- seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
like wellbeing, calm, compassion, openness – yet these are culturally variable
and hard to defend or define in detail. A representational view like Revonsuo and
colleagues’ does not help us here, because perfect representational matching
between consciousness and world may sound like sanity, but it doesn’t sound
much like health. And in any case, we know (Chapter 3) that representations of
the world are optimised not for accuracy of representation but for efficiency. So
can I ever say with confidence that my experience of health would not count as
‘altered’ compared to yours? And if I recover from long mental illness, the health
I return to will of course not be the same as the health I experienced before the
illness.
That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was
going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much
in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing;
but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed
itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet,
this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.
(Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, 1915)
An interesting twist here is that mindfulness meditation and several kinds of
psychoactive drug seem to be effective in treating mental illness. That is, tech-
niques often used for inducing altered states can also be used to cancel others
out. ‘Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy’ is helpful for conditions including
depression (Piet and Hougaard, 2011). Meanwhile, ‘microdosing’ of psychedel-
ics such as LSD is increasingly used as self-treatment for various mood dis-
orders (Maughan, 2017), and we summarised earlier in the chapter some of
the research evidence for the therapeutic use of LSD as well as psilocybin and
MDMA. In some cases, the drug being used may function simply to bring some
aspect of brain function back to normal, for example by stimulating underac-
tive serotonin receptors, as LSD does. But the chemical and neural structures
involved are complex, as are individual histories and environments. So it seems
odd to say that an ASC (such as PTSD, or some episodes in the experience of
PTSD) could simply be negated by a substance (like MDMA) or practice (like
mindfulness meditation) that is usually considered to induce a different ASC.
This kind of mathematical cancelling-out (alteration^1 + alteration^2 = baseline)
seems implausible.
There are so many ways of establishing and then questioning an ‘alteration
to consciousness’ that the very concept starts looking rather like ordinary life:
our experiences are never exactly the same even two minutes running, and
once we start trying to qualify or quantify what counts as a proper alteration,
we quickly find ourselves on shaky ground. There is a strong argument to
be made that ‘normality’ still needs as much investigation as the ‘alterations’
from it, and while much of the research covered in this book could be seen
as attempting this, we may also need to develop more contextually sensitive
methods. One option would be an ethnological approach to mapping the
continuities and variations in what different people from different cultures
take to be normal.
