnesses, all of whom presumably has basically the
same stimuli reaching their receptors, you may hear several different
versions of reality. Or, if you discuss the meaning of current
events with your acquaintances, you will find that there are many
other points of view besides your own. Most of our interest is
directed by complex, multifaceted social reality of this sort.
Most of us deal with this disagreement by simply assuming that
those who disagree with us are wrong, that our own perceptions
and consciousness are the standard of normality and rightness,
and that other people cannot observe or think well and/or are
lying, evil, or mentally ill.
A Sufi teaching story called "Bread and Jewels" {58,
p. 113} illustrates this nicely:
A king once decided to give away a part of his wealth by disinterested
charity. At the same time he wanted to watch what happened to
it. So he called a baker whom he could trust and told him to bake
two loaves of bread. In the first was to be baked a number of
jewels, and in the other, nothing but flour and water.
These were to be given to the most and least pious people whom
the baker could find.
The following morning two men presented themselves at the oven.
One was dressed as a dervish and seemed most pious, though he
was in reality a mere pretender. The other who said nothing at
all, reminded the baker of a man whom he did not like, by a coincidence
of facial resemblance.
The baker gave the bread with jewels in it to the man in the dervish
robe, and the ordinary loaf to the second man.
As soon as he got his loaf the false dervish felt it and weighed
it in his hand. He felt the jewels, and to him they seemed like
lumps in the loaf, unblended flour. He weighed the bread in his
hand and the weight of the jewels made it seem to him to be too
heavy. He looked at the baker, and realized that he was not a
man to trifle with. So he turned to the second man and said: "Why
not exchange your loaf for mine? You look hungry, and his one
is larger."
The second man, prepared to accept whatever befell, willfully
exchanged loaves.
The king, who was watching through a crack in the bakehouse door,
was surprised, but did not realize the relative merits of the
two men.
The false dervish got the ordinary loaf. The king concluded that
Fate had intervened to keep the dervish protected from wealth.
The really good man found the jewels and was able to make good
use of the. The king could not interpret this happening.
"I did what I was told to do," said the baker.
"You cannot tamper with Fate," said the king.
"How clever I was!" said the false dervish.
The king, the baker, and the false dervish all had their own views
of what reality was. None of them was likely ever to correct his
impression of this particular experience.
Consciousness, then, including perception, feeling, thinking,
and acting, is a semi-arbitrary construction. I emphasize semi-arbitrary
because I make the assumption, common to our culture that there
are some fixed rules governing physical reality whose violation
produces inevitable consequences. If someone walks off the edge
of a tall cliff, I believe he will fall to the bottom and probably
be killed, regardless of his beliefs about cliffs, gravity, or
life and death. Thus people in cultures whose belief systems do
not, to a fair degree, match physical reality, are not likely
to survive long enough to argue with us. But once the minimal
degree of coincidence with physical reality necessary to enable
physical survival has been attained, the perception/consciousness
of an action in the complex social reality that then exists may
be very arbitrary indeed.
We must face the fact, now amply documented by the scientific
evidence presented in any elementary psychology textbook, that
perception can be highly selective. Simple images of things out
there are not clearly projected onto a mental screen, where we
simply see them as they are. The act of perceiving is a highly
complex, automated construction. It is a selective category
system, a decision-making system, preprogrammed with criteria
of what is important to perceive. It frequently totally ignores
things it has not been preprogrammed to believe are important.
Figure 4-2 shows a person with a set of categories programmed
in his mind, a selection of implicit criteria to recognize things
that are "important." When stimulated by one of these
things he is preprogrammed to perceive, he readily responds to
it. More precisely, rather than saying he responds to it
which implies a good deal of directness in perception, we might
say that it triggers a representation of itself in his mind, and
he then responds to that representation. As long as it is a good
representation of the actual stimulus object, he has a fairly
accurate perception. Since he tends to pay more attention to the
representations of things he sees than to the things themselves,
however, he may think he perceives a stimulus object clearly when
actually he is perceiving an incorrect representation.
This is where perception begins to be distorted by the perceiver's
training and needs. Eskimos have been trained to distinguish seven
or more kinds of snow. We do not see these different kinds of
snow, even though they exist, for we do not need to make these
distinctions. To us it is all snow. Our one internal representation
of snow is triggered indiscriminately by any kind of actual snow.
Similarly, for the paranoid person who needs to believe that others
are responsible for his troubles, representations of threatening
actions are easily triggered by all sorts of behaviors on the
part of others. A detailed analysis of this is given in Chapter
19.
