7 Higher States of Consciousness That Can Genuinely Warp Your Perception of Reality

Dreams hold intriguing insights. Dreams help you make sense of reality. Dreams are where you can rehearse your life.

Photo by Samuel Regan on Unsplash

---

Before we get started… Only read this part if you're an online writer or an aspiring online writer. 

I'm planning out some content to help you become more successful in gaining followers, posting consistently, and earning more money from your online writing. 

But I need your help. 

Click here to answer a 35-second survey about your online writing journey.

---

Higher states of consciousness are a window into a different way of thinking.

Each state will change how you think. The cool thing? You can create these higher states of consciousness to alter the course of your life.

I’ve used flow states, as an example, to write consistently for the past seven years. Without this higher state of consciousness, I’d be stuck back in 2014 trying to get over my fear of what other people thought about my writing.

Flow states mean I simply don’t give a damn anymore about any of that.

A change in consciousness helps you separate the important from the unimportant. Outside noise disappears. The level, depth, and length of your focus changes.

If your brain had a God-mode, it would be higher states of consciousness.

1. Euphoria of a Runner (Runner’s High)

Euphoria after a run feels incredible. You can get a runner’s high from any form of aerobic exercise. People chase this higher state of consciousness because you’re left feeling calm once you switch it on.

A runner’s high isn’t a made-up phenomenon either. Runner Natalie Jessica describes it best:

[Runner’s High] is caused by a flood of chemicals throughout your body. These chemicals, including glutamate and endorphins, are produced in order to take away the pain and discomfort of the run, and they end up overwhelming the system by the time you stop running, thus leading to feelings of elation and happiness.

Running is a form of mindfulness. And mindfulness is at the heart of all psychological superpowers.

How to do it:

• Warm-up and begin a slow jog. Run at 50% of your capacity.

• Once warm, increase to 70% of your capacity.

• Zone out during the middle of your run by concentrating on the moment.

• Final step: Towards the end of your run, lift the pace to 90% or more of your capacity. Picture the finish line as motivation. Push as hard as you can. The level you push to during this final phase will determine whether you gain access to the higher state of consciousness, that is the runner’s high.

Why it works:

According to Jessica, you don’t feel as tired at the end of your run as you’d expect if you experienced a runner’s high.

This gives you a sense of accomplishment and the chemicals released into your body make you feel happy. Happiness combined with a feeling of accomplishment makes you feel superhuman. A superhuman ability can make a habit feel effortless and continue for years to come.

2. Near-Death Experience

I’ve experienced this higher state of consciousness a few times in my life.

At 16 years of age, I was walking along the main road with a friend late at night. All of a sudden a gang of youths appearing as a mystical group of charging bulls came hurtling towards us. The fear froze my body. I couldn’t run from the danger. I felt helpless.

I got beaten over the head with a baseball bat. I got hit by the baseball bat on every part of my body. As the baseball bat struck my tender skin, my friend received a large number of knife wounds. Blood poured out from his chest.

During this near-death experience, time slowed down. A higher state of consciousness took over. The strange part?

I felt no pain.

The mind took control. It shut down my pain receptors. It elevated my gratefulness to be alive in the first place. I experienced a spiritual moment.

Everything in that moment seemed to be at one with each other. I didn’t feel anger towards my attackers — I felt a bizarre sense of love. That love appeared in front of me. The hand of one of the attackers lifted me from the ground and freed me from a possible fateful moment. Even more crazy?

The man whose hand saved my life, now travels around third world countries saving other people’s lives. The attacker can become the healer.

A near-miss with cancer produced another near-death experience, full of warped realities. When your life is on the line, your priorities change.

In my case, the hospital became a portal to another world. The anaesthetic took me to a white room in an unfamiliar place. I could hear the surgeons talking, even though I was technically asleep. My body’s fight or flight mode blocked reality to help me make it to the other side.

What’s weird about a near-death experience, like cancer, is it places a mental bookmark in your brain.

You never forget it. The memory lasts a lifetime. It holds a hidden meaning you can unlock with your mind multiple times to tap into a kind of wisdom you may not have experienced before.

