non ordinary states
Non-ordinary consciousness — encompassing altered, psychedelic, holotropic, mystical, and primary states — occupies a contested but increasingly central position in the depth-psychology corpus. Stanislav Grof furnishes the term’s most systematic elaboration: non-ordinary states accessed through LSD or Holotropic Breathwork disclose strata of the psyche ordinarily unavailable to observation, demanding, in his view, a wholesale revision of Newtonian-Cartesian assumptions about mind and reality. The phenomenological range he documents — perinatal matrices, transpersonal experience, near-death perception — presses against the boundaries of psychiatric nosology, which historically misread such states as pathological. Robin Carhart-Harris approaches the same territory through neurodynamics, proposing that psychedelic and other ‘primary’ states represent high-entropy conditions in which the default mode network’s regulatory hierarchy collapses, yielding access to more archaic, less constrained modes of processing he links explicitly to Jung’s collective unconscious. William James, standing upstream of both, insisted on the noetic authority of mystical states and their irreducibility to ordinary waking cognition. The tension running through the corpus is diagnostic versus revelatory: whether non-ordinary states are derangements to be corrected or epistemic apertures to be cultivated. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ invocation of such states as sources for mythological reconstruction and Spiegelman’s Jungian account of ego-dissolution both affirm the revelatory position, while the broader clinical literature maintains therapeutic rather than metaphysical framings.
Some of the observations from non-ordinary states would require not only revision of our ideas about the human psyche, but of the traditional beliefs about the nature of reality.
Grof argues that evidence gathered in non-ordinary states compels a radical epistemological revision extending beyond psychology to the foundational metaphysical assumptions of Western science.
, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980thesis
Some of the observations from non-ordinary states would require not only revision of our ideas about the human psyche, but of the traditional beliefs about the nature of reality.
This parallel passage confirms Grof’s central thesis that non-ordinary states furnish empirical grounds for challenging conventional ontology, not merely psychiatric theory.
, LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine, 1980thesis
entropy is suppressed in normal waking consciousness, meaning that the brain operates just below criticality… entry into primary states depends on a collapse of the normally highly organized activity within the default mode network.
Carhart-Harris proposes that non-ordinary or ‘primary’ states arise when DMN-mediated entropy suppression fails, neurodynamically grounding the phenomenology of altered consciousness.
, The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs, 2014thesis
If the brain was to be sampled during a primary state (such as a psychedelic state) we would predict that the rules that normally apply to normal waking consciousness will become less robust.
Carhart-Harris identifies non-ordinary states as conditions in which the orthogonal network architecture sustaining ordinary waking consciousness breaks down, producing more fluid, less differentiated cognition.
, The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs, 2014supporting
In dreams, psychosis and other altered states, archetypal themes shaped by human history emerge into consciousness.
Carhart-Harris cites Jung to argue that non-ordinary states provide access to collective, phylogenetically ancient psychic material ordinarily suppressed by waking-state neural organisation.
, The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs, 2014supporting
psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy. These tools make it possible to study important processes that under normal circumstances are not available for direct observation.
Grof frames psychedelic induction of non-ordinary states as a scientific instrument for accessing psychic processes otherwise invisible to standard clinical observation.
, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980supporting
psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.
Grof’s parallel formulation reinforces the instrumental-epistemic status of non-ordinary states as windows onto otherwise inaccessible psychological processes.
, LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine, 1980supporting
psychedelic sessions were associated with dramatic emotions, psychomotor excitement, and vivid perceptual changes. They thus seemed to be closer to states that psychiatrists considered to be pathological and tried to suppress by all means.
Grof documents the historical misclassification of non-ordinary states as pathology, establishing the diagnostic-versus-revelatory tension that structures the field.
, LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine, 1980supporting
psychedelic sessions were associated with dramatic emotions, psychomotor excitement, and vivid perceptual changes. They thus seemed to be closer to states that psychiatrists considered to be pathological.
This passage recounts psychiatry’s categorical resistance to non-ordinary states, contextualising Grof’s reformulation of them as therapeutically and epistemically significant.
, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980supporting
I gain an assist from templates that lie in the imaginal worlds, the collective images of the unconscious, and those drawn up through dreams and non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Estés positions non-ordinary states of consciousness alongside dreams and imaginal experience as legitimate epistemological sources for mythological and depth-psychological reconstruction.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
a withdrawal of the centre of psychic gravity from ego consciousness occurs, and the energy thus invested in the unconscious produces a new pattern of psychic functioning which is not centered around ego consciousness.
Spiegelman describes the Jungian self-encounter as inducing a non-ordinary functional state in which ego-centred consciousness is displaced, producing a reorganised psychic economy.
, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985supporting
half expecting to hear of encounters with enlightenment, discoveries of the spirit, perhaps even altered states of consciousness. But the novice replied that during his first year in the contemplative life he had simply learned to open and close doors.
Kurtz employs the expectation of altered states as a foil to illustrate how contemplative traditions may deliberately subordinate dramatic non-ordinary experience to disciplined everyday practice.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994aside
Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see.
James’s analysis of the ‘field of consciousness’ provides a proto-phenomenological account of altered scope and depth in awareness that anticipates later theorisations of non-ordinary states.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902aside
Even when one enters into supernormal and suprarational experience, there should be no disturbance of the poise… It is not by becoming irrational or infrarational that one can go beyond ordinary nature into supernature.
Aurobindo distinguishes legitimate supranormal states from pathological regression, insisting that authentic non-ordinary consciousness elevates rather than dissolves rational clarity.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948aside