Altered States, God union, and the Role of Aesthetic Judgment

This essay was written as part of my PhD at Ubiquity University on a course about Psychobiology and altered states — it deals with the topic of aesthetic Judgment in Growing Up and Waking Up and the choice of one`s spiritual practice.

Introduction

The earliest time in my life from which I can remember an altered state, was in the year of 1988 (at least I guess so ;-) ) when my parents started to build a house in Regenstauf, a small town in Bavaria, Germany, part of the district of Regensburg. One day we visited the construction site, me being close to my fourth birthday. In the inchoate garden we met our future neighbors, who`s son Patrick, later my best elementary school friend, played with me in the mud. When I lifted an iron bar from the ground, I suddenly recognized that I would be unable to clutch it, because I was too weak. The iron bar tilted and fell into Patrick`s eye. I moved through this sequence so many times in my life and wondered what happened back then: I remember thoughts arising in the mind of my childhood`s self, the shocking recognition of my weakness in contrast to the overestimation of my strength, a pulse of intense fear, and then an internal distancing into a bluish sphere of consciousness from which I was witnessing intense emotions of pain, guilt, and sorrow arise over my mistake, in order to be just later paired with what I would call today a sense of care and compassion in my witnessing.

Raised as a Roman Catholic Christian the interpretation standing to reason was failure, the witnessing of suffering, and the recognition of guilt as the path forward to God union. St. Teresa of Avila (2001), one of the mystics that influenced me in the past, namely writes in The Book of My Life, when it comes to the first stage of prayer, that of recollection: “Indeed, when we think of and explore what the Lord has gone through for us, it inspires us to sympathize, and the pain and tears that spring from this are delicious” (Avila 2001, p.196). Reaching a contemplative state is connected to a remembrance of suffering, an ode towards the enormous gift which the creator offered to us as proof of his goodness, wisdom, and justice; a sacrifice offered when, as Gregory of Nyssa (1927) writes in the Catechetical Orations, a paradoxical movement took place in the incarnation process — the flame for which it is properly expected to strive upward moved like a heavy body, descending downward, while “the fire, though remaining fire, yet in its downward movement takes a direction contrary to its nature” (Nyssa 1927, 24:1). It is not that this is only a metaphor of Christ`s consciousness being an incarnation of God the Father, but what I experienced back in my childhood was reminiscent of that movement: my awareness moved up through my body and simultaneously, or at least very immediately after that uprise, plunged back into the fullness of the experience of my emotions in respect to my later friend Patrick.

With time I started to understand that this movement that happened back then in my body and awareness, was related to the startle, which conventionally is defined as “a whole-body flexor reaction to sudden, intense, stimulation whose function is defensive in nature, designed to protect the organism from assault by closing the eyes, ducking the head, and pulling in the limbs” (Bradley & Sabatinelli 2003, p.66). Stanley Keleman`s (1985) book on Emotional Anatomy made me understand that this startle had my neural energy flow into what he, in accordance with Wilhelm Reich`s (1972) Character Analysis and Alexander Lowen`s (1971) The Language of the Body, called the rigid state — where the general tendency is to “pull up, pull back, stiffen and brace” (Keleman 1985, p.106). This state, as depicted below in Figure 1, interestingly and as subjectively experience is related to the so-called witnessing state, or Turya, because as the energy moves upward and the chest expands in breathing, we start to reach the organic home of the divine — since he “in the head as Turîyam […] dwells” (Deussen 1921, p.966), so, the Brahma-Upanishad. Likewise, St. John of the Cross (1999, pp.45–46) in The Ascent to Mount Carmel mentions how in the almost final state of meditation the beloved “wounded his neck with their gentle hand, suspending all his senses,” indicating that upward movement related to spiritual experience towards that fourth state. Why fourth, because there are three earlier i.e., the cross waking, subtle dreaming, and causal deep dreamless states (Wilber 2006) while finally — when the body opens up again in a proper way and the awareness like the flame is allowed to descend and incarnate itself a fifth state might ultimately appear where the meditating or spiritually inclined person “abandoned and forgot himself, laying his face on his Beloved” (ibid. p.46).

Figure 1: The startle on the left as drawn by Keleman (1985, p.65) and the rigid mode correlating with the witnessing state in the depiction of Keleman (1985, p.107)

