My latest at 3 Quarks Daily: Stations of the mind: Om to Eureka and beyond.
Back in the 1960s, I suppose, someone coined the term “altered states of consciousness” (ASC) to designate what happens when one takes drugs such as marijuana, LSD, and so forth, but also during meditation and the like. These were under fairly intense investigation in psychology and medicine, and then things slacked off as the psychedelics were made illegal and counter-cultural backlash grew stronger. I was aware of that work, read some of the literature, and experimented with the drugs, mostly marijuana (enough so that it could not be termed experimentation).
Sometime after that, say in the 1980s (but who knows) I realized that consciousness itself was every bit as mysterious as anything that happens on an acid trip or during advanced meditation. We’re used to waking up in the morning and having to take time to concentrate the mind for the day’s activities, we’re familiar with the thrill of a roller coaster ride, being absorbed in a book, concentrating on walking along a log across a creek, drifting with the clouds, or being pleasantly or not so pleasantly drunk. And so those things don’t seem mysterious.
But really, they are. They all are. It’s consciousness that’s the mystery. The rest is just window dressing – well, that’s a bit extreme, but you get the idea.
Anyhow, this piece is about mental experiences I’ve had, from about the age of four to my late 20s. Some of them would qualify as ASCs – the mystical bliss of a musical performance, having a term paper write itself through me – others are just ideas I once had – that the world is just a movie being watched by the Baby Jesus – while the last is an intense intellectual realization of a kind that has come to be known as an Aha! experience. So there is some phenomenological diversity in these experiences. What connects them is simply the fact that I remember them – and for the very earliest the mere fact that I DO remember seems significant and that, without much analytical philosophizing about them, I connect them together as somehow defining what my mind is and how it operates.
I suppose I could add other experiences to the list – in the case of music, I have – but none seem as significant as those. Now if I really thought about it, analyzed things and so forth, then I might revise the list. But that’s the point, I haven’t really done that. These experiences have more or less presented themselves to me when I reflect back on my life. It’s not a long list ten or a dozen depending on just how you count them, and there’s nothing on there that happened after my late 20s, perhaps 30 – I’m not sure just when that last one happened, the Eureka experience, but it had to have been prior to 1978, when my Ph. D. was awarded. Of course I’ve not stopped living and thinking since then, and important things have happened, many of them. But something seems to have been completed at the time of that last experience.
