Consciousness, ordinary nature

This is an illustration of a particular situation and reaction being processed through the system within our ordinary state of consciousness, but it does not illustrate the overall nature of that ordinary state or show the limits of the variability of functioning within particular subsystems that the pattern of our ordinary state imposes. 

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... 

The fact that conditioned inhibitions may keep a person from acting in a socially inappropriate way should remind us that this process is not an exaggeration that has no application to you and me. Some of our own processes may be just as distorted and intense. Although processes have been intensified to a paranoid, psychotic level in this illustration to make points clearer, my own studies of psychological data, plus my own observation of myself, have convinced me that this is the basic nature of much of our ordinary consciousness. 

Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting. Set denotes the preparation of the individual, including his personality structure and his mood at the time. Setting is physical - the weather, the room s atmosphere social -feelings of persons present towards one another and cultural - prevailing views as to what is real. It is for this reason that manuals or guide-books are necessary. Their purpose is to enable a person to understand the new realities of the expanded consciousness, to serve as road maps for new interior territories which modem science has made accessible. 

To keep the acquired, semi-arbitrary, conditioned nature of our ordinary consciousness before us in the rest of our discussions, I shall no longer use the phrase ordinary consciousness, with its connotations of naturalness and normality. I shall substitute a technical term I introduced some years ago, consensus consciousness, as a reminder of how much our everyday consciousness has been shaped by the consensus of belief in our particular culture. ... 

In analyzing the nature of altered states of consciousness some years ago, including ordinary functioning in our ordinary state, I designated one of the components or subsystems of consciousness as the Sense of Identity subsystem. 

The ordinary, level-two knowledge we have about objective consciousness comes from the little we know about altered states of consciousness and the unusual moments we vaguely call mystical experiences that can occur in them. People have insights into their own nature and into the universe that are experienced as the most important things in the world, understandings that can totally alter the directions of their lives. But to describe them to others, and even to themselves once they are back in ordinary consensus consciousness, they must use ordinary thoughts and languages. All life is one, for example, or God is love, or All reality is both void and full. ... 

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. 

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