Spiritual states from this early age on shaped much of my childhood and adolescence and likewise much of my adult life was concerned with the “desire for expansion of understanding” (Hess 2012a, p.178) for these events and making meaning about the aforementioned and manifold other revelatory experiences and rapture on the stages of my life`s way. The paradoxicality in them, as St. Gregory pointed out, and the degree of grace and unpredictability or even accidentality of them was wondrous — a fact which I was retold when reading the book chapter on Age-Related Changes in Neuroendocrine, Cognitive, and Neuroanatomic Aspects of PTSD by Rachel Yehuda (2011) in week five of the psychobiology, altered states of consciousness, and neuroscience course. There she spoke about the complexities of cortisol activity and its outcomes with the conclusion that “if we mistakenly extrapolate from studies of normal aging that cortisol toxicity results in PTSD-related brain and cognitive deficits, we may miss an opportunity to exploit the potentially beneficial effects of cortisol on cognition and possibly symptom reduction in PTSD” (Yehuda 2011, p.161). It is easy to generalize the negative impact of anything and, as the German journalist Marie Louise Schreiber (2022, p.21) published in her last year`s book I’d rather not: A rebellion against the terror of the positive: “Constantly judging one’s thoughts and feelings as to whether they contribute to a vaguely defined state of happiness makes one tired. The pursuit of happiness then only leads to exhaustion.” Conventional psychology easily moves on to the side of terror, selling simple generalizations and ideologies as the sole truth, a fact that I had to discover very early in my life, but resisted with resoluteness in a “fuck your medications, I am not sick!” — believing that my state was part of a larger and more overarching pattern of reality which later I discovered in Robert Kegan`s (1982) framework of The Evolving Self, where the manifold depressions we might move through on our life`s way are intriguingly related to insights in our failure at a station that is meant to be left behind; an outdated self must be made object of a new subject so that we can again readily cope with the reality we moved out of balance with.

Given that this was my first course on transpersonal psychology — with of course some books read, which generally are considered to be part of that discipline — I was happily surprised when, in week one, I read through Brian Les Lancesters (2013, p.255) Neuroscience and the Transpersonal, where he wrote that looking across different levels of and approaches relevant to transpersonal psychology, a “question of more interest” shows up that transgress the oftentimes seemingly solid boundary between health and pathology, in his case using the example of epilepsy.

In the following essay I will further explore the lessons of the course that seem most relevant for this old theme of mine namely, Week 6 — Applied Psychobiology: Embodiment Approaches in Science and Practice, Week 7 — Cognitive Neuroscience: Basic Structures, and Week 10 — Applied Neuroscience: Altered States of Consciousness. The arrangement of my subjective experiences and older thoughts on the topics will culminate in an abstraction of what my internal guiding system always knew — altered states are valuable, there are many means to reach them, but not all will lead in the same direction, that of God union, though they seem to.

Second Attention Epistemology: Embodiment Approaches in Science & Practice

The approach that developed on the stages of my life`s way, described in the introduction to the article, is something that I saw mirrored in Pier Luigi Lattuada`s and Regina Hess`s (2015) Towards an Organismic-Dynamic Epistemology and Research Methodology. In the mentioned article they propose a Second Attention Epistemology which “outlines a method of investigation and validation based on participatory dialogue between man and the environment that has its roots in the Organismic Self, as well as psychophysical content that may be standardized as a result of measuring it against phenomenological accessible reference maps” (Lattuada & Hess 2015, p.21). Though my approach does not follow the verbalizing of the phenomenological maps given by Lattuada and Hess (2015) both they and me refer to five layers within the self or five states with corresponding bodies (waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, witnessing, and non-dual), which they call Microcosmic Vehicles: a “set of sub-boundaries to show some of the different ways of arranging information within the organismic Self: into organismic constellations or organismic mapping” (ibid. p.38). Likewise, they derived them in part from different traditions like Advaita Vedanta or the Hermetics, where I used ancient texts, like the Upanishads, or mystical texts, like the work of St. John, or modern sources, as Wilhelm Reich`s work and the succeeding bioenergetic movement. All these frameworks supported me with an embodied framework that gives the subjective experience a degree of intersubjective validation, while enabling a deepened understanding of the mechanisms that are naturally rooted in our organic underpinnings and correlates of conscious states. In reverse understanding these dynamics meant for me to understand how to guide other people through difficult periods of their life or simply support spiritual states within them. As Hess (2012a) points out, individual success in mastering body, mind, and spirit through practices feeds into the wish to support other`s change.

The coursework in week five and six mentioned several of the practices I went through and explored in my past, with the article of Don Hanlon Johnson (2013) and his Somatic Transpersonal Dimension mentioning three dimensions including (a) the dissolution of the idea that the self s a solid and stable object, (b) regulating the “neuromuscular barriers that keep one from a full and direct encounter with present reality,” (Johnson 2013, p.484), and © the movement into extraordinary states of awareness. My past somatic practice spanned multiple dimensions, where for about six years of my personal journey working in a pub was part of it — having to work physically, with constant attention on muscular movements and energy regulation, and being embedded in the collective flow of guests easily leads into meditation-like states, where controlled and regulated deep breathing can lead to a weakening of tissue boundaries. Additionally, as Johnson describes: it is about the repetition of the simplest activities “sitting, standing up, reaching, touching, tasting” (ibid. p.485) that enable to cultivate extraordinary awareness, which in a pub are filling glasses, cleaning glasses, carrying beer cases from the basement, giving a smile, reaching drinks, counting prices and so on — and as “one learns to do just what one is doing and no more, there is a delicious feeling of emptiness, an absence of the dispersal of self that so typically clouds our perceptions of the real” (ibid. p.486).

