2

“THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION”

 

First you must learn to see.

BARBARA MCCLINTOCK

Listening means learning to hear.

ROBERT WISE

Music is feeling, then, not sound.

WALLACE STEVENS

There are things known and things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

All organisms encounter a specific kind of environment from the moment they are born. And every one of them has to be able to perceive that environment, take in information about it, and process that information in order to survive. There are no organisms that can or do exist in complete isolation from their environment and there never can be.

not even scientists

There is no way to stand here and look at the world over there, as if there were no connection between the two except an observing brain.

such dissociation is in fact pathological

Every organism is deeply interwoven into the ecological matrix from which it is expressed. And every organism possesses an interface, a place where the outside world and it touch.

and that touching is continual

At that interface are located specific organs for the perception of the exterior world—for the perception of not me. This is true even of the tiniest of life-forms, such as viruses.

and of bulkier ones, such as neuroscientists

Viruses have, just as we do in the skin that covers our bodies, an outer protein envelope. The surface of the viral protein envelope is studded with receptors (just as the surface of our envelope is). These are the unique sensory organs that the viruses use to gather information about their surroundings. They are the interface portals, the doors of perception, that allow the viruses to survive, that allow them, as well, to find the cells they are most suited to live within.

As physician and viral researcher Frank Ryan comments . . .

Viruses have a kind of sensation that could be classed as intermediate between a rudimentary smell or touch . . . they have a way of detecting the chemical composition of cell surfaces. . . . This gives a virus the most exquisite ability to sense the right cell surfaces. It recognizes them through a perception in three-dimensional surface chemistry.¹

Every living organisms has to have a means to perceive informational inflows in order to survive; every living organism possesses mechanisms to do so.

Once environmental inputs are perceived, all organisms possess specific capacities for processing those informational inputs. Every one of them can determine the nature of the incoming information, its potential impact on the individual organism’s health, and can decide what to do in response. They have to be able to do this in order to survive.

These truths are fundamental yet their implications are nearly always overlooked; it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this “overlooking” has been intentional. For the implications directly counteract nearly everything we have been taught about ourselves and the world around us.

Because all life-forms, irrespective of their nature, must, to survive, have a sense of not me, they all have a sense of self, they are in fact self-aware. Because all life-forms, irrespective of their nature, must, to survive, be able to analyze the nature of the not me that approaches them and, further, must be able to determine its intent, and further, be able to craft a response to that intent, all life-forms are, by definition, intelligent. Because all life-forms have to be able to determine the intent of the not me that approaches them, they also have to be able to determine meaning. In other words, all living organisms can not only process data, they also engage in a search for meaning, an analysis that runs much deeper than linear cause and effect. Thus, three capacities—self-awareness, intelligence, and the search for meaning—that have (erroneously) been ascribed as belonging only to human beings, are in fact general conditions of every living organism.

thus, the essential nature of the conflict between reductionists
and those of us who actively feel the living intelligence
of the world around us

These three attributes of living organisms have an important place in this book but to get to them I need to play with something else first, something obvious, but something that is commonly overlooked. And that something is specific to experiencing the metaphysical background of the world, and that is the doors of perception.

The Doors of Perception

The doors of perception are in fact the sensory portals through which we experience the world. In human beings, as in most animals, informational environmental inputs are processed through the sensory modalities all of us are familiar with: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and feeling—which is similar to touch but different from emotion, i.e., how a place feels to you when you encounter it. (This is, in fact, a primary, and sixth, sense that all human beings possess—we could not survive without it.) We possess the capacity to perceive the world around us through the use of sensory capacities that have been developed over long evolutionary time. And these sensory capacities are deeply interwoven with the complexity that we know of as the world. They are a primary point of interface between me and not me. For the ecological sophistication that we call Earth to exist, those interfaces must, of necessity, be extremely sophisticated as well.

The world is filled with sensory events that have to be processed; all living organisms are immersed in those events—continually. And every single one of those sensory events are filled with meanings, some relevant, some not. We (and every other self-organized life-form that exists) not only possess specific receptors on our body surfaces that allow us to process those inputs but our central nervous system possesses specific neural networks whose job it is to work with, or process, those sensory inflows as they move deeper inside us.

All sensory inflows in every organism that exists are analyzed below the level of conscious awareness as to their nature and the meanings embedded within them. The function of the sensory-specific neural networks within us is to make sense of, and regulate the inflow of, the extremely large sensory data stream that touches us. And the amount of data within such sensory inflows is massive, though commonly we don’t notice that it is.

