Uncertainty as an Altered State
Altered states of consciousness pt. 1: some theory and personal experience. From the subjective to the collective, the unknown as an inescapable predicament and a necessary blessing.
Welcome back to the second fragment of my PhD research and practice diary, a communicable extension of my weird handwritten journals.
Illusion of certainty: about the process
Something I used to strive for with my moving-image works was to express everything in one piece. Everything I have ever found important, that ever affected and changed me in any significant way, all techniques I have ever learned, all references had to be crammed into this one work. I attempt to make sense of everything I ever read, watch, listen to, by finding links to my own experiences, and by connecting everything to each other, as if hoping to find some ancient pattern of knowledge hidden under the keywords. It does not happen as a result of an assumption or an intention - it has taken me a while to extract the nature of these mechanisms from my unconscious. This is how I build significance, how I search for meaning. And yet, while I build these bridges of certainty, my intuition is leading me towards the unchartered territories - towards the freedom of not knowing.
In filmmaking practice, I experienced an important shift in approach when I started working on my project Fragments of Experience. I allowed myself to create works that, instead of becoming a final piece and a sign of closure of a certain chapter, constituted my research material in practical form. Turning fragments of my diary into a film shot and edited within an hour, using hundreds of photographs of different locations to produce one moving-image piece, or deciding to show an unexpected, spontaneously filmed work in an exhibition instead of attempting to finish the main larger piece, were all decisions that began to free me from the constraint of the perfectionistic pressures. I allowed fragments to exist as fragments.
These restrictions of time or content imposed on my work, as well as the challenging of assumptions of what is correct or should be shown and made, led to a realisation: I need frameworks to unleash working with chaos. A harmony between them is the edge on which I am clumsily manoeuvring.
Following Terence McKenna who believed in the Mahayana Buddhism’s insistence that there is no centre and that everything is a concept of time and space as the “most sophisticated psychology”(1991), I am attempting to give up the finality of thinking and let go of the illusion of certainty also in writing, I am making this, too, a fragment.
In preparations to define, describe, and place Psychedelic Practice in contexts for my first essay in which I will start communicating the guiding ideas for my PhD, I began with a look into altered states of consciousness, in empirical and theoretical aspects.
In the next post to follow soon I would like to talk about the relationship of this topic to film, allowing a look into the artistic practice references, and possible related methodologies.
Altered states of consciousness - a door to the transpersonal
I have always been interested in altered states of consciousness, (i.e. states different to “ordinary” experience) because I often experience them spontaneously myself. The research into theory of ASC (Altered States of Consciousness, not to be confused with recently often applied Autism Spectrum Condition, into which parts of my research also extend) led through the initial definitions by Charles Tart (1972), expanded by views of transpersonal psychology (Daniels, 2005; Tart, 1975), the neurophenomenology branch of science (Thompson, Varela), Michael Winkelman’s (2011) helpful paradigm of integrative mode of consciousness, and what can be called the psychedelic community, including self-testing scientists working with psychoactive substances (H. Osmond, T. Leary, A. Shulgin), and writers, scholars, and philosophers such as Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna, and Alan Watts. Critical evaluations, connections to ancient philosophies and to neuroscience allowed me to place my own experiences in the warmth of awareness that these topics are important, valid, and interesting to serious thinkers and writers. It also had given me tools to evaluate and probe the meaning of the indescribable subjective experiences in general.
That extends beyond
It is aways helpful to define that by “ordinary” state of mind I mean one compatible with everyday functioning that requires analytical thinking, practical language processing, and pragmatic, typical cognition. This “baseline” state ( as Leary used to refer to it) can certainly differ from individual to individual, especially with the consideration of neurodivergence. Some of the most commonly discussed altered states (or methods of inducing them) are: out-of-body experience, shamanic journey, meditation, hypnosis, mystical experience, near-death experience, trance, dream (as well as hypnagogic and hypnopompic states), and substance-induced psychedelic states, but whatever the name, it is valid to say that one is aware of experiencing or having experienced an altered state, especially when it was of transcending or transpersonal nature.
The transpersonal is defined by Walsh and Vaughan (1993) in Daniels (2005) as an experience in which “a sense of identity or self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos”. It differs from merely transportive experiences, which offer a temporary break from the ordinary state of mind. The difference seems to be not only the length of the effect of such experience, but, importantly, a sense of connection, or unity.
I think the term more-than-human (used in e.g. Sheldrake, 2018) is fitting to describe what can be encountered beyond the self, because it can be understood as the surrounding biological world, the inanimate world on Earth and the Universe, as well as any chosen interpretation of spiritual dimension - be it the Goddess, God, gods, spirits, or any entities one might believe to exist, including the consciousness of the Universe itself. At the same time transcending (surpassing) the self means openness to communication, or feeling of unity with the greater extent of human experience, beyond the Jungian ego and persona - the conscious parts of self that we use to interact with the external world.