But these states don`t stop at dissolving self-related boundaries, sometimes even in the opposite making them more obvious and filling them with a clarity that is the foundation for understanding the situation in a pub anew. As Lattuada and Hess (2015, p.43) point out, the self is much more of a dynamic arising and passing away, “it is continuous with, and disappears into, a ground or order of life, and this order of life gives the Self its qualities, which are the qualities of being-in-the world including language, culture, developmental structures, physiological constraints, freedoms.” Especially somatic practice in a socially structured situation like working in a pub requires as Hess (2012b, pp.42–43) writes, an embodied approach to research which can “enhance our feeling, empathy, and understanding of Self and Other, leading to an understanding of interrelatedness.” Being in servitude requires that constant letting come and go of a self and letting come and go of other`s perspectives and needs, much as in meditative practices described by Buddhaghosa (2010) in the Visuddhimagga as the Divine Abidings, the dwelling places of the gods according to the positive feeling states which the self is cultivating there. These feeling states are “loving-kindness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity” (Buddhaghosa 2010, p.291). However, as Buddhaghosa states this practice where one gradually expands these positive feelings towards others should always start and turn back towards oneself as he mentions for loving-kindness: “First of all it should be developed only towards oneself, doing it repeatedly thus: ‘May I be happy and free from suffering’ or ‘May I keep myself free from enmity, affliction and anxiety and live happily’” (ibid. p.292). The dynamics generally applicable in such a situation as between emissary (waiter) and master (guest) encourage the necessity of deep self-care unless one accepts the downward spiral that can come from complementary communicative settings which Paul Watzlawick, Janet H. Beavin, and Don D. Jackson (1967, p.108) in Pragmatics of Human Communication call rigid complementarity: one “must change […] [one`s] own definition of self into one that complements and thus supports […] [that of another], for it is in the nature of complementary relationships that a definition of self can only be maintained by the partner’s playing the specific complementary role” — which in sever cases can lead to self-denial and a conflagration of subordination into all other domains of life leading to a mere masochistic character.

However, dealing with the fluidity of introjection and projection in complementary relationships and fluid boundaries seemingly supports to utilize what Lattuda and Hess (2015, p.38) might mean with the “spiritual and/or higher mental vehicle,” which “arranges and dispatches information in the form of transpersonal content, insight, intuition, visions” — a process which in the gastronomic environment meant multifold things from simply knowing the drinks someone needed, to spontaneously knowing where new desires arose, to seeing the pub through the eyes of the guest, to seeing the thought fields emanating through the pub, to having holographic awareness of the internal dimensions of guests while serving them. Where work feels like recognizing Ervin Laszlo`s (2017, p.65) dictum in The Intelligence of the Cosmos that “we human beings, as other natural systems, receive and decode the cosmic hologram. That in the internal perspective we are elements in the flow of sensations that constitutes our consciousness, while in the perspective of the ex-ternal observer we are in-formed clusters of vibration.” Or as Sri Aurobindo (2005, p.985) writes in The Life Divine, somatic experience can become a “wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement” that replaces our individual ideas of oneness or unity so that “many motions that were formerly ego-centric may still continue, but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness” (ibid. p.985). The interpenetration of the different layers of the human being in the holographic wavefield of nightlife interestingly had similar effects as Hess (2012) describes for the Capacitar body-mind-spirit practices in her dissertation. It seemed like an energy work where the individual work supports the “experience of safety, trust, control, empowerment, self-esteem, intimacy, connection with community, and finding meaning in life” (ibid. p.65). The individual process of transference into the field utilizing the interconnected whole changes the nature of the weekly gatherings successively: people reported feelings of “being on drugs” without consuming alcoholic beverage, reporting intense experiences of love and feeling home, more and more people started to feel released and started dancing wildly, so that the pub became more of a disco in the later night, strong bonds where forming across generational gaps, and much more.

Memorized Basic Structures & Consciousness

When in reflection I have went back to my early childhood experience in Regenstauf, one of the most interesting recognitions was that whatever happened back then was not only a sort of declarative memory, i.e., one of many remembered “personal episodes in time and space” (Chandler 2015, p.345), but a re-embodiment and re-embedding of myself into the very conscious state and physical activity happening to me this day. Neuroscience shows that generally memory is not solely a sort of content-based measure, but for example thinking of friends engages similar self-referential processes in the medial prefrontal cortex as are associate with those of one`s friends thinking about themselves (Chavez & Wagner 2020). This indicates that memory is in a certain sense a neuronal resemblance that overcomes the boundary of self and other or present and past similar to the effects of trauma that might lead to a new neural function with increased reactivity of the amygdale and decreased inhibitory responses in the ventral prefrontal cortex (Hughes & Shin 2011) or constant changes in the neuroendocrine system and its effects on memory (Yehuda 2011).

