Non-Ordinary Sensemaking: How to Navigate a New Reality

State competence, Synchronicity and The Four Forces

My book ‘The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world’ comes out in just one week! If just 20% of people on this list pre-order the book, it will become a best seller at launch, which would be a dream come true. In this piece I also announce an upcoming course with Trish Blain, Non-Ordinary Sensemaking, which you can read about all about here.

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On Christmas Eve, Jackson Reffitt reported his father to the FBI. It was 2020, and for several years, Guy Reffitt had become immersed in right wing conspiracies, deep in the online rabbit hole dug by QAnon. Now, Jackson was worried that his father and his friends were planning something big. Days later, on January 6th, Guy Reffitt stormed the Capitol. Speaking to a journalist from prison a year later, he said something that captures not just that day, but the era we live in: ‘Fantasy slammed into reality like a car wreck.’

The more time we spend online, the more we risk getting lost in our own realities. The internet is a powerful drug, and it can change not just how we think, but what we believe is real. The same is true of ideology. Two decades ago, social media began to force us into ideological echo chambers. Today, the rise of generative AI threatens to upturn our whole society, from the workforce to our understanding of consciousness.

This new reality won’t just be defined by technology, but by the different states of consciousness it can induce. Guy Reffitt was, in his own words, trapped in a kind of fantasy. So was the Belgian man who tragically killed himself because an AI chatbot convinced him it was the best way to save the environment.

These are extreme examples, but they speak to something fundamental about human experience: how we make sense of the world is largely determined by the state of consciousness we’re experiencing. A state is a temporary mode of feeling and perceiving, and we’re constantly moving between them. We think and feel differently when we’re consuming caffeine, or practicing breathwork, or deeply in love. Whole societies can enter collective states of grief, jubilation, or even manic fits of dancing. Or, as psychiatrist Mattias Desmet controversially argued during the pandemic, a ‘mass-formation’ that allowed authoritarianism to thrive.

Different modes of perceiving can open up new ways of being and deep insights, or drive us into dangerous delusions. What matters, above all, is how effectively we understand and navigate them.

In this piece, I’m going to explore what I see as the cutting edge of that new kind of sensemaking. I’ll draw on what I and others learned navigating one of the most extreme altered states on earth, a continuous infusion of DMT, as participants of Imperial College’s pioneering DMTx trial. I also feature an interview with Trish Blain, a facilitator who heads up NonOrdinary and has developed one of the best models I’ve found for mapping and navigating states of consciousness.

As I do in my book, I am going to draw on philosophy, cognitive science and phenomenology to explain how we can take what we’re learning from navigating these non-ordinary states and apply them to exploring new solutions to our collective problems.

Crossing State Lines  

In the last few weeks, you’ve probably experienced a number of different states of consciousness. Dreaming, having an orgasm, feeling expanded, joyful, safe threatened or heartbroken. You may have interacted with communities that explicitly value some states over others. Members of a meditation school seeking transcendence aren’t into loosening their inhibitions by drinking on the weekends. A group of drinking buddies aren’t that keen on sitting around gazing at their navels all day.

These guys have nailed it

When we choose a community, we’re also choosing a set of states to see the world from. Each of which give us access to different insights, and none are better or worse than one another outside of specific contexts. However, different ideological groups glorify particular states at the expense of others. Guy Reffitt and QAnoners were driven by a powerful feeling of mythic purpose, a righteous mission to save humanity from elite pedophiles. Other groups align themselves just as rigidly to transcendence, or social justice. They promote not just ideologies, but accompanying states of consciousness that influence everything we perceive.

If we start to view what’s going on in culture and politics through the lens of these states coming into contact with one another, what previously looked insane and nonsensical starts to make more sense. It also opens up the possibility of mediating between them to find more generative solutions to problems.

Moving between different states requires not just an act of translation, but what psychedelic researcher Friederike Meckel calls ‘state competence’. It’s rare anyone teaches us how to get good at being angry, or navigate artistic inspiration effectively, let alone mediate between them; we either have to seek out traditions that focus on particular states, or learn basic state-competence for ourselves through trial and error.

However, what works in one state doesn’t necessarily translate to another. To make matters worse, wisdom traditions don’t usually value the states promoted by other groups. Practices that focus on dissolving the ego like Zen don’t necessarily care for strengthening the ego through psychotherapy, for example. Either there’s some ideal state out there and one tradition has it, or they’re all missing a piece of the pie.