If you

look around the room, now,

that you are in, and allow yourself to take in everything in your visual field, you can see just how much visual data there is.

There is an incredibly rich range of shapes, and functions, and relationships of objects to each other, and shadows, and light reflections off surfaces, and subtleties of colors and textures, in fact millions of bits of visual sensory inputs in just this one place alone.

But until you began to intentionally look around you, you probably had little conscious awareness of the amount of data in your visual field. Specific parts of your neural network were acting to reduce the amount of incoming data reaching your conscious awareness. Most of your (conscious) attention was on reading this book, not on the visual field in which you sat immersed as you were reading it.

And even though these words are moving into you through a visual medium—the printed words on this page—as you became immersed in this book, you no longer saw the words as a visual input. You’d left that surface orientation behind. You began, then, to work with, and experience, the meanings that these words are only the containers for. Once you did, you saw, not words on a page, but pictures of the things I am speaking of and, too, into your experience came the sound of my voice and the feelings that accompany the meanings that these words have inside them. You were, until I woke you from it, engaged in a form of dreaming.

A special kind of dreaming,
central to everything this book is about,
and one that no one had to teach you how to do either

A rich sensory experience occurs during such dreaming but what you were not doing to any great extent was paying attention to the complex visual field that surrounded you as you dreamed. You were, at an unconscious level, restricting the amount of visual sensory information that flowed into your conscious mind.

All organisms learn to do this after they are born, to restrict the background sensory inputs that are not relevant to immediate tasks. And the more familiar your surroundings are, as are those in your house or on your regular route to work, the less such visual inputs tend to intrude on your awareness. It is possible, as you probably know, to drive to work or back home from a familiar place and not remember any details of the trip. During such drives, a part of you filters out the sensory inputs of the drive from your conscious awareness—but the unconscious parts of you do pay attention to all the visual data coming in. They drive the car for you; they just don’t bother your conscious mind with the details. And they would not unless something actually needed your conscious attention, like a

Garbage truck!

suddenly emerging from a side street.

This phenomenon is common to all living organisms. They all have mechanisms for taking in and processing sensory data—and they all have mechanisms for reducing the amount of sensory inflows. They possess what are called sensory gating channels—or as William Blake and Aldous Huxley more comprehensively described the phenomenon, we all have within us the doors of perception.

Sensory gating channels can be thought of as tiny apertures or gates or doors in specific sections of the nervous system’s neural network. They are similar to the lens in our eyes

you see

that can expand or contract as needed to increase or decrease the amount of data allowed in. They act to prevent sensory overload. In other words, if we consciously perceived everything that was coming in simultaneously as it was happening we would be overwhelmed with sensory experience.

This is, in fact, what many schizophrenics and those on hallucinogens experience—and it happens for a specific reason that is most definitely not pathological. It is crucial to our habitation of this planet and this book is about, in part, learning to open sensory gating channels at will to whatever degree is desired—to open the doors of perception.

If there were no sensory gating, every sound, every smell, every feeling, every visual input would emerge into awareness without any ability to shut it off. This is what William Blake, someone who could intentionally alter the degree of aperture of his sensory gating channels, was referring to when he said . . .

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

And as he quite rightly went on to say . . .

For man has closed himself up, till he sees thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.²

“Narrow chinks of his cavern.” What a beautiful way to put it, that habitual narrowing of sensory gating channels that most of us experience. In essence, when sensory gating channels are narrow, as they commonly are, we only perceive a very small part of the world around us. Only a tiny bit of the radiance of the world can shine in through the narrow aperture that is left; the rest of it is gated out.

Gated communities do then
have some relation to the real world

There is a reason for this, as brain researcher Arash Javanbakht notes . . .

In a world where we are simultaneously bombarded with a great deal of stimulation, we learn to focus our attention on important stimuli, while filtering out (gating) less relevant stimuli. Sensory gating (SG) is a way of habituation to repetitious and unimportant stimuli for the brain to reserve its limited resources to focus on important stimuli that need processing.³

It helps us focus on what we have determined, through experience, schooling, and cultural habituation, to be important. It also protects us from sensory overload. For it is true that, if gating did not exist, if the nearly infinite amount of sensory expressions that exist in the world flowed in without restraint every minute of every day of our lives, we simply could not function—we would experience what many researchers refer to as cognitive fragmentation. We would drown in a sea of sensory inputs. As neuropharmacologist Franz Vollenweider observes . . .