What happens when we are faced by the unknown, by things we have
not been trained to see? Figure 4-3, using the same kind of analogy
as the previous figure, depicts this. We may not see the stimulus
at all: the information passes right through the mind without
leaving a trace. Or we may see a distorted representation of the
stimulus: some of the few features it has in common with known
stimuli trigger representations of the known features, and that
is what we perceive. We "sophisticated" Westerners do
not believe in angels. If we actually confronted one, we might
not be able to see it correctly. The triangle in its hands is
a familiar figure, however, so we might perceive the triangle
readily. In fact, we might see little but the triangle—maybe
a triangle in the hands of a sweet old lady wearing a white robe.
Don Juan, the Yaqui man of knowledge, puts it quite succinctly:
"I think you are only alert about things you know" {10}.
I mentioned above the curious fact about psychologists, who know
about the complexities of perception, almost never seem to apply
this information to their own perceptions. Even though they study
the often large and obvious distortions in other people's perceptions,
they maintain an image of themselves as realistic perceivers.
Some psychologists even argue that perception is actually quite
realistic. But what does "realistic" mean?
We like to believe that it means perception of the real world,
the physical world. But the world we spend most of our time perceiving
is not just any segment of the physical world, but a highly socialized
part of the physical world that has been built into cities, automobiles,
television sets. So our perception may indeed be realistic, but
it is so only with respect to a very tailored segment of reality,
a consensus reality, a small selection of things we have
agreed are "real" and "important." thus, within
our particular cultural framework, we can easily set up what seem
to be excellent scientific experiments that will show that our
perceptions are indeed realistic, in the sense that we agree with
each other on these selected items from our consensus reality.
This is a way of saying that our perceptions are highly selective
and filtered, that there is a major subsystem of consciousness,
Input-Processing discussed at length later, that filters the outside
world for us. If two people have similar filtering systems, as,
for example, if they are from the same culture, they can agree
on many things. But again, as Don Juan says, "I think you
are only alert about things you know." If we want to develop
a science to study consciousness, and want that science to go
beyond our own cultural limitations, we must begin by recognizing
the limitations and arbitrariness of much of our ordinary state
of consciousness.
I have now mentioned several times that we believe certain things
imply because we were trained to believe them. Let us now look
at the training process by which our current "normal"
or ordinary state of consciousness came about.
Enculturation
Figure 4-4 illustrates the concept of the spectrum of human
potential. By the simple fact of being born human, having
a certain type of body and nervous system, existing in the environmental
conditions of the planet earth, a large (but certainly not infinite)
number of potentials are possible for you. Because you
are born into a particular culture, existing at a particular
time and place on the surface of the planet, however, only a small
(perhaps a very small) number of these potentials will ever be
realized and become actualities. We can think of a culture[1]
as a group of people who, through various historical
processes, have come to an agreement that certain human potentials
they know of are "good," "holy," "natural,"
or whatever local word is used for positively valuing them, and
should be developed. They are defined as the essence of being
human. Other potentials, also known to the culture, are considered
"bad," "evil," "unnatural." The
culture actively inhibits the development of these potentials
in its children, not always successfully. A large number of other
human potentials are simply not known to that particular culture,
and while some of them develop owing to accidental circumstances
in a particular person's life, most do not develop for lack of
stimulation. Some of these potentials remain latent, capable of
being developed if circumstances are right in later life; others
disappear completely through not being developed at an early,
critical stage.
Most of us know how to do arithmetic, speak English, write a check,
drive an automobile, and most of us know about things, like eating
with our hands, which are repellent to us (naturally or through
training?). Not many of us, though, were trained early in childhood
to enter a d-ASC where we can be, for example, possessed by a
friendly spirit that will teach us songs and dances as is done
by some cultures. Nor were most of us trained to gain control
over our dreams and acquire spirit guides in those dreams who
will teach us useful things, as the Senoi of Malaysia are {88
or 115, ch. 9}. Each of us is simultaneously the beneficiary of
his cultural heritage and the victim and slave of his culture's
narrowness. What I believe is worse is that few of us have any
realization of this situation. Like almost all people in all cultures
at all times, we think our local culture is the best and
other peoples are uncivilized or savages.
Figure 4-4 shows two different cultures making different selections
from and inhibitions of the spectrum of human potential. There
is some overlap: all cultures, for example, develop a language
of some sort and so use those particular human potentials. Many
potentials are not selected by any culture.