Science says two things:

1. Near-death experiences can cause a sense of peacefulness in a person.

2. Near-death experiences have similar features to a DMT psychedelic experience.

That is, you can experience a feeling of transcending your body.

3. Lucid Dreaming

Shane Ellerton’s experience with lucid dreaming reminded me, I have definitely experienced this higher state of consciousness.

Here’s his description:

“Once you manage to control your breathing, think positively and try to remove self-perpetuating thoughts out of your head. You may become so relaxed that you have the sensation of waking up but not actually properly woken up, but rather in that state of limbo where you could easily drift back into deep sleep.

You are aware of your surroundings in this state of limbo, although everything will appear in a sort of half-light. There may be some familiar objects around you where you normally sleep; however, not all is quite the same. You are not moving but rather you fixate on an object around you; whether it is a picture on a wall or even a stain on the floor.

You then have the sensation of gravitating towards it as if you were being absorbed into the object you are gazing at. During this moment, it is crucial that you avoid outside thoughts as this will throw you into a fully awakened state. Also, outside noise could interrupt the transition into a lucid state hence the need to be in a quiet environment.

Once fully immersed into, you may feel that you are floating on aether. You will be able to walk or even float in your surroundings in which you are sleeping in, or you could be succumbed into another landscape. In most cases, you know that you are lucid dreaming.

However, there are a few ways to find out if you are in a lucid-dreaming state. Glance at a digital clock and try to read the time. If the display on the digital clock looks gibberish, then this is a surefire way to tell you that you are in a lucid dream.”

How to do it:

The main technique required for lucid dreaming is to remember your dreams. This is achieved by writing your dreams down right after you wake up. When you read your dreams while awake, you reinforce them.

The reinforcement of your dream allows you to potentially revisit the same dream again during a future sleep.

Each time you revisit a dream you start to notice when you are and aren’t dreaming. Being aware of the fact you’re dreaming, is what leads to the lucid dream and the higher state of consciousness.

Why it works:

Dreams hold intriguing insights. Dreams help you make sense of reality. Dreams are where you can rehearse your life.

Image Credit: Healthline

4. Optimal Experience and the “Flow” State

A flow state is where the work you’re doing transcends you. This happens to me every time I write. I lose track of time. My ego vanishes. I work to serve rather than extract.

I channel emotion, energy, higher levels of consciousness, love, and empathy into every word I type. The words pour out of me and I can’t even explain how. Before I start writing I feel as though I am out of words. After 20 minutes of writing, I’m in flow, and I have no idea how the article completes itself. It’s as though I’m no longer operating my body or mind.

A flow state is a higher level of consciousness you can use to work from. Once you’ve experienced a long period in flow, the present moment never feels the same again. You chase flow because flow is outside of you.

How to do it:

• Drink coffee.

• Have a warm shower to relax you.

• Pump movie soundtracks through a pair of noise-canceling headphones.

• Start working. Forget the end result.

• Work for a minimum of 20 minutes.

• Let flow take over.

• Once in flow, stay there. Don’t break your concentration.

• Keep the people who benefit from your work front and center.

5. Mystical Experience (Sometimes Regarded as the Highest of all Higher States of Consciousness)

I am not religious. I did have a mystical experience in a church though. One Sunday, right after my heart got broken into a million tiny pieces, my friend suggested I come to church with him. I went along for the company.

Darkness filled the inside of the church. A few lights shined on the stage. Over one-thousand people filled the audience. The music played. The audience sang.

Their voices combined with lights and evangelical harmonies caused a switch in my head to be pushed. God didn’t show up.

But the power of music did cause me to get chills down my spine. The voices created high levels of energy. I later found out many of the people there had endured immense struggles in their lives.

Emotion linked the minds of each person in the room. My mind accidentally linked into their network.

Losing the love of my life spun me into their direction. Loss pushes you in the same direction as others who have experienced loss.

---

The best description of a mystical experience is this:

“A mystical experience is anything that is hard to comprehend or describe with rational or simple language. Generally, it is short-lasting, feels immensely meaningful or profound, and shatters some of your preconceptions.