A fundamental feature of information processing dysfunction in psychosis is the inability of these patients to screen out, inhibit, filter, or gate extraneous stimuli and to attend selectively to salient features of the environment. Gating deficits may cause these subjects to become overloaded with excessive exteroceptive and interoceptive stimuli, which in turn could lead to a breakdown in cognitive integrity and difficulty in distinguishing self from nonself.⁴

We need some sort of gating, and some control over gating, in order to function within the sea of sensory communications in which we are embedded. Hence, neural mechanisms for filtering sensory data inflows exist in the neural networks for every type of sensory input that we experience, including our nonkinesthetic feeling sense (what I have called heart perception in The Secret Teachings of Plants, Inner Traditions, 2004). Researchers in a number of disciplines have been working for over three decades to map (and label) the neural gating channels that control sensory input flows.

They are doing this to learn how to pharmaceutically normalize
schizophrenic conditions and to make a case
for the continued illegality of drugs—
very bad ideas, for reasons I will get to . . . eventually.

Sensory Flow Through the Brain

Researchers talk of P50 or N100, P200, N40, N50, M50, M100, N400, and so on gating channels. There are, in fact, a series of gating channels that exist in every sensory neural network, not just a single one. It can be visualized

even more accurately than the lens of an eye

as being similar to a series of locks on the river of incoming sensory flows.

For example, during auditory processing, sound inputs flow through the ear, then the brain stem reticular formation, then the medial septum (these two being called the lemniscal pathway), then the hippocampal region (which also includes the amygdala), then the thalamus, then the auditory cortex, then finally the cerebral cortex.

These latter three being called the nonsensical,
I mean the nonlemniscal, pathway

The central clearing center, as it were, for all sensory inputs is the hippocampus. It is here that all pathways converge.

It is this organ that is concerned with
orienting us—in both physical space
and the rich field of meanings through which we move
every day of our lives
It is the part of us that works most deeply with meanings,
with the meanings that are embedded within every
sensory input we receive

As researchers comment, the hippocampus (of which there are two, one on each side of the brain) is specifically “concerned with interpreting the significance of sensory stimuli, to orient the organism in its environment.”⁵ And this most definitely includes the meaning fields in which we are embedded. From here all the sensory inputs, except that of smell, are funneled to the thalamus (or thalami, there are two, one on each side of the brain), for routing to specific areas of the cerebral cortex.

Sensory gating processes occur every step along these neural pathways, located in the limbic, striatal, pallidal, and thalamic structures of the brain. Only what the pre-attentional parts of the self determine is important is allowed to reach conscious awareness.

The gating in the deeper sections of the brain occurs nearly instantaneously, within 50 milliseconds—that is 50 thousandths of a second—much more quickly than in the hippocampus which takes 250 milliseconds to process the incoming data stream.

The unconscious or pre-attentional parts of the self that analyze sensory inputs and then determine what or what not to let through may vary in their function: they may be a part of us that are focuses on protection of the self or a part that engages sensory phenomena with a sense of wonder or even a part that is measuring sexuality levels in people at a party. If the area of interest (or concern) of any particular deeper part is activated, then the sensory gating will open more widely—allowing more inputs to reach conscious awareness. If the unconscious parts determine that the sensory inputs have no importance, sensory gating narrows—and the sensory inputs remain outside our awareness. These deeper parts of us allow sensory inputs to touch our consciousness only if they determine those inputs are important enough.

though you, your conscious self, can override that decision
. . . if you want to, that is

The pre-attentional parts of the self use a complicated analytic process to determine relevance. They weigh a large variety of factors to gauge relevance; this includes such things as the intensity of the sensory inflow, its novelty, the degree of contrast between a sensory stimulus and its sensory background, and its rarity.

When it comes to novelty, the pre-attentional parts of the self look for patterns of similarity, that is . . . how similar is this new sensory input to ones that have gone before? They, in essence, engage in a comparative analysis in order to determine whether something is novel or not. But the new sensory input must be novel in a specific way. Specifically, because every new inflow of sensory data is not in fact identical to those that went before,

no event is ever identical to any previous event

each new sensory input does present the self with novelty. To override the continual novelty of the world there is a certain novelty threshold that must be reached before a new sensory stimulus is considered to actually be novel. So, while all the white daisies in the garden are slightly different from one another you won’t generally perceive any of them as novel.

unless you decide to

But should you come upon a pink one in that sea of white, it will automatically capture your conscious attention.

Then there is intensity: Sensory inflows of any sort that occur past a certain threshold or degree of intensity always reach conscious attention. A sudden, loud sound in the kitchen, as opposed to the continual and familiar sounds of the refrigerator jogging in that room, will always capture conscious attention. This allows us, at the simplest, to determine safety levels in our environment.

