After discussing the models for a system description to mind and consciousness, Tart deepens the ordinary consciousness state which produces the ordinary consensus reality:
The Nature of Ordinary Consciousness
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The prejudice that our ordinary state of consciousness is natural or given is a major obstacle to understanding the nature of the mind and states of consciousness. Our perceptions of the world, others, and ourselves, as well as our reactions to (consciousness of) them, are semi-arbitrary constructions. Although these constructions must have a minimal match to physical reality to allow survival, most of our lives are spent in consensus reality, that specially tailored and selectively perceived segment of reality constructed from the spectrum of human potential. We are simultaneously the beneficiaries and the victims of our culture. Seeing thins according to consensus reality is good for holding a culture together, but a major obstacle to personal and scientific understanding of the mind.
A culture can be seen as a group which has selected certain human potentials as good and developed them, and rejected others as bad. Internally this means that certain possible experiences are encouraged and others suppressed to construct a "normal" state of consciousness that is effective in and helps define the culture's particular consensus reality. The process of enculturation begins in infancy, and by middle childhood the individual has a basic membership in consensus reality. Possibilities are partially shaped by the enculturation that has already occurred. By adulthood the individual enjoys maximum benefits from membership, but he is now maximally bound within this consensus reality. A person's "simple" perception of the world and of others is actually a complex process controlled by many implicit factors.
One of the greatest problems in studying consciousness and altered states of consciousness is an implicit prejudice that tends to make us distort all sorts of information about states of consciousness. When you know you have a prejudice you are not completely caught by it, for you can question whether the bias is really useful and possibly try to change it or compensate for it. But when a prejudice is implicit it controls you without your knowledge and you have little chance to do anything about it.
The prejudice discussed in this chapter is the belief that our ordinary state of consciousness is somehow natural. It is a very deep-seated and implicit prejudice. I hope in this chapter to convince you intellectually that it is not true. Intellectual conviction is a limited thing, however, and to know the relativity and arbitrariness of your ordinary state of consciousness on a deeper level is a much more difficult task.
Consciousness, not our sense organs, is really our "organ" of perception, and one way to begin to see the arbitrariness of our consciousness is to apply the assumption that ordinary consciousness is somehow natural or given to a perceptual situation.
This is done in Figure:
A man is looking at a cat and believing that the image of the real cat enters his eye and is, in effect, faithfully reproduced on a screen in his mind, so that he sees the cat as it is. This naive view of perception was rejected long ago by psychologists, who have collected immense amounts of evidence to show that it is a ridiculously oversimplified, misleading, and just plain wrong view of perception. Interestingly, these same psychologists seldom apply their understanding of the complexity of perception to their own lives, and the person in the street does so even less.
While there are a great many simple perceptions we can very well agree on, there are many others, especially the more important ones in human life, on which there is really little agreement. I would be that almost all adult, non-institutionalized humans in our society would agree that this object in your hand is called a book, but as we define more complex things the bet gets riskier. If you go to a courtroom trial and listen to the testimony of several eyewitnesses, all of whom presumably has basically the same stimuli reaching their receptors, you may hear several different versions of reality. Or, if you discuss the meaning of current events with your acquaintances, you will find that there are many other points of view besides your own. Most of our interest is directed by complex, multifaceted social reality of this sort.
Most of us deal with this disagreement by simply assuming that those who disagree with us are wrong, that our own perceptions and consciousness are the standard of normality and rightness, and that other people cannot observe or think well and/or are lying, evil, or mentally ill.
Consciousness, then, including perception, feeling, thinking, and acting, is a semi-arbitrary construction. I emphasize semi-arbitrary because I make the assumption, common to our culture that there are some fixed rules governing physical reality whose violation produces inevitable consequences. If someone walks off the edge of a tall cliff, I believe he will fall to the bottom and probably be killed, regardless of his beliefs about cliffs, gravity, or life and death. Thus people in cultures whose belief systems do not, to a fair degree, match physical reality, are not likely to survive long enough to argue with us. But once the minimal degree of coincidence with physical reality necessary to enable physical survival has been attained, the perception/consciousness of an action in the complex social reality that then exists may be very arbitrary indeed.
We must face the fact, now amply documented by the scientific evidence presented in any elementary psychology textbook, that perception can be highly selective. Simple images of things out there are not clearly projected onto a mental screen, where we simply see them as they are. The act of perceiving is a highly complex, automated construction. It is a selective category system, a decision-making system, preprogrammed with criteria of what is important to perceive. It frequently totally ignores things it has not been preprogrammed to believe are important.
Figure shows a person with a set of categories programmed in his mind, a selection of implicit criteria to recognize things that are "important." When stimulated by one of these things he is preprogrammed to perceive, he readily responds to it. More precisely, rather than saying he responds to it which implies a good deal of directness in perception, we might say that it triggers a representation of itself in his mind, and he then responds to that representation. As long as it is a good representation of the actual stimulus object, he has a fairly accurate perception. Since he tends to pay more attention to the representations of things he sees than to the things themselves, however, he may think he perceives a stimulus object clearly when actually he is perceiving an incorrect representation.
This is where perception begins to be distorted by the perceiver's training and needs. Eskimos have been trained to distinguish seven or more kinds of snow. We do not see these different kinds of snow, even though they exist, for we do not need to make these distinctions. To us it is all snow. Our one internal representation of snow is triggered indiscriminately by any kind of actual snow. Similarly, for the paranoid person who needs to believe that others are responsible for his troubles, representations of threatening actions are easily triggered by all sorts of behaviors on the part of others.
What happens when we are faced by the unknown, by things we have not been trained to see?
The figure, using the same kind of analogy as the previous figure, depicts this. We may not see the stimulus at all: the information passes right through the mind without leaving a trace. Or we may see a distorted representation of the stimulus: some of the few features it has in common with known stimuli trigger representations of the known features, and that is what we perceive. We "sophisticated" Westerners do not believe in angels. If we actually confronted one, we might not be able to see it correctly. The triangle in its hands is a familiar figure, however, so we might perceive the triangle readily. In fact, we might see little but the triangle—maybe a triangle in the hands of a sweet old lady wearing a white robe
Don Juan, the Yaqui man of knowledge, puts it quite succinctly: "I think you are only alert about things you know".
I mentioned above the curious fact about psychologists, who know about the complexities of perception, almost never seem to apply this information to their own perceptions. Even though they study the often large and obvious distortions in other people's perceptions, they maintain an image of themselves as realistic perceivers. Some psychologists even argue that perception is actually quite realistic. But what does "realistic" mean?
We like to believe that it means perception of the real world, the physical world. But the world we spend most of our time perceiving is not just any segment of the physical world, but a highly socialized part of the physical world that has been built into cities, automobiles, television sets. So our perception may indeed be realistic, but it is so only with respect to a very tailored segment of reality, a consensus reality, a small selection of things we have agreed are "real" and "important." thus, within our particular cultural framework, we can easily set up what seem to be excellent scientific experiments that will show that our perceptions are indeed realistic, in the sense that we agree with each other on these selected items from our consensus reality.
This is a way of saying that our perceptions are highly selective and filtered, that there is a major subsystem of consciousness, Input-Processing discussed at length later, that filters the outside world for us. If two people have similar filtering systems, as, for example, if they are from the same culture, they can agree on many things. But again, as Don Juan says, "I think you are only alert about things you know." If we want to develop a science to study consciousness, and want that science to go beyond our own cultural limitations, we must begin by recognizing the limitations and arbitrariness of much of our ordinary state of consciousness.
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