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  • So when you're considering non-ordinary or altered states one of the first questions

  • is what do they feel like?

  • What's actually going on in those places and spaces?

  • And one of the challenges in coming up with a good and consistent answer, not just for

  • a specific state like meditation or a flow state or a psychedelic the state, is what

  • qualities do they all share?

  • Because each of those communities of practice over decades, centuries and even the millennia

  • have accumulated their own storytelling or content about what the state they access are,

  • what they mean and where you're supposed to go through them.

  • So for instance, if you were a Buddhist meditator you will be instructed in all sorts of stages

  • and levels and progressions of non-ordinary states of consciousness ranging from waking

  • state all the way to white light void to Buddha consciousness, et cetera.

  • I if I am a peasant farmer in India and I have a non-ordinary state experience I might

  • experience Ganesh, the elephant God in a rice patty.

  • If I'm a peasant in Mexico I might experience the version of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

  • If I'm coder in Silicon Valley I might experience the matrix and code mode, this is ones and

  • zeros streaming all night as I bang away on my keyboard.

  • And the reality is is that underneath those experiences are far more alike than the wrapping

  • paper, the narrator wrapping paper of what people see based on culture, custom and biography.

  • And what we attempted to do was create a functional framework that lets us talk about these things

  • as apples to apples and really see the similarities.

  • And what we realize is that because of the neurobiology there are four qualities that

  • tend to arise pretty consistently regardless of which door you go through to get into these

  • non ordinary states.

  • And they are selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness and richness or STER for short.

  • And selfishness tends to happen because the areas of our brain, specifically the prefrontal

  • cortex but including additional networks that connect, often turn off or completely light

  • up.

  • Either way they knock out our everyday waking sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness.

  • So we end up momentarily lost our inner voice, lost our inner critic, lost our Jiminy Cricket

  • and we are in a state of not thinking about our thinking.

  • Timelessness happens for a similar reason.

  • As basically different parts of our brain light up and turn off our ability to calculate

  • time gets knocked out because it is a comprehensive measurement, it doesn't just occur in one

  • single location in the brain.

  • So when we start knocking out parts of the networks we lose our chronometer.

  • And all of the neurochemistry, brain focusing, attention, learning, dries our attention we

  • drop out of daydreaming about the past or the future and we get absolutely sucked into

  • the immediate present moment so a feeling of timelessness comes with it.

  • The effortlessness is just it's no longer about what I'm trying to do, it's not about

  • exerting a grit or willpower, which a lot of people have been talking about and writing

  • about these days and it's literally almost in the biblical sense it's sort of not my

  • will but thy will.

  • I feel myself swept along and it can be I'm jus self-propelled and it feels awesome or

  • it's terrifying but I don't have a choice.

  • But either way it's not me plotting one foot in front of the other to get to a goal I've

  • decided.

  • So that's the effortlessness.

  • And then the final bid is the richness.

  • And that's arguably the whole shooting match because when I knock out my self-consciousness

  • I don't have a voice inside my head second-guessing, filtering.

  • When I'm not in the past or the future I'm just in the deep present, when I am effortlessly

  • being propelled the next thing that consistently seems to happen is we have access to far more

  • information than we do in our regular waking state.

  • And that is when we go from conscious processing, which is very limited and narrow, to unconscious

  • processing, which is faster and vaster.

  • And Dr. David Eagleman, who is at Stanford who's a friend and a colleague and a board

  • member of ours at the Flow Genome Project, constantly makes that case that really it's

  • as if our conscious mind is sort of like the headlines of tomorrow's newspaper reporting

  • on the reality of today.

  • And when we get into non-ordinary states because of all the shifts in brain function and hormones

  • and neural electricity we have access to more of that information in real time and the results

  • often feel supernatural.

  • People in the past historically have assigned this to the gods, to their muses, to fate,

  • to possession, to angels, you name it we pretty much exhaust the gamut of all the ways we

  • could say this is just too much, this is too cool, it's too inspired, it's to inform to

  • possibly be me.

  • So we've assigned it super natural origins, but in reality we now know it might just be

  • super hyphen natural.

  • It's just us in an optimated state.

  • It's big data for our minds.

So when you're considering non-ordinary or altered states one of the first questions

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