Hey! Did you hear that? . . . Shush . . . Listen . . .
Is someone at the door?

Then there is degree of contrast: When determining contrast, the pre-attentional parts analyze incoming sensory data against the background inputs. As an example, if you are at a party where many people are talking, not only is the sound gated but the semantic meanings in the hum of conversation are also gated. Essentially, both sound and the meanings-in-the-sounds are reduced in intensity so you don’t get overwhelmed by the incoming sensory inputs. However, should you hear your name from across the crowded room,

Did you hear what happened between Michael and Jenny?

the gating channel that is contrasting sound meanings in the room will open more widely and allow the sensory input through. It signals the cerebral cortex to pay attention. Once signaled, the cortex, in association with other parts of the brain, uses stochastic processes to enhance the signal so that what is being said can be heard in detail.

Well, he put the moves on her during a workshop.

What happens, in experience, is that out of the sea of sound, your name just jumps out and is clearly heard—even if you were not consciously listening to that particular conversation. At that moment you consciously begin to listen and as you do, and as the pre-attentional parts of the brain open channels more widely, more and more of the conversation can be heard.

What I heard is that she actually told him to fuck off,
right in the middle of the lecture.
Geesus! The guy’s an idiot!
Yeah, and then he . . .

One of the ways that your neural system facilitates this process is through the near-immediate creation and release of specific neurotransmitters. These affect gating levels and processes in the central nervous system and brain.

Glutamate and GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid), acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, melatonin, testosterone (and other androgens), estradiol (and other estrogens), noradrenaline, nicotine, and a host of less common but still powerful neuroactive compounds such as DMT are all generated and released into the system in a unique combination each time, depending on the incoming sensory inputs and their meanings.

Hearing your name in such a circumstance will always signal the unconscious self to open gating more widely, for any attention intentionally directed toward you by outside organisms will always (potentially) have something to do with your safety.

I heard he’s going to get fired.

That always overrides gating.

In general, every sensory message, irrespective of its nature, flows through the same pre-attentional parts of the brain during the initial gating. Once this early gating occurs, the remaining sensory bits are routed to the thalamus which then sends them to the specific portion of the brain that specializes in that particular sensory modality: the primary visual cortex for vision, the primary auditory cortex for sound, the primary somatosensory cortex for touch, and so on. After processing in those centers, they are sent to the cerebral cortex—which itself performs a final gating—and then they reach conscious awareness. During sleep, the thalamus, if we are blessed, acts to cut off nearly all sensory inputs so as to not alert the cerebral cortex and cause waking.

Each of these specialized areas is capable of extremely detailed discrimination in very tiny modulations of the sensory inflows. The auditory cortex, as an example, processes the sound inputs that have not already been gated earlier in the stream. It specifically works with tone, pitch, harmony, loudness, and beat patterning or timing. In people that use auditory inputs as a primary or major area of sensory processing

musicians for instance

there is much less gating of sound in the deeper levels of the brain than in nonmusicians. In consequence, much more sound input reaches the auditory cortex. Because the auditory cortex is continually used to work with larger amounts of sound inflows (with more subtlety), it becomes highly developed and shows tremendous plasticity, that is, continuous new neuronal development. Frances Densmore, for example, the ethnomusicologist who recorded thousands of Native plant songs in the early twentieth century, could perceive pitch differentiations as tiny as ¹/₃₂ in deviation. (She had as well total recall and prefect pitch.) The more a sensory modality is consciously used to analyze incoming sensory inflows, the more sensitive it becomes, and the larger the neural network within it becomes.

this applies to the feeling sense,
that is, heart field perception, as well

In the primary auditory cortex, different neurons respond to different tones. Each neuron or neuron group in that region of the brain is, in fact, specific for particular tones. The neurons adjoining those sensitive to one tone are themselves sensitive and respond to tones that are similar but slightly different and so on across the whole range of sounds humans can perceive. From long-term and extensive use, in musicians, the neurons become highly sensitized to tiny modulations in every incoming sound. As well, the neurons in the cortex synchronize with each other creating much larger fields of perception for variations in the sound inputs. This increases sensitivity to sound perception. And, from the stimulus of continued and highly focused use, more neurons form in the organ, creating, again, more sophisticated sound perception. Over time, the organ itself becomes much more aware. It begins to actively look for and respond to fields of sound communication and, in combination with the hippocampus, actively works to pull the inherent meanings out of the sound field.