4E Cognitive Science

To see what that may be, we need to understand how we actually interpret and act on information in the first place. This is where we can apply the insights of 4E cognitive science, which argues that as human beings our cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. We’re in a constant process of flow with the world, adapting and changing in response to our environment and one another. 

Cognition is embodied because it is inseparable from our experience as a physical body. Researcher Barbara Tversky has shown how the way we physically move through space changes how we think and how we solve problems. Our concepts and ideas are inseparable from our gestures, feelings, and sensations. We can see hints of this in our own language when we talk about ‘moving on’ from a difficult period, or ‘taking a step back’ to reevaluate a situation. When we admire someone, we ‘look up to them,’ and when we’re feeling excited about an idea, we talk about ‘leaning into it.’

Our cognition is also embedded in the world, inseparable from the environment to which we’ve adapted. A whale is embedded in the ocean, and it doesn’t make sense to conceptualize it as an animal outside of that environment. When we are communicating online, we have to recognise that our cognition is in that moment embedded in a new environment and adapt accordingly. 

Ludicrous.

Cognition is also enacted: everything you do impacts the world around you and creates new realities that in turn constrain or open up possibilities for you. If you save money, you are opening up possibilities that wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t. Our cognition is also extended; it moves through and responds to other people, technology, and the environment. Studies have shown that, as human beings, we perceive our tools as an extension of our bodies. For example, we don’t have to think about how wide our car is getting through a narrow street; we just know. In a sense, the car and our body meld together. Communicating through a phone is, in some sense, putting us into a different state of consciousness than having a face to face conversation.

In case four E’s aren’t enough, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has argued for two more. The first is emotion. In a course I ran with him, he explained that ‘we have to understand that cognition is not cold calculation. It's always got an affective, motivational, emotional aspect. All cognition is about caring or not caring about taking a risk which has affective consequences.’

His sixth E, exaptation, is the one that may be most relevant to how we can bring back useful information from various states of consciousness and apply them to our sensemaking. Exaptation is a term from evolutionary biology, describing the process whereby features of an organism acquire functions they weren’t originally adapted for. One good example is the tongue, which allows us to manipulate food but was exapted to allow us to speak. A bird already has feathers to fly, so nature helped it use those same feathers for showing off to potential mates. Vervaeke argues that when we’re talking about concepts, ‘You're basically taking the same machinery you use for moving around physical space and you’re exapting it.’

A practice like Tai Chi, which can improve our physical balance, can often give us a more balanced view of people or help us flow between different ideas more fluently. Practices like mindfulness that allow us to decenter and accept our experience can help us listen to others without taking what they’re saying personally, and pay closer attention to what they’re actually expressing. In each case, we’re taking what we’ve learned from one state and exapting it to another. 

This points directly to what we miss when we focus on one state over another; the fact that they’re interrelated and work best when they form a rich tapestry of experience, and we can move between them with flexibility and openness. 

DMT Extended State

What happens if we set out to exapt what we can learn in the most intense, mysterious state known to humanity to finding new solutions to systems level problems? That was the personal experiment I had in mind as a participant in a world-first Imperial College trial investigating the effects of an extended infusion of DMT, and the inquiry at the heart of my book. 

DMT is a powerful psychedelic molecule that, when vaporised, elicits an intense altered state that lasts for around 10 minutes. The Imperial study pumped it directly into our bloodstream for 30 minutes, leading to a 40 minute peak experience. I recently participated in a panel event hosted by Graham Hancock and Dr. Andrew Gallimore alongside three of the other participants of the dose-finding part of the DMTx trial (meaning we had 4 doses), forming half of the people on earth who’ve had this experience. 

It was deeply transformative. It was also a huge challenge to my sensemaking. Throughout, I had to stay connected to my intuition, openness, vulnerability and skepticism in equal measure. This is as true of a DMT experience as it is of trying to navigate between extreme conspiracy theory and mainstream media narratives, and what we learn in one can be applied to another with powerful results. Doing it well requires a whole new set of cognitive and emotional skills; skills that may be increasingly necessary in a world where the barriers between online and real are getting thinner, and where seemingly intelligent AI entities populate our waking life more and more. 

