Making Altered States of Consciousness Part of Your Life

States of Consciousness

You have already experienced thousands upon thousands of different states of consciousness in the course of your life. These states are results of the interaction between your thoughts, emotions and physiology. Our states are constantly shifting and changing, an angry word can change your state in one direction and a smile take you in another. The stimulus that shifts our state may also come from within us like reliving a past event or anticipating the future. We all want to live as much of our lives in positive states as is possible. Unfortunately the reality is most of us spend too much of our time caught up in a negative states.

In the West we have developed a habit of looking to outside events and things to generate desirable states. When feeling down we try to lift our spirits by buying ourselves a treat. We may find ourselves pursuing serial relationships in search of the high we experience when we fall in love. We convince ourselves of our lives be complete when we land that prize new job.

Online State Control

We generate online states when we are engaged and going about our everyday business. Off-line states are created when you have shutout the outside world and turn your awareness inwards. To fulfil your true potential you need to develop your skills in utilising both your online and off-line states.

The best technology available at this moment for developing your online state control is Neuro Linguistic Programming our NLP. By applying its techniques, you can revisit positives states you have experienced in the past and discover how you have encoded them within your neurology. You then can create an anchor, like touching your thumb and forefinger together. You can then trigger the state at will by firing the anchor whenever you want to recreate that state in the future.

Going Off-Line

The practice of taking our consciousness off-line is not part of our mainstream Western culture. Although this is something that is beginning to change with increasing numbers of people taking up meditate. We are fortunate that in the last couple of decades to have seen an explosion in our understanding of our brain mind body systems, this is leading to the development of non-mystical technologies and processes that allow us to take our consciousness off-line in a ways that is more suited to our Western culture.

Why go off-line

To answer this question fully would take several chapters of a book, so I will only summarise the main benefits here.

* It increases your awareness of signals coming from your unconscious mind.

* It allows you to enter states where you can communicate your goals to your unconscious mind, so it can assist you in their achievement.

* It allows you to access modes of consciousness that are generated by the older mammalian part of our brains that are normally swamped by the signals by your rational conscious mind.

* It aids the integration of left and right brain functioning that improves the richness of our everyday experiences and increases creativity.

* It improves your awareness of the natural flows and rhythms of your body and mind.


Technologies for Taking Your Mind and Off-Line

Once again I only have room here to give you a quick summary of these technologies you can find more details on my blog.

* Meditation -- the traditional method of quieting the mind that has been practice for thousands of years.

* Brainwave entrainment, using audio or visual technologies such as binaural beats to slow down your brainwave frequencies from the normal beta of everyday consciousness down to alpha or theta you reproduce the conditions created by meditation. The research is starting to uncover which brainwave frequencies are most appropriate for various altered states of consciousness.

* Hypnosis -- the development by Milton Erickson of the permissive methods of hypnosis has inspired the development of a number of highly effective methods of generating and utilising altered states of consciousness. The effectiveness of these methods is further enhanced when they are combined with brainwave entrainment.

* Lucid dreaming -- this method uses techniques that allow you to become aware of the fact that you are dreaming while you are still in the dream state. Although records of lucid dreams go back thousands of years, it is only recently that systematic studies have been carried out.

I hope my brief summary will encourage you to carry out further investigations into the fascinating world of altered state of consciousness.