We can change the labels in Figure 4-4 slightly and depict various
possible experiences selected in either of two states of consciousness.
Then we have the spectrum of experiential potentials, the
possible kinds of experiences or modes of functioning of human
consciousness. The two foci of selection are two states of consciousness.
These may be two "normal" states of consciousness in
two different cultures or, as discussed later, two states of consciousness
that exist within a single individual. The fact that certain human
potentials can be tapped in state of consciousness A that cannot
be tapped in state of consciousness B is a major factor behind
the current interest in altered states of consciousness.
Figure 4-4, then, indicates that in developing a "normal"
state of consciousness, a particular culture selects certain human
potentials and structures them into a functioning system. This
is the process of enculturation. It begins in infancy,
possibly even before birth: there has been speculation, for example,
that the particular language sounds that penetrate the walls of
the womb from outside before birth may begin shaping the potentials
for sound production in the unborn baby.
Figure 4-5 summarizes the main stages of the enculturation process.
The left-hand column represents the degree to which physical reality
shapes the person and the degree to which the person can affect
(via ordinary muscular means) physical reality. The right-hand
column indicates the main sources of programming, the psychological
influences on the person. The main stages are infancy, childhood,
adolescence, adulthood, and senescence.
Infancy
We tend to think of a newborn infant as a rather passive creature,
capable of little mental activity, whose primary job is simple
physical growth. Recent research, on the contrary, suggests that
a person's innate learning capacity may be highest of all in infancy,
for the infant has to learn to construct the consensus reality
of his culture. This is an enormous job. The cultural environment,
for instance, begins to affect the perceptual biases described
in Chapter 8 as the Input-Processing subsystem. Most Westerners,
for example, are better at making fine discriminations between
horizontal lines and vertical lines than between lines that are
slanted. At first this was thought to result from the innate hardware
properties (racial, genetic) of the eye and nervous system, but
recent evidence shows that it is probably a cultural effect. Cree
Indians, who as infants live in teepees where there are many slanted
lines, can discriminate slanted lines as acutely as horizontal
and vertical ones{2}. "Civilized" Westerners, on the
other hand, grow up in environments where vertical and horizontal
lines predominate. In more ways than we can even begin to think
of, the enculturation process affects perception, and ultimately
consciousness, even in infancy.
Note also that the structuring/programming of our consciousness
that takes place in early infancy is probably the most persistent
and most implicit of all our programming and learning, for at
that time we have no other framework to compare it with. It is
the only thing we have, and it is closely connected with our physical
survival and our being loved and accepted. It gives us a loyalty
and a bond to our culture's particular world-view that may be
almost impossible for us to break, but again, one whose limitations
we must be aware of if we are really to understand the workings
of our minds. Another Sufi teaching story, "The Bird and
the Egg" {58, p. 130}, illustrates the power of this early
programming:
Once upon a time there was bird which did not have the power of
flight. Like a chicken, he walked about on the ground, although
he knew that some birds did fly.
It so happened that, through a combination of circumstances, the
egg of a flying bird was incubated by this flightless one.
In due time the chick came forth, still with the potentiality
for flight which he had always had, even from the time he was
in the egg.
It spoke to its foster-parent, saying: "When will I fly?"
And the landbound bird said: "Persist in your attempts to
fly, just like the others."
For he did not know how to take the fledgling for its lesson in
flying: even how to topple it from the nest so that it might learn.
And it is curious, in a way, that the young bird did not see this.
His recognition of the situation was confused by the fact that
he felt gratitude to the bird who had hatched him.
"Without this service," he said to himself, "surely
I would still be in the egg?"
And, again, sometimes he said to himself: "Anyone who can
hatch me, surely he can teach me to fly. It must be just a matter
of time, or of my own unaided efforts, or of some great wisdom:
yes, that is it. Suddenly one day I will be carried to the next
stage by him who has brought me thus far."
Childhood
By the time an ordinary person reaches childhood, he has attained
a basic membership in the consensus reality of his culture. A
normal child has a pretty good idea of the dos and don'ts of his
culture and behaves in a generally acceptable fashion. Many of
the potentials present at the time of his birth are gone by now,
but consensus reality has been formed from the few that have been
cultivated.
