Phases

“In 1970, while conducting thirty students around the world for an academic year to study cultures on location, I availed myself of my professional friendship with a distinguished philosopher at the University of Madras, T.M.P. Mahadevan, to ask him to speak to my students. I felt awkward about the invitation for I assigned him an impossible topic, to explain to neophytes in one short morning how Indian philosophy differs from Western philosophy. I needn’t have been concerned, for he rose to the occasion effortlessly. Beginning with a sentence that I remember verbatim for the scope it covered, he said, matter-of-factly: 'Indian philosophy differs from Western in that Western philosophers philosophize from a single state of consciousness, the waking state, whereas India philosophizes from them all.' From that arresting beginning, he went on to explain that India sees waking conscious [sic] as one state among four, the other three being the dream state, the state of dreamless sleep, and a final state that is so far from our waking consciousness that it is referred to simply as 'the fourth.'"

---Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals

"Anthropologists divide cultures into monophasic and polyphasic. Most of the world’s cultures, including shamanic ones, are polyphasic, meaning that they recognize and utilize multiple states of consciousness, such as dreams and meditative contemplative states. Polyphasic societies value and cultivate these states, honor those who master them, and derive much of their understanding from them of the mind, humankind, and the cosmos.

"By contrast, monophasic cultures - of which the modern Western world is the prime example - recognize very few healthy alternate states of consciousness and derive their view of reality almost exclusively from the usual waking condition. These societies give little credence to alternate states and may denigrate those who explore them, especially if they involve drug use. People reared within monophasic blinders can have great difficulty recognizing unfamiliar states, let alone their healing or spiritual potentials."

---Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., The World of Shamanism: New Views of an Ancient Tradition

Thinking about this from several angles.

First, Mahadevan's statement about the West is not only true of its philosophy, for the most part, but also of its science. It cannot be denied that the modern West excels in scientific inquiry, and it seems reasonable to connect this scientific supremacy with its commitment to the state of consciousness in which this scientific progress has been worked out. Science is the modern West's cornerstone of knowledge and truth, just as Christian doctrine was the cornerstone for the medieval West. That the modern West is remarkably monophasic, as far as its philosophy and science is concerned, is understandable, however, given the equally remarkable status of its sciences. It took many years of refinement and precision in order to reach the sophistication and technological applicability of our sciences; in the long development towards greater objectivity, altered states of consciousness, which require training and cultivation just like inductive reasoning, must have presented a great challenge. Not to our society's attitudes towards altered states catalyzed by certain drugs.

But all of this is to say that although the modern West could benefit from taking seriously other states of consciousness--with many applications in psychology, religion, and philosophy--the West still does have its rich scientific tradition from which to draw, particularly in cutting through the delusions and illusions that altered states can encourage. And science itself is not incompatible with altered states--science is identified by a method, not a state of consciousness (namely, our ordinary waking state). Charles Tart in particular has advocated for the development of "state-specific" sciences, applying rigor and discrimination to the often hazy and overly subjective altered states.