The famous founder of the formal science of developmental psychology James Mark Baldwin (1915), when writing about the aesthetic consciousness, his most evolved stage in The Genetic Logic, states that it (the aesthetic consciousness) “does not recognize its separateness from all experience, in the sense of the trans-subjective reference” (1915, p.298). A sort of compassion arises, which he defines by the German term Einfühlungsvermögen, where the force of the true as much as the value of the good “are preserved in the semblant reconstruction itself, giving to its mental life, to its ‘self,’ the corresponding meaning of a synnomic conscious function” (ibid. p.298) — where synnomic means forms of interpretation that are inter-individually coordinated and intra-individually uniquely reconstructed worldviews. The paradox Baldwin (1915, p.299) opens on these passages deals with an object of art, which once an externalized object support “the movement of mind in its universal and synnomic form, […] but, on the other hand, it reasserts the relativity of the individual processes which reinstate, within the aesthetic whole, the concrete situations involving knower and known” (ibid. p.299). Very similar to the complementarity in the pub, where the other was simultaneously an externalized object and an internalized meaningful component of loving-kindness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity with its personal needs which lead to deepened intuition and insight in respect to their states and demands, — these memory structures, which are not only based on the encoding, decoding, and retrieval of episodic, declarative memories, are intra-subjective aesthetical experiences, that hold on to their universal structure (their microcosmic vehicle), while constantly, each time when accessing them, give rise to a new worldview and meaning and solidifying the once experienced neural formation as an artwork; wherefore the cultivation of aesthetic compositions of neural functioning based on the experience of sacred internal states seems necessary to for an “interconnectedness of being and knowing, and the expression of the experiences collected in our bodies,” which Hess (2019a, p.206) calls an embodied understanding.

When considering chapter seventeen in Chris Chandler`s (2015) book on Psychobiology what we deal with in this case might be referred to as neuroplasticity. Chandler (2015, pp.355–356) states that “it has been argued that the reuse of existing neural systems may have been an important contributory factor to the development of cognition in our species, with advanced cognitive functions using more regions scattered across the entire brain.” Neuroplasticity allows to recalibrate how brain areas work together and especially in meditation research the idea of plasticity plays an important role, even towards the idea that normally anticorrelated brain networks can grow together in so called non-dual states (Josipovic 2014). These memory structures which generate new assemblies of neurons might be called engrams or “a memory trace on the assumption that it involves changes in a neuronal circuit rather than in a single neuron” (Breedlove & Watson 2017, p.551) to encode a memory. Neuroscientific meditation studies even explore altered states based on having memory traces reactivated through recollection as Mario Beauregard and Vincente Paquette (2006) with Carmelite nuns.

The difference of these engrams likely is that they are most probable not only stored within for example the medial temporal lobe memory system which includes the anterior thalamus, the mamillary body, he entorhinal cortex, perineal cortex, the parahippocampal gyrus, the hippocampus, and the fornix (Chandler 2015), but rather are specifically orchestrated structures of higher attention and cognition. Attention control according to Breedlove and Watson (2017) can be subdivided into two main modes. (a) First, a “dorsal frontoparietal network for voluntary control of attention” (ibid. p.590) and (b) second a “right temporoparietal network for reflexive attention” (ibid. p.591).

Figure 2: The attention control network according to Breedlove and Watson (2017, p.591) with the lateral part — rather task positive — on the left and the medial part — rather default mode — on the right.

The first network can be subdivided into an attention control network and one for target processing where however, generally it seems the attention control network depicted by Breedlove and Watson (2017) in two depictions — one focusing on the medial parts of the brain and one on the lateral parts of the brain — are subdivided into the so-called default mode and task positive mode of attention control. The depiction from Breedlove and Watson is modified in Figure 2 to pay credit to that additional information provided e.g., by Hal Blumenfeld (2016) in The Neurology of Consciousness.

The default mode or task negative network was coined so, since regardless of task, this set of “regions tend to show reduced activity during task blocks when functional neuroimaging data are analyzed by conventional block-design analyses contrasting task versus rest. […] [While] on the other hand, regions showing relatively increased activity during task blocks […], have been referred to as ‘task-positive networks’” (Blumenfeld 2016, p.3). Chandler (2015, p.519) defines the task negative network as a “network of brain regions active when the individual is not focused on the external environment,” where activity therein is shown, when people “are focused on tasks such as autobiographical memory retrieval, imagining the future, and conceiving the perspectives of others. The default mode network is involved in emotion perception, empathy, Theory of Mind (TOM), and morality” (ibid. p.519). Notwithstanding the separate activity patterns of both networks, they are intriguingly interconnected and that there are “context-dependent dynamic changes of connectivity pattern either within or across network boundaries, which emphasizes the importance of a dynamic perspective in future search,” so Wei Gao and his colleagues from the University of North Carolina (2013, p.11).

Figure 3: The neural network is more modularized in the left hemisphere (A) and less modularized in the right hemisphere (B), so Goldberg (2009, p.70)

The (b) right temporoparietal network for reflexive attention (Breedlove & Watson 2017) is according to its focus on sensory inputs which are unexpected. Generally, the right hemisphere as Elkhonon Goldberg in The New Executive Brain writes is more apt to deal with novelty. This is due to the network structure of the neuronal web, where “the right hemisphere consists of a large network of such grooves of varying degrees of depth, but all gravitating toward medium depth. By contrast, the left hemisphere consists of a collection of grooves clustered into separate mini-nets, each being quite deep within itself but with very shallow grooves connecting the mini-nets” (p.70). This is depicted in Figure 3.