Thus, when musicians play, that part of the self is highly involved in the expression of sound. It is partnered with the conscious mind; they become allies in the process of sound-making. An exquisitely developed feeling sense also comes into being which blends together with the parts concerned with sound generation creating a unique synaesthesia of sensory perception and expression. This blended sensory capacity is concerned with the exact expression of meaning through sound. Fingers, lips, breath, the auditory neural network, and the feeling sense—that is, how the music feels—all act as one unified coherent organism of expression. Tiny shifts in any of these systems cause tiny modulations in the meaning-filled sound field that, ultimately, produce a musical outcome far beyond any combination of the parts.

When musicians listen to incoming musical or sound inflows, they listen for those exact kinds of tiny, invisible, modulations that no one else can hear. And if they are playing together in a group, they then modulate their sound expression in response to what they are hearing. What occurs then is a living communication between a group of people who are working intensively with something invisible—something that is more than the sum of the parts, the thing that comes into being at the moment of self-organization. You can’t point to it, but you can always feel it when it’s there . . .

and when it’s not.

This dynamic is what the poet William Stafford was describing (though he was talking about writing) when he wrote . . .

Just as the swimmer does not have a succession of handholds hidden in the water, but instead simply sweeps that yielding medium and finds it hurrying him along, so the writer passes his attention through what is at hand, and is propelled by a medium too thin and all-pervasive for the perceptions of nonbelievers who try to stay on the bank and fathom his accomplishment.⁶

In musicians, or those who, over a long time, attend closely to sound modulation (as good actors and writers also do), the entire auditory neural network becomes an active, intelligent sensing organ. Over time, unique invisibles, perceivable only because of the sensitivity and openness of the sensory gating in that neural network, are able to be heard and, as well, expressed through the activity of that part of the self. This is what Goethe was talking about when he said that

Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ
of perception in us.

Using that part of the brain as a primary sensing organ, actively extending its gating parameters, literally remakes it. More neurons form, the brain region becomes more plastic; it becomes highly sensitive to the lightest touch of sensory inflows. A new organ of perception emerges that can be used to consciously perceive tiny modulations of the meanings held within a much larger spectrum of the sensory modality being used.

Children who begin working at an early age with music have, as habit, much less pre-attentional or unconscious gating in the neural network that attends to sound. Gating, in general, develops over time and with exposure, the pre-attentional self learning to gate whatever is not important to the conscious mind. Children, by nature, have much less gating than adults—gating tends to narrow over time. If children begin working with sound early on, auditory gating remains much more open—it never narrows as it does in others. Since the importance of sound perception remains high in those who begin young, the systems in the auditory neural stream allow more sound through to the conscious mind, simply as habit throughout their lifetime.

In those who begin working with music at a later age, the simple decision to pay attention to sound, and tiny modulations of sound, will override established gating parameters and start the sensitization of auditory neurons.

though it takes awhile

As it is developed as a habit of daily behavior over a long enough time period (several years minimum) the neuronal fields become increasingly sensitive, neuronal synchronization begins to occur, the neuronal fields extend, and more neurons form. The sensory zone, as it does in all musicians, increases in size. The pre-attentional parts of the self take the top-down decision by the conscious mind to attend to sound as an override. This resets unconscious gating parameters; and if you work at it long enough, the resets will be permanent.

Gating “Deficits”

Gating activity outside of the normal bell-shaped curve for the population of the United States is, generally, considered to be pathological. The more widely open gating channels are, the more likely someone is to be defined as clinically abnormal and to be labeled, one way or another, as having “stimulus filtering difficulties” or “gating deficits.”

P50 (a.k.a. P1) gating systems have to do with the gating or modulation of auditory perceptions. Nonmusicians (and some musicians) that have “less robust” P50 gating are often considered (by psychologists) to have higher rates of “perceptual modulation” difficulty. For nearly all people, a new sound that occurs in the field of background sounds within which we are immersed daily signals our conscious minds to pay attention. This causes us to focus on the new sound. Once identified, its nature determined, and safety level appraised, conscious focus shifts away from it (if safe), to whatever we were doing before. Those with “less robust” gating have, as habit, a more open P50 system, and many more incoming sounds make it into conscious perception.

Wait! What is that!
What?
Don’t you hear it? Something’s moving in the house.

