Religion and rituality

[Angrboda]

Many rituals used in religion are a reliable, predictable, and potent way of bringing about an altered state of consciousness. Think of a kid spinning around until she gets dizzy. She is provoking, by the very simple mechanism of spinning, an altered state of consciousness which is powerfully different from her base state. There are additional elements in religion, reflecting its more complex social and cultural function, but this is likely one of the core "causes" of ritualized behavior. People in Asia often grow up with meditation as an automatic habit they acquire early on; same principle: inducing a powerful and significantly altered state of consciousness. (I have a book on Zen and the brain which I'm episodically dipping into, and one theme that is emerging is that deep states of meditation parallel properties of various stages of sleep, inhibiting some functions, disinhibiting others, and so on, while retaining consciousness and lucidity. It's a thought provoking idea.)

Sam Harris has observed, I think rightly, that living is a constant act of engaging in behaviors to alter our state of consciousness. When we feel hunger, we eat food in order to reach a non-hungry state of mind. We pursue careers to earn money to buy things to make us happy (alter consciousness from a less happy state to a more happy one). And so on.

An important question, I haven't answered, is do we seek altered states of consciousness for their own sake, and why, evolutionarily, do we do it, if so. Or do we pair altered states of consciousness with socially or reproductively advantageous behaviors to "super-size" the motivation to engage in such behaviors? Or is the pleasure derived from pursuing and obtaining altered states of consciousness just an epiphenomenon, a by-product of having brains that are good at non-altered state processing tasks, which, yield novelty when pushed into an altered state?

There is an interesting documentary on the co-evolution of plants like cannabis and humans which is worth seeking out. (I'll look later.) But drugs which induce an altered state of consciousness have been a constant companion, from alcohol to the bark of a willow tree to the cocoa plant's leaves. You might say evoking altered states of consciousness co-evolved between our cognitive needs, and the behavior of things and animals in our environment. There's even a documentary which suggests that beer is responsible for civilization. (Also worth seeking out.)