Accordingly, the left hemisphere`s attention networks rather are pivotal when people have become experts in their domain and the structure of their knowledge is highly modularized and represented with social value judgments (Rosen et al. 2020). Figure 4 tries to indicate that what Breedlove and Watson (2017) define as the right hemispheric network for reflexive attention, helping us to reorient based on generalizations in the left hemisphere, is in the left hemisphere a network highly engaged in the attention control of people judged as highly creative as Roger E. Beaty and his colleagues (2018) showed. Whereby “this high-creative network exhibits dense functional connections between core nodes of […] [other networks] — networks that typically work in opposition — suggesting that the creative brain is marked by a tendency to simultaneously engage these large-scale circuits to a greater degree than the less creative brain” (ibid. p.1090).

Figure 4: (A) shows in yellow the right temporoparietal network for reflexive attention as depicted by Breedlove and Watson (2017) — the graphic however taken from Le Bouc et al. (2022, p.267); (B) shows the left hemispheric network for high-creativity (Beaty et al. 2018, p.1088)

As Breedlove and Watson (2017) indicate: consciousness itself, when we try to localize it in our brain seems to rely on a variety of brain areas. Especially when explored by looking at patterns of synchronicity according to the two authors of Behavioral Neuroscience the default mode network seems to be the place where we are when “most introspective and reflective” (Breedlove & Watson 2017, p.18). But generally, it seems that our conscious states — irrespective of where they arise and what they are — integrate various of the aforementioned circuits and areas specified to demands. Personally, I, in the past, came up with the conception of five neuronal koshas or hubs (Angerer 2018).

The evidence of certain brain circuits being orchestrated together with organ functions and what the Vedic tradition called Vayus, which are first mentioned in the Amritabindu Upanishad (Deussen 1921) and defined on the pages of Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati’s (2009 p.48) Prana and Pranayama in the following way: “The term Vayu is derived from the root va, meaning ‘motion’ or ‘that which flows’. So, the prana Vayus represent the inherent quality of motion which energizes every action from secretion of the digestive juices to the movement of the hand.” The Vayus successively ascend through the body with the first being related to the lower abdomen (Apana), the second to the portion above the navel (Samana), the third to the heart and lungs (Prana), and the fourth with the throat and head (Udana) while the fifth (Vyana) “at last continuously flows through all limbs” (Deussen 1921, p.928).

While Figure 5 shows one of my many overarching frames that were generated from a sort of Second Attention Epistemology, given the nature of this paper, I only exemplarily mention a few evidences for the relationship of Vayus with the brain: Julian Thayer and his colleagues (2012) for examples showed that there is an intriguing relationship between heart rate and medial ventral prefrontal cortex function making it a likely corelate of prana, whereas a study about herbal medicine from the Hubei University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Zhao 2018) illustrate that liver disease recovery positively influences the function of the orbitofrontal cortex, the brain area slightly below the ventral prefrontal cortex, making it a likely correlate of samana, while Kaylah Curtis and colleagues (2019) depict how the insular cortex is interwoven with the lower parts of the digestive tract and the viscera therein, the vital energies of apana. Furthermore, Zoran Josipovic (2021) indicates in Implicit–explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness as such that the precuneus is the most prominent source of nondual states while as other sources show it is most centrally involved in the activity of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system (Ruffle et al. 2021), making its activity being a reflection of “flowing through all limbs.”

Figure 5: My personal explorative frame of different embodied dimensions and memorable neuronal structures linearly aligned with Lattuada`s and Hess`s (2015, p.38) Microcosmic Vehicles on the left.

Altered States of Consciousness

Albert P. Garcia-Romeu and Charles T. Tart (2013) refer to the various mentioned states as discrete ones; as dynamic patterns and configurations of our human psychology`s underlying structure. They define altered states as those which show any divergence from “our ordinary waking state from which one conducts the majority of day-to-day affairs” (ibid. p.123). Alternatively, they speak about alternate states in respect to the idea that a baseline state is difficult to define (ibid.). Stanley Krippner (1972) in Altered States of Consciousness provides a list of twenty categories of these states: The dreaming state, the sleeping state, the hypnagogic state, the hyperalert state, the lethargic state, state of rapture, states of hysteria, states of fragmentation, regressive states, meditative states, trance states, reverie, the daydreaming state, internal scanning, stupor, coma, stored memory, expanded conscious states, and our normal waking state.

Garcia-Romeu and Tart (2013) in Altered States of Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology pick out sleep and dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, mystical and transcendent experiences, as well as out of body experiences and near-death experiences, while in their history of research into altered states from prehistory to early psychedelic research makes clear that various states could be induced by various methods starting with dancing and music and the use of psychedelic plants over the development of complex cults into the comparative studies starting with William James (1985) in the early 20th century, ending with the psychedelic research of the second half 20th century and then pointing on important research in the aforementioned altered states.