In other words people who have this gating channel more open can in fact hear things that most of the rest of us cannot. And the more open the channel is, the more they hear. People with very open P50 channels commonly report being “flooded with sound” or hearing “everything at once.” In other words, the unconscious mechanism that filters sound lets more through, so much so that, in some cases, the people exist in a sea of sounds that tend to overwhelm consciousness. This is often complicated by the fact that, commonly, they also have more open N100 channels.

N100 (a.k.a. N1) gating channels are those that trigger increased attention and activation of memory. When this channel is also open not only are there more sounds being consciously perceived but conscious attention is directed to each and every one of those sounds. Further, a rapid cross-correlation of new sensory inputs with previous experiences is generated in order to determine subtle meanings and differentiation within them. Those with “less robust” N100 gating tend to overinclude “irrelevant” sensory inputs and meanings into the focus of attention. For such people, to the unconscious part that analyzes background sounds, all sounds remain relevant and so it signals that conscious attention must be paid to the incoming sounds. The more open this gating channel the more difficult it becomes to shift attention away from the incoming sounds. Not only can the person be overloaded with incoming sounds, they have great difficulty in removing their attention from the individual sounds themselves.

Soldiers with PTSD often have trouble with these two gating channels; they take in more sounds, are highly alert to any tiny new sound in their auditory surroundings, and rapidly cross-correlate new sounds with old ones, seeking out their potential danger. (This will also keep adrenal stimulation high, putting them into a high alert status most of the time.)

Although studies on gating “problems” have occurred with various “abnormal” states (such as PTSD, migraines, bipolar disorder, Asperger’s, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, and autism) most of the work has occurred with those labeled schizophrenic. A common complaint among this group is of “sensory inundation and inappropriate orienting to irrelevant stimuli,” and this includes a great deal more than just sound. It is often spread across the sensory spectrum. Essentially, they perceive a lot of things other people don’t and they don’t know how to sort it out. In them, the doors of perception are more widely open than in the rest of the population, sometimes much more widely so.

“Inappropriate orienting to irrelevant stimuli,” by the way, is a cultural definition, not a functional one. In other words, those with significantly open sensory gating channels are orienting themselves to sensory inputs that most other people do not notice and attributing importance to the meanings in those sensory inputs that other people do not.

Further, they don’t know how to interpret the sea of meanings they are experiencing. They tend to use the cultural metaphors (and standards of normalcy) they have internalized to explain what is happening, the majority of which are inaccurate maps of the metaphysical background of the world. Those metaphors just don’t work at helping orient the person in time, space, or meaning. Often they make things worse. It’s a software problem that extends itself as well to clinicians. Few of those that treat the condition actually have access to the metaphysical background of the world themselves or even understand what access to that world means. In consequence, not only are the interpretations by “schizophrenics” of their meaning inflows “crazy,” so are the informational interventions by their caretakers.

This behaviorally orients those with this kind of widely open sensory gating far outside the cultural norm. In cultures that recognize the importance of this capacity, this group of people are trained to use their enhanced perceptual capacities for the benefit of the group.

there would then be many more holy people among us

Schizophrenic states, in fact, share a large number of common features with the experiential states generated by hallucinogens indicating that schizophrenia is not in fact an abnormal state but is itself an altered state of consciousness. Part of the major problem attending schizophrenia is what it is defined to be, that is, abnormal, rather than an altered state of consciousness that has a specific ecological function for the species. In the West such states are labeled as an illness and are almost always medicated.

Most psychoactive drug use is proscribed for exactly
the same reason . . .
You must not extend perception further than the
society wants it to go

There are very few people in the West (and virtually none who are clinically schooled) who understand how to train someone in the use of that enhanced perception. Once such gating dynamics are labeled abnormal, accepted to be neuropathological, there is generally no alternative (in that system) except pharmaceutical suppression.

But when it comes to the whole concept of “abnormal,” a deeper look begins to reveal inherent problems. Studies have found that one-fourth of “healthy” individuals in every Western population commonly report sensory inundation, difficulty in stimulus filtering (stimulus overinclusion), and problems with orienting to inappropriate stimuli. It is much more common among artists (writers, musicians, painters, and so on), those who use psychoactive drugs, and the gifted. It is also common among people who have been exposed to severe environmental stressors such as war. Rather than abnormal, it is, rather, a common experience of the human species. Despite this, there are strong cultural reasons why more widely open gating channels are suppressed.

You are not going out of this house with your hair
like that young man!
(Hey wait! Come back here!)

Nevertheless, the capacity for opening the doors of perception is built into us and every species of life on this planet for a reason.

and that reason is central to the purpose of this book

As well, it’s natural to us, for when we are born our gating channels are very, very open.