So when you're considering non-ordinary or
altered states one of the first questions
is what do they feel like?
What's actually going on in those places and
spaces?
And one of the challenges in coming up with
a good and consistent answer, not just for
a specific state like meditation or a flow
state or a psychedelic the state, is what
qualities do they all share?
Because each of those communities of practice
over decades, centuries and even the millennia
have accumulated their own storytelling or
content about what the state they access are,
what they mean and where you're supposed to
go through them.
So for instance, if you were a Buddhist meditator
you will be instructed in all sorts of stages
and levels and progressions of non-ordinary
states of consciousness ranging from waking
state all the way to white light void to Buddha
consciousness, et cetera.
I if I am a peasant farmer in India and I
have a non-ordinary state experience I might
experience Ganesh, the elephant God in a rice
patty.
If I'm a peasant in Mexico I might experience
the version of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
If I'm coder in Silicon Valley I might experience
the matrix and code mode, this is ones and
zeros streaming all night as I bang away on
my keyboard.
And the reality is is that underneath those
experiences are far more alike than the wrapping
paper, the narrator wrapping paper of what
people see based on culture, custom and biography.
And what we attempted to do was create a functional
framework that lets us talk about these things
as apples to apples and really see the similarities.
And what we realize is that because of the
neurobiology there are four qualities that
tend to arise pretty consistently regardless
of which door you go through to get into these
non ordinary states.
And they are selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness
and richness or STER for short.
And selfishness tends to happen because the
areas of our brain, specifically the prefrontal
cortex but including additional networks that
connect, often turn off or completely light
up.
Either way they knock out our everyday waking
sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness.
So we end up momentarily lost our inner voice,
lost our inner critic, lost our Jiminy Cricket
and we are in a state of not thinking about
our thinking.
Timelessness happens for a similar reason.
As basically different parts of our brain
light up and turn off our ability to calculate
time gets knocked out because it is a comprehensive
measurement, it doesn't just occur in one
single location in the brain.
So when we start knocking out parts of the
networks we lose our chronometer.
And all of the neurochemistry, brain focusing,
attention, learning, dries our attention we
drop out of daydreaming about the past or
the future and we get absolutely sucked into
the immediate present moment so a feeling
of timelessness comes with it.
The effortlessness is just it's no longer
about what I'm trying to do, it's not about
exerting a grit or willpower, which a lot
of people have been talking about and writing
about these days and it's literally almost
in the biblical sense it's sort of not my
will but thy will.
I feel myself swept along and it can be I'm
jus self-propelled and it feels awesome or
it's terrifying but I don't have a choice.
But either way it's not me plotting one foot
in front of the other to get to a goal I've
decided.
So that's the effortlessness.
And then the final bid is the richness.
And that's arguably the whole shooting match
because when I knock out my self-consciousness
I don't have a voice inside my head second-guessing,
filtering.
When I'm not in the past or the future I'm
just in the deep present, when I am effortlessly
being propelled the next thing that consistently
seems to happen is we have access to far more
information than we do in our regular waking
state.
And that is when we go from conscious processing,
which is very limited and narrow, to unconscious
processing, which is faster and vaster.
And Dr. David Eagleman, who is at Stanford
who's a friend and a colleague and a board
member of ours at the Flow Genome Project,
constantly makes that case that really it's
as if our conscious mind is sort of like the
headlines of tomorrow's newspaper reporting
on the reality of today.
And when we get into non-ordinary states because
of all the shifts in brain function and hormones
and neural electricity we have access to more
of that information in real time and the results
often feel supernatural.
People in the past historically have assigned
this to the gods, to their muses, to fate,
to possession, to angels, you name it we pretty
much exhaust the gamut of all the ways we
could say this is just too much, this is too
cool, it's too inspired, it's to inform to
possibly be me.
So we've assigned it super natural origins,
but in reality we now know it might just be
super hyphen natural.
It's just us in an optimated state.
It's big data for our minds.