The summary the authors give is not conclusive in whether they deal with states or instruments in order to alter consciousness. With dreaming and sleeping they focus on various phases of the sleep cycle an especially at the state of lucidity, where one is not only aware that we are in the dream state but “one simultaneously feels as if consciousness is clear and lucid, very much like ordinary waking consciousness” (Garcia-Romeu & Tart 2013, p.131) but also mention that dreams are a means to access extraordinary experiences. Hypnosis, which they mention as controversially discussed seems to play a role in “inducing transpersonal experiences” (ibid. p.131) and of clinical significance and therefore it appears as an instrument as much as meditation is a realm of various techniques and simultaneously of different “Higher states of consciousness” (ibid. 132). In contrast when Garcia-Romeu and Tart (2013) speak of mystical and transcendent experiences there is only a hint towards multiple means or “triggering stimuli” (2013, p.133) as they call it, where meditative states again might easily fit in. Similarly, out of body experiences, “defined by a perception that one is elsewhere than one`s physical body and that one obviously possesses, from self-examination, a clear non-dreamlike state of consciousness, comparable to waking consciousness” (ibid. p.133) and near death experiences, which are not necessarily related to experiencing one`s death, but are “typically characterized by the feeling of having survived one`s own death” (ibid. 2013). Rick Strassman (2011, p.332) in DMT: The Spirit Molecule, too, states that “near-death experiences seem to have the greatest impact on those who take […] the leap to a mystical level of awareness,” and that it were “these realms, into which DMT might lead, that the volunteers and I believed held the greatest promise of significant personal transformation” (ibid. p.332) whereas the German integral psychologist Wulf Mirko Weinreich (2023, pp.111–112) writes in Extended Integral Psychotherapy that during the Turya state the “last threshold is transcended, into the completely unpersonal, witnessing SPIRIT, as it is commonly experienced in near death experiences or meditation marathons.”

The idea that many spiritual states are not means-dependent and might come like an accident is typical for many spiritual traditions. Especially the Japanese Zen monk Eihei Dogen (2007) in his Shobogenzo: The Treasure House of the Eye of the True Teaching is sure, just like Christ is, when he pronounces to be prepared as in Matt 24:42–43 (The Holy Bible 2001) at any time, that despite all preparations: “When you have your awakening, you will not know why it has come about as it has” (Dogen 2007, p.1091). Dogen (2007) some passages later quotes the reason for this be restating what a meditation master once stated:

The whole of the great earth is the Body of a True Human Being,
The whole of the great earth is the gateway to liberation,
The whole of the great earth is the Solitary Eye of Vairochana [the Eternal Buddha],
The whole of the great earth is our own Dharma Body. (Dogen 2007, p.1094)

With now almost three decades of experience with prayer and meditation this resembles my personal experience — though it seems that with time all given states can be trained many of the states can come from all kinds of tasks we do or situations we are in; the main common denominator being that they are based on either (a) long spans of extreme effort in terms of focus or openness to experiences as with working in a pub or (b) like in my childhood experience the situation itself — as in near death experiences, which are often connected to extreme events according to Garcia-Romeu and Tart (2013) — has an extreme character that leads to an overreaction in the conscious and physiological response very similar as intake of psychoactive substances leads to a short-term modification of the human neurotransmitter balance with LSD for example acting as “a serotonin receptor agonist” (Breedlove & Watson 2017, p.120). Similarly, Regina Hess (2019b) writes on the hypothesized effect of dark retreat on modulating human neurochemistry in a way that would resemble the effect of endogenous psychoactive substances and thus the combination of different means could serve a better end-result. Specifically, she (ibid.) writes about the Eleusinian Mysteries, a ritual that reaches back into 1700BC according to Garcia-Romeu and Tart (2013). There initiates entered an “architectural similitude of a cave […] [while] the initiates were exposed to a glimpse of a transcendent reality by the ingestion of a powerful psychoactive drink called Kykeon (mix)” (Hess 2019, p.4). Using this as a metaphor, in one of the darkest times of my life, however, accompanied by hours of spiritual practice every day, I had some of the most profound visual altered states: meeting angels, aliens, the snake from paradise, and much more (Angerer 2022).

At the same time, irrespective of the strong means-independent nature of altered states of consciousness, the various means nonetheless seem to have strong influence on the nuance of ultimate experiences. Lancaster (2013, p.231) in Neuroscience and the Transpersonal for example points towards the interrelationship of mystical states and very specific neurological functions and brain areas when he assumes “parallels between the cognitive neuroscience of perception and specific stages identified in the Abhidhamma.” Likewise, I personally assume and know from my own reflection that various mind-altering processes and states are connected with different source-locations in the body, like the Vayus, or the brain, like the neuronal hubs depicted in Figure 5.