One of the main ways in which consciousness is shaped to fit consensus
reality is through the medium of language. The word for an object
focuses a child's perception onto a specific thing considered
important by the culture. Social approval for this kind of behavior
gives words great power. As a child gradually grows in his mastery
of language, the language structure and its effect on consciousness
grow at an exponential rate. The tyranny of words is one of the
most difficult things from which we must try to free ourselves.
A child's basic membership in consensus reality is not complete.
The mind of the child can still do many strange (by adult standards)
things. As Pearce {49, p. 56} comments:
The child's mind is autistic, a rich texture of free synthesis,
halluncinatory and unlimited. His mind can skip over syllogisms
with ease, in a non-logical, dream-sequence kind of "knight's
move" continuum. He nevertheless shows a strong desire to
participate in a world of others. Eventually his willingness for
self-modification, necessary to win rapport with his world, is
stronger than his desire for autonomy. Were it not, civilization
would not be possible. That we succeed in moulding him to respond
to our criteria shows the innate drive for communion and the flexibility
of a young mind. It doesn't prove an essential and sanctified
rightness of our own constructs.
Maturity, or becoming reality adjusted, restricts and diminishes
that "knight's move" thinking, and tends to make pawns
of us in the process. The kind of adult logic that results is
dependent on the kinds of demands made on the young mind by parents
and society.
It is precisely this kind of childish strangeness that both frustrates
us adults when we try to deal with children and excites our envy
when we realize children have a certain freedom we do not have.
Adolescence
Adolescence is a different stage from childhood, not just a continuation
of it, because the influx of sexual energies at puberty allows
considerable change in the ordinary consciousness of the child.
for most adolescents this is a time of turmoil (at least in our
culture) as they strive to adjust to bodily changes and to learn
to satisfy their sexual needs within the mores of the culture.
For many there is a continuity with childhood, and after a transitional
period of being difficult, the adolescent settles into a pattern
of being a grown-up version of the child he was. For others a
conversion of some sort occurs: the sexual and other energies
unleashed at puberty become sublimated into a belief system that
may be radically different from what they had as children. If
this is traumatic or sudden, or if the belief system is radically
at odds with that of the parents, we notice this conversion. If
the sublimation of the energies is into a socially accepted pattern,
we are not as likely to perceive it.
Conversion is a powerful psychological process that we do not
understand well. It bears some similarity to the concept of a
discrete state of consciousness (introduced later) but more basically
refers to a psychological process of focusing, of giving great
energy to selected structures, that may take place in any state
of consciousness.
I do not believe that the conversion process is completely free
to go wherever it will. By the time a person has reached adolescence
(or later, if conversion takes place later), many human potentials
he possessed at birth are, for lack of stimulation, simply no
longer available. Of the latent potentials that still could be
used, cultural selection and structuring have already made some
more likely than others t o be utilized in a conversion. Thus
even the rebels in a society are in many ways not free: the direction
that rebellion takes has already been strongly shaped by enculturation
processes.
The adolescent is very much a member of the consensus reality
of his culture: his ordinary state of consciousness is well adapted
to fit into, and he has a fair degree of control over his physical
environment. For most "ordinary" adolescents, there
are far fewer possibilities for unusual functions of consciousness
than there were in childhood.
Adulthood
Adults are full-fledged members of the consensus reality: they
both maintain it through their interaction with their peers and
are shaped by it and by parts of it. Adults are, as Don Juan taught,
always talking to themselves about their ordinary things, keeping
up a constant pattern of information flow in their minds along
familiar routes. This strengthens and maintains their membership
in the consensus reality and their use of their ordinary state
of consciousness as a means for dealing with consensus reality.
Because of the power over physical reality given them by their
consensus reality state of consciousness, adults are the most
free; yet, because they are the most thoroughly indoctrinated
in consensus reality, they are the most bound. They receive many
rewards for participating in the consensus reality in an acceptable
way, and they have an enormous number of external and internalized
prohibitions that keep them from thinking and experiencing in
ways not approved by the consensus reality. The Sufi teaching
story, "Bayazid and the Selfish Man" {58 p. 180}, shows
how difficult it is for an adult to free himself from the power
of ordinary consciousness and consensus reality, even when he
believes he wants to:
One day a man reproached Bayazid, the great mystic of the ninth
century, saying that he had fasted and prayed and so on for thirty
years and not found the joy which Bayazid described. Bayazid told
him that he might continue for three hundred years and still not
find it.
"How is that?" asked the would-be illuminate.
"Because your vanity is a barrier to you."
"Tell me the remedy."
"The remedy is one which you cannot take."
"Tell me, nevertheless."
