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. 

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 experi- 

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. 

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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... 

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. 

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. 

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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