Though Garcia-Romeu and Tart (2013) in their article only differentiate between two types of meditation either being focused or mindful actual difference in the neuronal source structure of meditative practices show a much larger bandwidth of variations which in the past I classified using John Westerhoff`s (1994) typology in Spiritual Life, which contrasts speculative and affective mysticism as well as apophatic and cataphatic mysticism; which in accordance with the last chapter of this essays might be called speculative task-positive network and affective default-mode network approaches as well as cataphatic overgeneralizing world directed right hemispheric and apophatic undergeneralizing otherworldly directed left hemispheric approaches:

1. Affective Cataphatic States: Predominantly in the right hemispheric midline one finds mindfulness (Hölzel et al. 2007) or narrated witnessing like done in Theravada Samadhi practice and Mahayana Buddhism, with a path towards one desired insight or truth (Farb et al., 2017, p.317).
2. Affective Apophatic States: Medial but rather left hemispheric the experience of a personal unification with the divine (Beauregard & Paquette 2006 & 2008) and personal prayer (Schjoedt 2009) and states of love, which are included in preliminary practices throughout Buddhist schools, like in compassion and kindness training (Beauregard et al. 2009; Engström & Söderfeldt 2010; Lee et. al. 2012).
3. Speculative Cataphatic States: Right hemispheric lateral, practices of witnessing and targeting for objectifying and focus like done in Buddhist Zazen practice (Hasenkamp & Barsalou 2012; Hasenkamp et al. 2012; Ritskes et al. 2003) or the recitation of a psalm, hence thinking practice (Azari et al., 2001) as well as conscious self-control and objective reasoning (Cohen, Berkman, & Lieberman 2012; Goel et al. 2009).
4. Speculative Apophatic States: During indiscriminative relational openness for objects that are prone to manifest in consciousness (Brewer et al., 2011; Manna et al., 2010) our left lateral prefrontal cortex is stimulated as well as seemingly reinforced through visualizations (Newberg et al. 2006); as well as recognizing lack of reciprocation (Rilling et al. 2007).

However, these differences are only part of the truth. I have spent years to test the various techniques and see how they unfold the ordinary state trajectory that most of the traditions describe in one or the other way and basically are an influence of the type of awareness we utilize in order to move along. Each of them has their own unique flavor of being aware and becoming consciousness of the objects that arise but simultaneously meditation can be easily done with various meditation objects which spring from the different bodies. As Terri O`Fallon (2012, p.100) in Growing Up is Waking Up writes about early stages of human development as they show up in childhood and adolescence and the state experiences people can have there: “all of them have concrete objects, or visualized concrete objects (as in concrete deity mysticism) […] while they are concrete, subtle, causal, and non-dual states.”

People living in earlier bodies and from earlier stages have different objects they deal with and simultaneously once we have grown through, these objects don`t cease — which is one of the main assumptions each model of psychological stage development shares since the times of Baldwin (1906, p.20) when he in the first volume of Thought and Things states that “the formulations of any lower science are not in- validated in the next higher, even in cases in which now formulations are necessary for the formal synthesis which characterizes the genetic mode of the higher” stage. We find the perspective of the co-existence of many layered souls in spiritual authors, such as Sri Aurobindo (1999) in The Synthesis of Yoga who speaks of the lower triple soul in man and the higher supramental that permanently coexist while consciousness dynamically ascends and descends living from any of them or Adi da Samrajs (2002; Wilber 2017) three paths: the paths of the yogi, the sage, and the saint focus on different aspects of being human, but are livable at every stage of development.

In this respect in the past, I have especially been wondering about the difference between substance induced states and those through meditation as it felt to me that earlier, even though at some level indicating a similar connection to the non-dual end state, overall were related to an earlier body of our being and thus working on different objects. With extended use of THC, I always observed a regression into quite early stages and concomitantly the intake of cannabinoids decreases the function of areas important in most meditative practices — like the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — and in contrast “one cluster of convergent increased activation was observed among cannabis users in the right striatum (i.e. caudate, claustrum, putamen) extending into the insula” (Yanes et al. 2018, pp.7–8). Cannabis therefore always seemed only a proper mind-altering drug if used together with additional means that counteract the regressive tendencies, i.e., meditating, dream yoga, reading, journaling or else.

Other substances that according to Chandler (2015) fall under the category of mind-altering drugs but rather act hallucinogenic like LSD seem more regularly associated with transpersonal experiences as by James Fadiman and Andrew Kornfield (2013) in the Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology. However, here, too, we see a similar pattern as with cannabinoids, where the functional connectivity of the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) towards the striatum is increased whereas decreased functional connectivity between “the PCC and frontal brain areas has been reported after psilocybin and LSD administration, as well as decreased global brain connectivity” (Preller et al. 2019, p.2745). However, like meditation, where anticorrelated networks start to interact, especially in respect to the precuneus when it comes to non-duality (Josipovic 2014) after LSD administration functional connectivity of the resting state network, part of which is the posterior cingulate cortex, with hubs like the precuneus and cingulate cortex is increased as well (Müller et al. 2018; Tagliazucchi et al. 2016). At the same time the intake of LSD counteract the normal meditative procedures which strongly rely on error recognition and consciously controlled states (Hasencamp et al. 2012): LSD, so a study by Andre Schmidt from the department of Psychiatry at the University of Basel and his colleagues (2017, p.9) “impaired the error-related activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and para-hippocampus and thereby impeded a subsequent recruitment of dorsolateral prefrontal regions (superior/middle/inferior frontal gyrus) to adjust further task performance.”