For the last five years, I’ve run courses for thousands of people focused on the tools we need to make sense of culture and media more effectively. These are cognitive and emotional capacities we all have, like mindfulness and conversational practices that help us identify our own biases, projections and shadows. Paying subscribers can access an extensive resource of the ones I’ve found most helpful in The Sensemaking Companion. 

However, making sense of states of consciousness that radically challenge the status quo, whether a DMT experience, the eruption of a new social movement online, or the Pentagon’s latest report into ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’, requires us to tap into deeper, more complex capacities: intuition, embodiment and non-ordinary thinking. Openness, curiosity and deep discernment. I have my own very personal example of this from during the DMTx trial, one I didn’t write about in my book but that provides an example of ways we can approach intense states and learn from them. Buckle in, because it’s weird as hell.

Giving Reality the Finger 

During the DMTx trial, some of the wildest things I experienced didn’t happen during the dosings, but between them. Most memorably, I went through a two week period in which I experienced intense synchronicities. Synchronicity, if you haven’t come across the term, was developed by Carl Jung “describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.” 

At the time, I was living on a houseboat in London, on a mooring with around 50 other boats. I had a running joke with a friend there where we used to give each other the finger when we ran into one another. About a week after my first dosing, I was heading to a meeting in the city, and on the way he flicked me off with not one but two fingers, which was a clear escalation and left me little choice but to retaliate with my own double bird flicking. We had a brief chat and I headed off. 

I had no choice but to retaliate.

I got off the tube at London Bridge, and stood on a long escalator going up to the street. It was very crowded on the escalators. About half way up, a man coming down the escalator parallel to mine turned at the waist, made eye contact with me and calmly flicked me off with both fingers. My head spun. I felt as though reality was pulling me in several directions at once. Had that really just happened? Had I imagined it? What the fuck was going on?

The shock stayed with me as I walked through the station. I focused on my breath and tried to entertain multiple possibilities at once. The first was that I imagined the whole thing. That is was the side effect of being an experimental drug subject. Psychedelics act on our salience network, and it’s common for people to have an increased experience of seeing connections and patterns in the period after taking DMT. However, that didn’t preclude that the man may have also flicked me off. It also felt qualitatively different than noticing a meaningful coincidence. If I’d imagined the whole thing, it would be the first time (to my knowledge) that I’d ever had a hallucination in a waking state, and normal hallucinations usually overlay on reality, rather than completely changing its rules. But nevertheless, it could have all been in my head.

As I walked out of the station, I tried to hold that potential at the same time as taking seriously that it did, somehow, take place. It was a tricky dance, because I was aware that jumping to meaning-making was going to lead to more confusion: I simply couldn’t be entirely sure of any of these possibilities.

Close to my destination, I recognised someone across the street. I didn’t know him well, but we’d met a few times socially and also been at a workshop together. He looked quite distinctive as he had a mustache, and he’s from Scandinavia, so I was surprised to see him in London and walked across the street to greet him. As I got closer, I realised just in time to avoid embarrassment that it wasn’t him. It was just a guy who looked a hell of a lot like him. 

Later that day, I found out through a mutual friend that the man I thought he was had killed himself the day before. Hearing that news was so intense, and so unbelievably strange, that I had to sit down and stare at a wall for a while. My experience of that day felt like an altered state, one in which I experienced the normal rules of causality as illusory (I talked about this in detail with Bernardo Kastrup, who had a brilliant explanation for it.) I had already reported my strange pseudo-recognition of the man in question to a third party before I found out about his tragic suicide, so it was far harder to explain than the middle-finger man.

It also raised a question which is at the core of this piece, one that disturbed me as much as it excited me. What if, instead of taking me farther away from reality, this state was helping me to see a new aspect of it? What if learning to navigate this synchronicity state was actually necessary for accessing different types of knowledge I couldn’t access otherwise?

It’s a possibility full of promise and danger. However, it’s one we can and should approach with curiosity, discernment and skill. Luckily, during the trial I had some help with that.

Trish Blain and The Four Forces

Throughout the trial, I was doing weekly sessions (and still am) with a coach and facilitator called Trish Blain. Blain has been running group processes for two decades, from relational practices to tantra, and is an expert in navigating and mapping different kinds of altered states. 

