Reflection: What Your Ordinary Consciousness Is Doing

Prompts to consider

• Huxley says ordinary consciousness is a pragmatic filter, it narrows experience to what is practically useful, cutting out most of what is available. Think about a time when this filter seemed to loosen without drugs: deep aesthetic experience, flow state, meditation, grief, falling in love, profound tiredness, or a moment of genuine awe. What was different about your experience in that state? What did it reveal, if anything, about what the filter normally screens out?
• The Buddhist doctrine of anatta (non-self) and Metzinger's phenomenal self-model both suggest that what you experience as 'you' is a construction rather than a bedrock reality. Sit with this for a moment. Not as an abstract proposition but as something to actually try to notice: where is the 'you' that is reading these words? Can you find it, some stable, unitary thing that persists? Or do you find, instead, a process, a stream, a series of moments with no fixed owner? What is it like to look for the self and have trouble locating it?
• The political suppression of psychedelic research for five decades was motivated by social and political concerns rather than scientific ones. This is an example of political values shaping what questions science is allowed to ask. Are there other areas today where you think political or cultural values are distorting the scientific research agenda, either by preventing certain questions from being asked, or by flooding resources into certain questions for non-scientific reasons? What does this imply about how you should relate to scientific consensus versus scientific practice?