Bayazid said: "You must go to the barber and have your (respectable)
beard shaved. Remove all your clothes and put a girdle around
yourself. Fill a nosebag with walnuts and suspend it from your
neck. Go to the marketplace and call out: 'A walnut will I give
to any boy who will strike me on the back of neck.' Then continue
to the justices' session so that they may see you."
"But I cannot do that; please tell me something else that
would do as well."
"This is the first move, and the only one," said Bayazid,
but I had already told you that you would not do it; so you cannot
be cured."
I stress the view that we are prisoners of our ordinary state
of consciousness, victims of our consensus reality, because it
is necessary to become aware of this if we are to have any hope
of transcending it, of developing a science of the mind that is
not culturally limited. Enormous benefits result from sharing
in our consensus reality, but these benefits must not blind us
to the limits of this reality.
Senescence
The final stage in a person's life comes when he is too old to
participate actively in the affairs of his culture. His mid may
be so rigid by this time that it can do little but rerun the programs
of consensus reality while his abilities diminish. If he is aware
of other possibilities, he may find old age a way of freeing himself
from cultural pressures and begin to explore his mind in a new
way. There are cultural traditions, in India, for example, where
a person who has fulfilled his main tasks in life is expected
to devote his remaining years to exploring his own mind and searching
out spiritual values. This is difficult to think about in the
context of our own culture, however, for we have so overvalued
youth and the active mode of life that we define older people
as useless, a defining action that often affects those older people
so that they believe it.
The Complexity of Consciousness
This chapter opened with a drawing showing the naiveté
of the view that perception and consciousness are means of grasping
physical reality. It ends with a drawing (Figure 4-6) that shows a truer and more complex view of perception (and, to some extent,
of the consciousness behind it). In the center of the drawing
are depicted various stimuli from others and from the physical
world impinging on the individual. These stimuli produce effects
that can be classified as mental, emotional, and bodily. The innermost
reaction circle represents clearly conscious experiences. At this
moment, as I write, I hear a pneumatic drill being used to break
up the pavement outside my window. I mentally speculate about
the air pressure used to operate such an interesting tool but
note that it is distracting me; I emotionally dislike the disturbance
of my writing; the muscles of my face and ears tighten a little,
as if that will reduce the impact of the noxious sound on me.
While the three-part classification of effects provides a simplification,
in reality the mental, emotional, and bodily responses to stimuli
interact at both conscious and less than conscious levels. My
mind notices the tension around my ear and interprets that as
something wrong, which, as a minor emotional threat, aggravates
the noxiousness of the sound, etc.
Immediately behind fully conscious experiences are easily experienceable
phenomena, represented by the second circle. The mental effect
of these phenomena relates to the individual's explicit belief
system: I believe that noise is undesirable, but I am fascinated
by the workings of machines. Their emotional effect relates to
the things he readily knows he likes or dislikes: loud noises
generally bother me and make me feel intruded upon. Their bodily
effect relates to consciously usable skills and movements: I can
relax my facial muscles. These phenomena affect the individual
at a level that is not in the focus of consciousness, but that
can be easily made conscious by paying attention.
These two levels are themselves affected and determined by a more
implicit level of functioning, implicit in that the individual
cannot identify its content simply by wanting to and paying attention.
Where did I get the idea that noise is an intrusion? Why am I
fascinated by the workings of machines? I do not know. I might
be able to find out by prolonged psychological exploration, but
the information is not easily available, even though these things
affect me. Why do I have an immediate emotional dislike of noise?
Is there some unconscious reaction behind it? How have I come
to maintain certain muscle sets in my face that are affected by
stress in certain ways?
The outer circle in Figure 4-6 represents basic learnings, conditionings,
motor patterns, instincts, reflexes, language categories, and
the like, which are so implicit the individual can hardly/ recognize
their existence. This is the level of the hardware, the biological
givens, and the basic enculturation processes. The distance of
these things from consciousness makes it extremely difficult for
him to discover and compensate for their controlling influences:
they are, in many ways, the basis of himself.
If the stimulus in the middle of Figure 4-6 is a cat, this whole
complex machine functions, a machine designed by our culture.
We don't "just" see the cat! Our ordinary state of consciousness
is a very complex construction indeed, yet Figure 4-6 hardly goes
into details at all. So much for the naturalness of our ordinary
state of consciousness.
Footnote
[1] For simplicity here, we will ignore subcultures
and conflicts within a culture. (back)