You may encounter paradoxical or alien concepts firsthand, such as non-duality; a realization that nothing in the universe is truly separate, or impermanence; an awareness that pretty much everything is temporary.”

I’ve had short experiences where I relive a past life. Sometimes I feel as though I have already lived the current moment. These tiny windows of reality don’t last long. Pretty quickly they vanish and I can’t even remember what is happening.

Another mystical moment I have experienced multiple times is the first day of being alive. I remember being given a blue blanket by my grandma in the hospital. I remember the two stuffed bears my aunty gave me on the same day, that I still have.

They say we forget the first few years of our lives — and that’s mostly true for me, except the first day of being alive.

I don’t know what it means, and that is perhaps the coolest thing about mystical experiences. It’s easy to dismiss a mystical experience. What if you didn’t? What if you dared to look beyond what makes sense?

How you know you’ve had a mystical experience:

(Courtesy of Mateo Sol)

You have ‘conscious unity.’

Meaning, your individual identity is temporarily lost. There is a oneness with everything in your experience.

There is no time or space.

“With a lack of a definable identity or spatial recognition, your sense of time feels infinite. You go from perceiving time from moment-to-moment as a static individual, to perceiving it as a stream of eternal present moments.”

Without time, space is endless.

You experience a more intricate and profound reality.

Mateo says everything feels innately perfect.

Gratitude fills the moment.

Gratitude makes you feel ecstatic. You feel a sense of overwhelming happiness or joy. Consciousness becomes the gift, not a feeling of your own existence.

The meaning of ‘paradox’ reveals itself.

“Our sense of self or identity creates duality in our perception of reality (‘I’ am separate from ‘That’).

However, the moment this separation disappears, you’re left with a non-dual reality in which your intellect finds paradox after paradox (e.g., something is both light/dark, here/absent, human/divine, limited/eternal).

In truly understanding paradox, you experience mind-blowing and expansive realizations.”

You can’t put it into words.

The depth of experience is too hard to describe. Words are only a shallow description of what occurred and you don’t want to downplay what happened, out of fear you might ruin it or never experience it again.

You return to normal with a slight change.

You return from a mystical experience. The challenge is you’re never the same. Something changes and you may spend the rest of your life figuring out what it is. Knowing what changed doesn’t matter.

Experiencing reality with the change is the point of the experience.

6. Out-of-Body Experience

I have not reached this higher state of consciousness, yet. Many have. This picture below illustrates what some describe as an out-of-body experience.

Image Credit: reasonandscience

Healthline says cardiac arrest is one potential trigger for having an out-of-body experience.

A 2014 study of 101 people who survived cardiac arrest, found 13% of participants “felt a separation from their body during resuscitation.” 7% reported an “awareness of events they wouldn’t have seen from their actual perspective.”

Even if you haven’t experienced this higher state of consciousness, it’s cool to imagine what might happen if you ever do. Awareness of a higher state of consciousness is the pre-work for intentionally having one.

7. Modified States of Consciousness, Achieved with the Help of Meditative Psychotechnics

This is the category of psychedelics.

Podcaster Tim Ferriss is a big believer in this category. He believes this higher state of consciousness can help you heal from past trauma.

Again, I am not at this level and stay well clear of it. Altering your mind with psychedelics still needs a lot of research.

It’s an exciting possibility though. The possibility of the mind being healed through natural ingredients is endlessly fascinating.

It’s so easy to be messed up by trauma you can’t control and didn’t ask for.

An escape from trauma through a higher state of consciousness is something to look forward to in the future.

Final Thought

Is your mind warped yet?

Higher states of consciousness are fascinating. Your mind has so many dimensions to it. Reality and consciousness don’t contain an instruction manual.

Many experiences with higher states of consciousness are dismissed because they are misunderstood by so many of us. Now you understand what they are, your ability to experience a different level of thinking can be used in many ways.

Use higher states of consciousness to question reality.

When you question the reality you quickly move past shallow human constructs such as opinions, anger, or selfishness.

---

This instalment of Unfiltered is free for everyone. I send this email weekly. If you would also like to receive it, join the 92,000+ other smart people who absolutely love it today.

👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