Final Reflection: The Aesthetic Judgment of Means

Back in the days of my early childhood I did not see the beauty in what I experienced that day, rather it took me like two decades to understand what unfolded in me. In the same way, in my adolescence, when I reacted to a therapist`s medication advice with a “fuck you, I am not sick,” I had to ponder for years whether there was goodness in that words and the reaction and wherefrom it came: this sudden rupture of a silver light that poured through me and made my mind crystal clear and pristine and allowed me to dismantle and confront the institutional authority as well as my parents. I have seen many people in the years to come, who ended up on regular medication, because either they did not hear and receive that force or ignored it. Though there are surprising amounts, not only by Kegan (1982), that, as Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. (2009) coin it in The Bright Side of Being Blue, depression is an evolutionary adoption to successively analyze complex problems and overcome them it formally is treated as an illness (WHO 1993). How many of our actual illnesses are just badly understood forms of embodiment, or maybe in the words of Hess (2012c, p.80) borderland states of consciousness that “can serve as a bridge for re-connecting with ‘ourselves’ in the world and cosmos.”

Today, I would say that the intriguing structure of our psychobiology and the related conscious awareness in themselves carry what Immanuel Kant (2014, p.86) in his Critique of Judgment called the sublime: “It is an object (of nature) whose conception determines the mind to think of the inaccessibility of nature as a representation of ideas.” We have ideal states in us, ideas, that we can not reach, but at the same tame the synnomic function (Baldwin 1915) and our semblative, resembling mechanisms can be a recollection of that ideal states that we already are and for whom we ever exist and strive towards them until we access them in our unique fashion which reduces them however into the relative realm that we live in. Our aesthetic feeling, our sense for intra-psychological harmony, so Kant (2014) further in his third critique can bring us to the morally right and good which we normally would reach by applying practical wisdom:

The good par excellence, subjectively judged according to the feeling it inspires (the object of moral feeling), as the determinability of the subject’s powers, by the idea of a necessary law par excellence, is distinguished primarily by the modality of a necessity based on concepts a priori, which contains in itself not only a claim, but also a commandment of approval for everyone, and does not in itself belong to the aesthetic, but to the pure intellectual power of judgment; It is also not attached in a merely reflective, but determining judgment, not to nature, but to freedom. But the determinability of the subject by this idea, and indeed of a subject that can feel in itself obstacles to sensuality, but at the same time superiority to it by overcoming it as a modification of its condition, i.e., the moral feeling, however, is related to the aesthetic power of judgment and its formal conditions to the extent that it can serve to make the lawfulness of action out of duty simultaneously presentable as aesthetic, i.e., as sublime, or also as beautiful, without losing its purity: which does not take place if one wanted to put it in natural connection with the feeling of pleasantness. (Kant 2014, p.86)

In this respect — and I am happy that the depiction of substance intake was not one sided in the course — I, too, can think about tryptamine induced states in my past including MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline. As the neuroanatomic analysis showed, there is a distinguishable pattern to that of meditative states however, in my surroundings the substance induced states are generally treated as equivalent to meditative states. So Weinreich (2023) mentions psychoactive substances in line with a continuous spiritual practice when we want to trigger target states in the subtle, causal, or nondual realms. Personally, and from energetic transmission of people I have known who dominantly navigate on substances I see a regressive tendency and strengthened anchoring in pre-personal states — the whole trajectory of the ventral prefrontal cortex and dorsal prefrontal cortex, the prana and udana life forces are bypassed and an ideal state established that is incomplete. This is not to diminish what Fadiman and Kornfeld (2013) have to say about the positive side-effects of psychedelics, but it should be clear that the type of ego-dissolution and ultimate people experience in these states — which in some cases might be similar to that reported in meditation (Brewer, Garrison, & Whitfield-Gabriel 2013) — does seemingly not go along with the same compensatory mechanisms of increased integration of the evolutionary younger frontal lobes. At the same time the decrease of default mode self-referential processes seems, too, be strongly dependent on culture with Carmelite nuns showing increased default mode activity (Beauregard & Paquette 2006) but Buddhists decreased activity in the ventromedial part of the frontal cortex, versus increased in non-religious populations, and a shifted gradient towards the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in Christians (Han et al. 2010). Given all these different modifications and assuming an ideal gradient that cherishes our whole embodied spectrum an overall judgment seems not overly difficult however, given the benefits of all these lifestyles somewhere in the half-time of evolution: our personal aesthetic judgment runs first and with time we as humanity hopefully become able to judge whether any of these are more sublime and closer to the ultimate idea while others support the self on different thresholds of the trajectory.

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