Our ordinary mind that we’re used to is not everything there is. Many people, especially young or those who have interest in practical psychology and spirituality, already know it.
But it is always useful to provide more introductory information into the operation system of your own consciousness.
Our consciousness is not such a stable thing after all. It does have a tendency towards stability, towards a stabilized vantage point in reality, which has its adaptive qualities. If we have a stable description of reality, a stable mental model, it allows us to interact successfully with self-repeating patterns of life.
Needless to say, we, humans, strive a lot to make our life repeatable and patterned. All our lives are built around routine actions. Everyday we need to satisfy our needs—physiological needs, interpersonal needs, self-steem needs, self-actualization needs.
At some point we might even get access to what Abraham Maslow, this brilliant American psychologist, called self-transcendence needs.
So, we can habituate our consciousness towards one baseline state of awareness. Usually it is a habitual attention to specific and concrete tasks at hand or thoughts in our mental interior world. Everyday one drives to work, sits at his or her office desk, and repeatedly performs self-similar activities (to do lists), receiving some wage in the end of the week or month. This patterns our minds, patterns our neural activations and inhibitions.
This has an adaptive value, but our brain also allows for a multitude of other states of consciousness, very extraordinary at times. Think of a flow state, this highly effective state of consciousness that emerges during peak performance activities (such as when we do our work with full presence and, at the same time, spontaneity).
Some think that our brains are naturally wired for entering alternative realities of neurophysiological functioning in order to gain even more adaptive advantage.
I personally don’t think about things through such an adaptive/functionalist perspective, even though it is much useful, and, definitely, in the evolution of our species adaptivity of certain functions plays is an important factor.
What’s important here is that we can access multiple states of consciousness, myriads modes of awareness, even though at first it might be difficult to make those stabilized vantage points out of which we experience (and, indeed, construct) reality.
Psychoactive substances (such as psychedelics and cannabis) are not the only or even primary ways of entering an altered consciousness. People go to prolonged meditation retreats and experience profound shifts in awareness which last for several weeks after the retreat ends . . . and if one continues his or her practice, these effects may last even longer.
Folks report increasing calm and peacefulness, increased sensory awareness, greater feeling of their eroticism, and so on. Sometimes they enter profoundly altered states which feel as if some transcendental energy is revitalizing their whole bodies (this often happens in a presence of someone who has mastered altered states of consciousness, such as a spiritual teacher or experienced communicator who operates in flow states).
Besides meditation there are other means of experiencing alternations of consciousness. Hypnosis has been well-known to humanity in the past millenia. Other practices include sensory deprivation (which is now gaining popularity in a form of floating tanks), holotropic breathwork, shamanic rites, and even sports, as Michael Murphy testifies in his works on the subject of flow states called “the zone” that athletes experience.
Those who love to read may have experienced profoundly altered states of awareness while reading certain books.
The depth and strength of an altered state may vary: it can be experienced as a slight alternation of the pattern of subjective awareness and embodiment or it can grow into a full-blown sensory and trans-sensory experience and even an out-of-body state.
All of this, as some scientists propose, are variations of normal brain-mind functioning. In other words, even though there are pathological states of consciousness, altered states per se are a variation of our normal psychological functioning. Indeed, some propose (as Maslow did) that frequent exposure to altered and peak states at some point can become an important part of a truly healthy life.