Tao components

In the systems approach to the study of consciousness and its states Charles T. Tart introduces the system components:

The Components of Consciousness: Awareness, Energy, Structures

People use the phrase states of consciousness to describe unusual alterations in the way consciousness functions. In this chapter we consider some of the experiences people use to judge what states they are in, in order to illustrate the complexity of experience. We then consider what basic concepts or components we need to make sense out of this variety of experiences. I have often begun a lecture on states of consciousness by asking the audience the following question: "Is there anyone here right now who seriously believes that what you are experiencing, in this room, at this moment, may be something you are just dreaming? I don't mean picky, philosophical doubts about the ultimate nature of experience or anything like that. I'm asking whether anyone in any seriously practical way thinks this might be a dream you're experiencing now, rather than you ordinary state of consciousness?" How do you, dear reader, know that you are actually reading this book now, rather than just dreaming about it? Think about it before going on. I have asked this question of many audiences, and I have only occasionally seen a hand go up. No one has stuck to defending this position. If you take this question to mean, "How do you know you're not dreaming now?" you probably take a quick internal scan of the content and quality of your experience and find that some specific elements of it, as well as the overall pattern of your experience, match those qualities you have come to associate with your ordinary waking consciousness, but do not match the qualities you have come to associate with being in a dreaming state of consciousness. I ask this question in order to remind the reader of a basic datum underlying my approach to consciousness—that a person sometimes scans the pattern of his ongoing experience and classifies it as being one or another state of consciousness. Many people make distinctions among only a few states of consciousness, since they experience only a few. Everyone, for example, probably distinguishes between his ordinary waking state, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Some others may distinguish drunkenness as a fourth state of consciousness. Still others who have personally experimented with altered states may want to distinguish among drug-induced, meditative, and emotion-induced states. Without yet attempting to define consciousness or states of consciousness more precisely, suppose we ask people who have personally experienced many states of consciousness how they make these distinctions. What do they look for in their experience that alerts them to the fact that they are in a different state of consciousness from their ordinary one? A few years ago I asked a group of graduate students who had had fairly wide experience with altered states, "What sorts of things in yourself do you check on if you want to decide what state of consciousness you're in at a given moment?" Table presents a categorization of the kinds of answers they gave, a categorization in terms of the systems approach I am explaining as we go along.

EXPERIENTIAL CRITERIA FOR DETECTING ANALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

EXTEROCEPTION (sensing the external world)
•	Alteration in various sensory characteristics of the perceived world—glowing lights at the edges of things, attenuation or accentuation of visual depth
INTEROCEPTION (sensing the body)
•	Alteration in perceived body image---shape or size changes
•	Alteration in detectable physiological parameters---accelerated or retarded heart rate, respiration rate, muscle tonus, tremor
•	Perception of special bodily feelings not normally present---feelings of energy in the body, generally or specially localized, as in the spine; change in quality of energy flow in the body, such as intensity, focus vs. diffuseness
INPUT-PROCESSING (seeing meaningful stimuli)
•	Sensory excitement, involvement, sensuality
•	Enhanced or decreased sensory intensity
•	Alterations of dominance-interaction hierarchies of various sensory modalities
•	Illusion, hallucination, perception of patterns and things otherwise known to be unlikely to actually exist in the environment
EMOTIONS
•	Alteration in emotional response to stimuli---overreacting, underreacting, not reacting, reacting in an entirely different way
•	Extreme intensity of emotions
MEMORY
•	Changes in continuity of memory over time---either an implicit feeling that continuity is present or an explicit checking of memory that shows current experience to be consistent with continuous memories leading up to the present, with gaps suggesting an altered state
•	Details. Checking fine details of perceived environment (external or internal) against memories of how they should be to detect incongruities
TIME SENSE
•	Unusual feeling of here-and-nowness
•	Feeling of great slowing or speeding of time
•	Feeling of orientation to past and/or future, regardless of relation to present
•	Feeling of archetypal quality to time; atemporal experience
SENSE OF IDENTITY
•	Sense of unusual identity, role
•	Alienation, detachment, perspective on usual identity or identities
EVALUATION AND COGNITIVE PROCESSING
•	Alteration in rate of thought
•	Alteration in quality of thought---sharpness, clarity
•	Alteration of rules of logic (compared with memory of usual rules)
MOTOR OUTPUT
•	Alteration in amount or quality of self-control
•	Change in the active body image, the way the body feels when in motion, the proprioceptive feedback signals that guide actions
•	Restlessness, tremor, partial paralysis
INTERACTION WITH THE ENVIRONMENT*
•	Performance of unusual or impossible behaviors---incongruity of consequences resulting from behavioral outputs, either immediate or longer term
•	Change in anticipation of consequences of specific behaviors---either prebehavioral or learned from observation of consequences
•	Change in voice quality
•	Change in feeling of degree of orientation to or contact with immediate environment
•	Change in involvement with vs. detachment from environment
•	Change in communications with others---incongruities or altered patterns, consensual validation or lack of it

*This category represents the combined functioning of several subsystems.

A wide variety of unusual experiences in perceptions of the world or of oneself, of changes in time, emotion, memory, sense of identity, cognitive processes, perception of the world, use of the body (motor output), and interaction with the world were mentioned. If we ignore the categorization of the experiences listed in Table, we have an illustration of the current state of knowledge about states of consciousness—that people experience a wide variety of unusual things. While the experiencers imply that there are meaningful patterns in their experiences that they cluster together as "states," our current scientific knowledge about how his wide variety of things goes together is poor. to understand people's experiences in this area more adequately we must develop conceptual frameworks, theoretical tools, that make sense out of the experiences in some more basic way and that still remain reasonably true to the experiences as reported. We can now begin to look at a conceptual framework that I have been developing for several years about the nature of consciousness, and particularly about the nature of states of consciousness. Although what we loosely call altered states of consciousness are often vitally important in determining human values and behavior, and although we are in the midst of a cultural evolution (or decay, depending on your values) in which experiences from altered states of consciousness play an important part, our scientific knowledge of this area is still sparse. We have a few relationships, a small-scale theory here and there, but mainly assorted and unrelated observations and ideas. My systems approach attempts to give an overall picture of this area to guide future research in a useful fashion. I call this framework for studying consciousness a systems approach because I take the position that consciousness, as we know it, is not a group of isolated psychological functions but a system—an interacting, dynamic configuration of psychological components that performs various functions in greatly changing environments. While knowledge of the nature of the components is useful, to understand fully any system we must also consider the environments with which it deals and the goals of its functioning. So in trying to understand human consciousness, we must get the feel of the whole system as it operates in its world, not just study isolated parts of it. I emphasize a psychological approach to states of consciousness because that is the approach I know best, and I believe it is adequate for building a comprehensive science of consciousness. but because the approach deals with systems, it can be easily translated into behavioral or neurophysiological terms. Let us now look at the basic elements of this systems approach, the basic postulates about what lies behind the phenomenal manifestations of experience. In the following chapters we will put these basic elements of awareness, energy, and structure together into the systems we call states of consciousness.