Deepak Chopra argues that ordinary perception is a conditioned, narrowed version of reality, and that psychedelics loosen the neural networks keeping us locked in that reduced state. He uses the kittens experiment to show how perception narrows, and claims expanded consciousness reveals a formless, timeless source beneath all experience.
Chapters
Consciousness is that which makes any experience possible. So this experience we're having right now is possible because conscious beings are interacting. The experience of your body is possible because there's consciousness. The experience of your mind is possible because there is consciousness. In the background of every experience is consciousness in the background. So we can also say conscious is the knowing element in every experience, but we can also expand on that. Consciousness is that in which all experience occurs. This experience is not happening on our computers, although it appears to be. It's happening, not even happening in our brain, because there's only electrochemistry in the brain. This experience, any experience, whether it's sensations, images, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, ideas, longings, regrets, fear, anxiety, depression, love, compassion, joy, equanimity, anything that we can call a cognitive or perceptual experience needs consciousness for that experience to be experienced. The experience itself is. It can be a perception, a cognition, an image, a feeling, a thought. But that experience cannot happen unless there's consciousness. In fact, the experience itself, perception, cognition, thought, feeling, emotion, imagination, is a modified form of consciousness. So consciousness is that in which all experience occurs, is that in which all experience is known. And finally, it's that out of which all experience is made, because experience is a modified form of consciousness, and experience is the totality of all knowing, all perceptions, all understanding, and all memory. Now, we all have experience every day. I'm having the experience. I'm in New York City, it's a wonderful day, and the temperature is so and so. You're having your own experience. To be alive, to exist, is to have consciousness. Now, you asked something very important, and that is, what's the role of psychedelics in any. In expanded states of consciousness. So expanded states of consciousness are states of consciousness where there is less and less of the conditioned mind dominating the experience. So, conditioned mind. So let's just. Let's let's explore that for a moment. The conditioned mind edits out reality. It edits out reality. When I was a medical student, there was an experiment that I read about. Actually, the people who did the experiment got the Nobel Prize. And in physiology, the experiment was that they brought up kittens in two different rooms. One group of kittens were exposed to a room with only horizontal stripes. The other group of kittens were exposed to a room with only vertical stripes. And when these kittens grew up older, as cats, one group could see only a horizontal, horizontal world. The other group of cats could see only a vertical world. Why? Because their consciousness, which was expanded as babies, now got constricted and edited to just that one experience vertical stripes or horizontal stripes. So before consciousness is conditioned into what we call the mind, which is by definition, conditioning, religious conditioning, social conditioning, economic conditioning, gender conditioning, racial conditioning. On and on. Since the beginning of time, human beings have reconditioned. Same ideas. Economy, race, gender, latitude, longitude. We don't realize these are human constructs that we came up with. And now we can't live without them. We can't live without Greenwich Mean Time or latitude or longitude or coordinates. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to have the zoom call. So we came up with a restricted version of reality in order to navigate our everyday reality, which we call the world. New York City, this body, the Milky Way galaxy. Not realizing that this is an edited version of reality that goes back thousands of years to the cognitive revolution that occurred maybe 40,000 years ago when one species of humans, Homo sapiens, separated from the other hominoids by creating a language for creating models and stories. Then it expanded. We created mathematical language, et cetera, et cetera. But everything that we call everyday reality is actually an edited version of reality. What Aldous Huxley, who was a great explorer, of course, of psychedelics, he said our brains are like the reducing valve of reality. Reality is infinite. But our brain is the reducing valve through the conditioned mind. So what psychedelics do, in my opinion, is they loosen the neural networks which are the biological correlates of the conditioned mind. So you can now expand experience, reality as it really is. And reality as it really is, is infinite. Because pure consciousness doesn't have any form, not having any form, it doesn't have any boundary, not having any boundary. It's infinite. Not being, being infinite, it is incomprehensible. It is not space. It is not time. It is the source of all experience. We can't. We can't comprehend it by any system of thought, because systems of thought themselves are. Are neural correlates in the brain of the conditioned mind going back at least 40,000 years. So when you take something that loosens the neural correlates, the biological correlates, you actually access reality. And if you're lucky, you go all the way and you realize you. And the infinite, formless, a causal, irreducible, fundamental, incomprehensible, unimaginable, unperceivable, unconceptualizable. Self is the real reality. Everything else is a modified form. Therefore, these extended, expanded states of consciousness also give us insight, intuition, access to imagination, creativity, symbolic representations of higher consciousness that we call deities or gods. But they are symbols of our own consciousness. And ultimately get us to the source of all experience, which is spaceless and timeless and therefore immortal.
