Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 11–12: Higher States of Consciousness
Why is it that people experience higher states of consciousness as more real than their everyday lives? How can we explain these phenomena, and their transformative power, in psychological, information-theoretic, and neurological terms?
There are numerous descriptive accounts of the higher state of consciousness (HSC), which often involve the experience of seamless unity between world and self, i.e. seeing the world in a grain of sand. Characteristics of the experience include intense clarity of vision, simultaneous breadth and depth, sense of profound peace and connection, joy (defined as positive emotion from deep connection to the good), increased vitality and insight, and losing the sense of autobiographical self (remembering the “true self”).
While HSCs are often ineffable (often leading to conflicting metaphysical claims about God, for example), they are almost universally described as positive and transformative. HSC can be thought of as a comprehensive state of flow that encompasses the totality of one’s self and world. HSCs facilitate a continuous optimal grip on the world, optimizing both gestalt and features, enabling profound insights.
There are a few general principles to highlight with regard to HSCs.
Continuity and Disruption
A look into the brain scans of people who have had enlightenment experiences shows a pattern of hyperactivity followed by hypoactivity in the frontal and parietal lobes, areas which constitute one’s sense of self. The implication here is that the HSC follows a pattern of intense activation of an existing cognitive frame followed by a sudden disruption, thereby breaking up that frame and allowing for reintegration.
HSCs are usually triggered by cognitively disruptive strategies, including fasting, religious rituals, and psychedelics. Studies of mind wandering show that it is a type of mild disruptive strategy which adds variation to problem solving, leading to unexpected insights.
Finding invariances
The world is filled with variation and noise. The search for truth is based on looking at things from multiple perspectives to discover the underlying patterns of invariance. The same process can be used to find patterns across errors that are due to bad framing, allowing one to get to the root or nexus of one’s errors.
There is an analogy with machine learning here, as the training process relies on introducing noise into the data to prevent overfitting. Getting a model to work in the real world is an artful balance between overfitting and underfitting the training sample.
Increased plausibility
Plausibility basically means that something makes sense, and the act of making sense is tightly connected with the sense of meaning. Something that is plausible should demonstrate both trustworthiness (convergence between sources of evidence) and elegance (multi-aptitude or the ability to explain many things). Plausibility also rests on fluency, or the degree to which it is understood and able to be applied to the world (fluency is increased in the HSC).
Science is essentially self-correcting plausibility. There is no certainty in science, as we are simply using inference to the best explanation.
Decentering and participatory knowing
The Solomon Effect describes the wisdom that one often gains when exploring problems, particularly interpersonal ones, from a third person perspective. HSCs are known for causing a shift in perspective from an egocentric to an allocentric one, freeing one from the supersalience of their ego.
It is generally a good idea to explore HSCs in the presence of a community to facilitate decentering, in particular the use of psychedelics should best be done within the context of a wisdom tradition. Psilocybin in particular is described as increasing metastability, or improved functionality through complexification, which is diversification and integration together.
In the HSC, the self and world become involved in a kind of mutual participatory relationship analogous to love. According to one theory, the self is basically cognitive machinery that serves to glue together things that are relevant (by the transitive property). HSCs allow that machinery of self-complexification to be turned onto the world, exapting it to make the world “come alive”.
