Expanded States of Being

What altered states reveal about how ordinary consciousness is built.

The previous pages argued that your ordinary experience, the unified self, the solid world, the continuous stream of awareness, is a construction: a model the brain builds and runs so seamlessly that it feels like simply seeing reality as it is. There is a powerful way to test that claim. Alter the machinery (give the brain a rattle) and watch what happens to the experience. If ordinary consciousness were a direct readout of reality, it would be hard to change without changing reality. If it is a construction, then changing the brain’s settings should change the construction in revealing ways, and it does, profoundly. That is what this page is about: not altered states as experiences to chase, but altered states as a window onto how the ordinary state is assembled. 

A note on tone before we go further, because this territory attracts two equal and opposite errors. One is hype, the treatment of altered states, especially drug-induced ones, as mystical shortcuts to enlightenment, healing, and truth, with the risks and the limits waved away. The other is reflexive dismissal, the treatment of all non-ordinary experience as mere malfunction, hallucination, or self-indulgence, with nothing to learn from it. Both are lazy. These states are revealing, genuinely useful, and they are also risky, and frequently overhyped. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to alter your consciousness by any particular means, least of all the riskier ones.

I. What “Altered” Means

If, as The Architecture of Awareness described, the brain constructs your experienced world as a kind of controlled model, constantly predicting and constraining what you perceive, then an “altered state” is simply what happens when the parameters of that model shift. The ordinary waking state is not the only way the machine can run; it is one configuration, the default one, tuned by evolution for getting through a normal day. Change the inputs, the chemistry, the breathing, the focus, the sensory environment, and the construction reconfigures, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically, revealing by contrast just how much construction was happening all along.

Seen this way, there is nothing supernatural about altered states, and equally nothing trivial. They are the construction showing its seams. And there is a striking unifying idea, drawn from the predictive-brain framework of Karl Friston and the psychedelic research of Robin Carhart-Harris, that helps explain a wide range of them at once. Ordinary consciousness runs on strong “priors,” high-level expectations and beliefs that heavily shape what you perceive and how you interpret it, including the deep prior that there is a single solid self at the centre. Many altered states, on this account, work by relaxing the grip of those high-level priors, loosening the top-down model so that experience becomes less constrained, more fluid, more “entropic” in the sense of less rigidly ordered. When the priors that normally hold the self-model and the world-model tightly in place are loosened, the construction becomes visible, malleable, and sometimes drops away entirely. This single mechanism, the relaxing of the brain’s confident top-down model, connects meditation, psychedelics, flow, and more, and ties this whole topic back to the entropy thread running through Part III: these are, in a real sense, higher-entropy configurations of the mind.

II. The States, and What Each Reveals

Meditation: The most studied, most accessible, and least risky doorway, and the one we treat as a tool in Mindfulness. Sustained attention practice reliably alters the state of consciousness, and advanced practitioners report, and brain imaging broadly supports, changes in exactly the systems you would predict: quieting of the default mode network, the set of brain regions associated with self-referential thought, mind-wandering, and the narrating “interpreter” from The Self. As that self-referential chatter quietens, meditators describe the sense of a solid separate self thinning, and in deep states dropping away into an experience of pure awareness without a centre, precisely the no-self the contemplative traditions describe and the neuroscience predicts. What meditation reveals, slowly and safely, is that the self-model is not fixed: attention can be trained to loosen it, and the loosening, far from being a loss, is repeatedly described as relief. Of all the doorways, this is the one that is free, legal, low-risk, gradual, and backed by evidence.

Flow: The state of complete absorption in a challenging task, described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that athletes, artists, and skilled workers know well: time distorts, self-consciousness vanishes, action and awareness merge. Flow is worth including because it is so ordinary and so clearly not mystical, and yet it shows the same core feature, the quietening of the self-referential, self-monitoring system. In flow, the constant background commentary of the self falls silent, absorbed entirely into the doing, and people consistently report it as among the most satisfying states they know. That a state of diminished self-focus is experienced as deeply rewarding is a quiet but powerful clue, recurring across this whole page, that the constructed self is in some ways a burden as much as a tool. Flow typically requires unconscious competence in a particular skill, total concentration, immediate feedback, and a task that matches your skill level by being near the edge of your capabilities. 

Breathwork: Deliberate control of the breath, slow and regulating, or fast and intense as in certain practices, can shift consciousness markedly, which is unsurprising given how directly breathing is wired into the autonomic nervous system, as Breathing details. Intense voluntary hyperventilation practices can produce strong altered states, including powerful emotional release and experiences some describe as comparable to mild psychedelic states, largely through changes in blood chemistry and arousal. This is powerful, and it carries real cautions: intense breathwork can cause fainting, and must never be done in or near water or while driving, and the more extreme practices warrant care and ideally experienced guidance, particularly for anyone with cardiovascular or psychiatric conditions. The slow, gentle, regulating end of breathwork is safe and broadly beneficial; the intense end is a genuine altered-state technology that deserves respect.

Psychedelics: The most dramatic, most studied-of-late, and by far the most risk-laden of the doorways, and the one requiring the most care to discuss honestly, because both the hype and the dismissal are wild here. 

Classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD act on serotonin receptors and produce, at sufficient doses, profound alterations of consciousness, including the phenomenon of “ego dissolution,” the temporary loss of the sense of a separate self, which maps onto measurable reductions in the coordinated activity of the default mode network, the very system implicated in the self-model. This is a remarkable convergence: a chemical intervention loosens a specific brain network, and the self reliably thins or dissolves, strong evidence that the self really is something that network constructs. The leading neuroscientific account, the “relaxed beliefs under psychedelics” model mentioned above, frames the whole experience as a dramatic loosening of the brain’s high-level priors, which can allow rigid patterns of thought, the entrenched negative beliefs of depression, the fixed narratives of trauma, to become temporarily fluid and open to revision. As a window onto how consciousness and the self are built, psychedelics are the most vivid demonstration there is.

Early trials of psychedelic-assisted therapy for depression, PTSD, and addiction produced genuinely encouraging results, and researchers take the potential seriously. But the field has recently run hard into the limits of its evidence. In 2024 the United States FDA declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, despite it being the widely expected frontrunner, citing a cluster of serious problems: the near-impossibility of properly blinding a trial when everyone can tell whether they received a powerful psychoactive drug, strong expectancy effects, questions about how durable the benefits are, gaps in safety monitoring, and even allegations of misconduct. Subsequent high-profile trials have left investors and regulators unconvinced. The underlying neuroscience of what they do to consciousness is fascinating and increasingly solid; the clinical claim that they are a reliable, approved treatment is not yet established.

The risks are serious and must not be minimised. Psychedelics can precipitate acute psychological crises, “bad trips” involving terror and confusion, that are dangerous in the wrong setting. They can trigger or worsen serious psychiatric conditions and carry particular danger for people with, or predisposed to, psychosis or bipolar disorder, for whom they can be harmful. They interact dangerously with various medications. The unregulated reality, in which most use occurs outside any clinical setting, adds the further dangers of unknown substances, unsafe environments, and, in the grim underbelly of the “psychedelic renaissance,” unscrupulous or abusive “guides” and therapists exploiting people in profoundly vulnerable states. These are powerful, unpredictable interventions into a mind in a fragile configuration, and they are not toys, not shortcuts, and not for everyone, and for some people, they are dangerous. 

Other doorways: Briefly, for completeness, because they reveal the same underlying point: sensory deprivation (the float tank), in which removing sensory input alone shifts consciousness, showing how much the ordinary state depends on a constant sensory stream; rhythmic and ecstatic practices (drumming, dance, chant), used across cultures for millennia to alter consciousness through entirely non-chemical means; dreaming and lucid dreaming, nightly proof that the brain generates fully immersive experienced worlds from the inside with no external input at all; and the near-death experience, the striking and consistent phenomenology reported by some who come close to death, which is genuinely interesting as a window onto what the brain does under extreme conditions, and which, it must be said carefully, does not require, though it does not rule out, any supernatural interpretation, and remains an open area where honest researchers disagree.

III. What the Window Shows, and the Trap to Avoid

In every case, altering the machinery alters the experience as well as the self-model and the rigid top-down beliefs that normally hold experience in place. This is powerful confirmation of the central claim of this whole section: ordinary consciousness is a construction, the self is a process the brain runs, and both can be turned down, reconfigured, or temporarily switched off, which is not what you would expect if either were a fixed, fundamental thing. 

There is also a recurring and important clue in the fact that so many of these states, meditation’s quiet, flow’s absorption, the ego dissolution of deep practice, are experienced as profoundly positive, even as among the most meaningful experiences of a person’s life. The common thread is the temporary easing of the separate, self-referential self, the same self whose defence, as The Self argued, generates so much suffering. Loosening the grip of the constructed self reliably brings relief and meaning.

However, the very power and pleasure of these states make them easy to chase as ends in themselves. A peak experience, however profound, is a state, and states pass; building a life around pursuing the next one is a recipe for disappointment and, sometimes, for harm. The contemplative traditions have always warned that dramatic experiences are not the goal and can become an obstacle, a spiritually-flavoured form of escapism that the manual examines in Hyper-Spirituality. What these states reveal is valuable: a direct, felt demonstration that the self is lighter and more optional than it feels, and that there are ways of being beyond the default. But the value is in what you bring back and integrate into an ordinary life, the loosened grip, the changed perspective, the lasting insight, not in the experience itself, and certainly not in collecting ever-more-dramatic states while the ordinary life goes untended. 

So expanded states of being, in the end, serve the same purpose as everything else in this section: they are a way of seeing, with unusual vividness, that you are not the fixed, solid, separate self you normally take yourself to be, but a construction capable of being configured in many ways. Some of the doorways, meditation above all, are safe, free, and worth walking through. Others are powerful, risky, and to be approached, if at all, with great care and full knowledge of the dangers. All of them, treated as windows rather than destinations, point back to the same liberating fact: the ordinary state is one option among many, and seeing that loosens its grip. Finally, as Alan Watts use to say – “Once you receive the message, hang up the phone.”

IV. Cross-Links

• Consciousness, Free Will & Meaning for the section overview
• The Architecture of Awareness for the constructed nature of ordinary consciousness
• The Self for the self-model these states loosen
• The Web of Meaning for meaning beyond the peak experience
• Freedom, Determinism & Free Will for the question of who is steering
• Resources for the reading list