I find it an infinitely inspiring concept that through reaching within, one could not only explore one’s own Unconscious, including archetypes of the Shadow, the Soul Image (anima/animus), and the Mana Personality, but to also reconnect with the collective unconscious, a plane of experience common for all human beings throughout all time (Jung). A similar idea is that of the biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, which suggests existence of an inherent memory in nature, which all organisms contribute to and can draw upon (2018). In the context of psychedelic experiences, a state in which one is aware of this universal connection is sometimes called cosmic consciousness.
The mystery is natural
I have always been earnestly striving for facts. For knowledge that has been described and peer reviewed, tested, confirmed. The insecurity-propped need to be taken seriously tends to suppress my intuitive drive towards the mysterious. In truth, I have never thought the mysterious to be something unnatural, or contrary to rational thought. Science itself encounters it at every step, even Albert Einstein regarded the sense of mystery as a guiding principle of human life (in Gandy, 2022).
I would agree that the inherent curiosity towards the unknown is a driving factor for learning and development. For Jung, self-actualisation was a never-ending process of incorporating the unconscious into the conscious realm, and for philosopher and cognitive scientist Evan Thompson, inspired by the Buddhist tradition, self is an experiential, unceasingly changing process, enacted by awareness (2015). Whether through connecting to one’s own unconscious or to the source of all consciousness (Sheldrake) I understand the drive towards the unknown as an exploratory process that gives life purpose. Not knowing is a joy, because it presents endless possibilities and offers a space to hold up hope, belief, and faith. Cognitive science argues that our brains rely on predictions, however for some of us, I feel, there is more wrong guesses than right ones. At times, embracing the awareness that I have not the slightest clue what’s coming next can become an altered state in itself.
Spontaneous absorption as an ASC
The spontaneous states of intense sensory absorption, immersion in surroundings sounds of nature and the city turning into rhythms and melodies, colours, shapes and forms changing, separating into mosaic-like fragments and re-assembling in front of my eyes, propelled by patterns of movement of the air, balancing on the crossroads of the recognisable and the unknown, into which associations can carry every impression. In this way I experienced the magic in nature, not as an inaccessible occult, but as a direct sensory experience of the surrounding world. I seem to be oscillating between immersion and the need for isolation from this external world. In some circumstances the buzz of sensory information and the unceasing changing of infinite details become unbearably exhausting. It is likely that need for insolation from the overwhelming environment that produced the experiences of daydreaming, in which I could, since early childhood, spend a long time away from interaction with my surroundings, absorbed in inner images, imaginations and ideations. Other times I would become immersed in a book or activity to a point in which even the voices from my immediate surroundings evaded my attention.
In a search for ways of assimilating and communicating these experiences I encountered the threads of Buddhist and Taoist philosophies, and descriptions of psychedelic experiences in the context of psychedelic substances. As a teenager I learned about autohypnosis and meditation and became able to put myself in states of deep relaxation which not only eliminated the frustrating sensory distractions of the surroundings, but allowed me to drift in spaces filled either with magnificently peaceful, glittering void, or with vivid imagery produced by autosuggested imaginations, sometimes ripe with spontaneously occurring symbols and insights, akin to Jung’s idea of active imagination, which I think can serve as an excellent method for creative practice. I have always been deeply interested in dreams and hypnagogic states, which have been described to share common features with psychedelic states, such as clarity of consciousness, enhanced capacity for mental imagery and visualisation and “more fluid, unconstrained, […] and hyper-associative states of consciousness”, which because of these characteristics have the capacity to contribute to both artistic creativity and scientific problem solving (Gandy et al., 2022 for comprehensive review of evidence).
No matter how many words I spill here, searching for meaning and hope, it is the phenomenological aspect of ASC that plays the main role in encountering the mystery. I will write about that in the context of film and filmmaking next week.
It was again McKenna that said in one of his interviews that we seem to spend hours, months, even years, immersed in branches of science, art, literature, poetry, motivated by the need to understand our own experience. Acute realisation of subjectivity can be a lonely concept, but a discovery and understanding of states that, through the inner experience, allow a connection to the whole, the collective, the cosmic, is a motivation that propels through doubt.
Thank you for reading these personal musings, please get in touch with any feedback or suggestions.
Is it too long? Would you like to read more about a specific topic?
Do you have similar thoughts or are fascinated by any of the mentioned phenomena? How do you deal with your altered states?
Any comments appreciated.