“Our regular waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his pioneering work on transcendent experiences, “is however one particular kind of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential types of consciousness completely completely different… No account of the universe in its totality will be last which leaves these different types of consciousness fairly disregarded.”
All of us expertise altered states of consciousness on a regular basis, with out the help of mind-altering substances. When blood sugar plummets with starvation, a completely completely different moodscape takes maintain. Below the month-to-month tempest of hormones, nearly a completely completely different particular person can emerge. Each evening we really feel the perimeters of consciousness as we slip into the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. Daily we interact in varied delusions and willful blindnesses as a way to preserve our self-image, hold our imperfect relationships intact, and guard our deepest hopes from the fearsome fangs of actuality.
Given consciousness renders reality what it is, and given this selfsame consciousness is so prone to misperceiving actuality, it’s hardly a marvel that we so simply slip into illusions that seem completely persuasive and internally coherent — from conspiracy theories to misplaced infatuations to hallucinations. And but evolution will need to have had a cause to make us so susceptible to such deviations from the trail of cause — maybe our misshapen views of actuality serve us, maybe they even save us; maybe Virginia Woolf was proper to write down that “illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things.”
That’s what the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) intimates in a stunning passage from his basic Hallucinations (public library):
People share a lot with different animals — the essential wants of foods and drinks or sleep, for instance — however there are further psychological and emotional wants and wishes that are maybe distinctive to us. To stay on a day-to-day foundation is inadequate for human beings; we have to transcend, transport, escape; we’d like that means, understanding, and clarification; we have to see total patterns in our lives. We’d like hope, the sense of a future. And we’d like freedom (or not less than the phantasm of freedom) to get past ourselves, whether or not with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning expertise or in states of thoughts which permit us to journey to different worlds, to transcend our rapid environment. We’d like detachment of this type as a lot as we’d like engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality simpler to bear. We search a vacation from our internal and outer restrictions, a extra intense sense of the right here and now, the wonder and worth of the world we stay in.
Complement with the psychology of willful blindness, then revisit Oliver Sacks on consciousness, artificial intelligence, and our search for meaning, the healing power of nature, and the building blocks of personhood.