Trish Blain

She uses a model she’s developed called the Four Forces which I found invaluable in my preparation for the trial. I’m traditionally quite skeptical of models and maps, for as Alfred Korzybski said, the map is not the territory. This map in particular I have found invaluable for making sense of different states, and it works as well for navigating a DMT experience as it does for de-escalating an argument. The idea is simple, namely that we have four core desires we’re trying to get met: Connection, Purpose, Growth and Expression. As Blain explains it: 

The Four Forces starts as a map of basic desires and human motivations. Everybody wants to belong, to be loved, and be in love: Connection. Everybody wants to be unique and be seen and heard: Expression. Everybody wants to be part of and contribute to something greater than themselves: Purpose. And everybody wants tomorrow to be better than today: Growth. But what ends up happening is we're not taught what these desires actually are or how to get them, so we end up creating strategies that give us a limited version of them.

We end up making choices based on either/or, and these become polarities. For example ‘I want to belong, so therefore I'm going to give up some of my expression so that I can fit in.’ Or, ‘I don't want to get trapped in group-think, so I'm going to be a lone wolf’. Or, you might decide ‘I'm going to be of service so I can feel valuable and deny my own desires.’ These examples are all strategies we create in order to get what we want without the apparent downsides.

However, there’s a problem. For example, when you only choose to be a lone wolf, you shut yourself off from belonging and feeling, and eventually what happens? We end up feeling bored or frustrated because the strategy still doesn’t give us what we really want. It doesn’t work, so we flip flop, or try something else. We end up doing all these different gyrations trying to figure out how to get what we want or need, when what we actually want is to be able to be in deep relationship with others and at the same time be fully ourselves. We want both, but don’t know how to do it.

She suggests that the trick is to connect to all of these innate desires at the same time, and learn how to enter the different states associated with each.

When we do them all at the same time as deeply as we can, we start to resolve the issues that come up when we’re only focusing on connection, or only on expression, for example. The contradictions go away, and instead they actually enhance each other. We experience reality differently. In fact, we start to experience these desires as expanded and non-ordinary states, including flow states. 

A great analogy for this is jazz improv. You get to have your solo, expression, to feel what wants to come from your unique contribution, but you are also feeling into the other people and their contribution – connection. You’re leaning into something that’s emerging, which is greater than you could have imagined, so you’ve got growth. And the purpose is the structure of the music in this metaphor, which provides the foundation and unifying element. When you start to apply these all very deeply and at the same time, a lot of the issues and problems that show up culturally also start to shift, and new options open up.

Each of the Four Forces maps onto different states of consciousness, and helps untangle some of the confusion different practices have. I found this particularly important in navigating peak experiences. Instead of a ‘state-absolutism’ where one a particular type of state is seen as revealing ultimate reality (like the so-called ‘mystical experience’ in psychedelic therapy models), models like this provide a more integrative approach. Different states provide us with different perspectives on reality that are equally valid and all true at once. 

The ‘kenshō’ experience of Zen Buddhism, of becoming one with all things, can be seen as the ultimate moment of connection. No longer are we separate individuals – rather, we dissolve into the vast nothingness of the universe. But we can also have a very different mystical experience in which our single point of consciousness becomes the whole universe, which is the ultimate in expression. This is an experience of ‘all is one and you are it,’ in which your unique expression of consciousness is one with the universe. Alternatively, we might have a peak experience in which we see the world as full of meaning, intention, and direction. Everything is revealed, we see underlying patterns behind things, and know that everything is coming together for a higher purpose. Or, we might have an ecstatic experience in which we’re filled with life-force energy. Tantric experiences, like a kundalini awakening, are ones of tapping into a wellspring of aliveness and expansion which map onto growth.

The trick is not to think that one of these peak states is worth chasing at the expense of the others. The core of Blain’s approach is additive. It’s not ‘either I express myself, or I choose to belong’ but finding a way to hold all your desires at once. This, eventually, was what helped me to hold the synchronicity experience I had and use it as a basis from which to start seriously researching panpsychism, quantum physics and working on improving my own intuition.

I forgot to take photos of that process, so the best I can do is this stock image of a man roughly my age doing important research while wearing a sweater

Including an understanding of states of consciousness in our sensemaking opens the door to finding new ways beyond the tangles and confusions of the different political tribes. It helps us consider what desires different groups or organisations are trying to get met, and the tactics they’re using to do so. It also allows us to deeply empathise with those desires, which is the only way we’re going to collectively build new social realities together. Non-ordinary states, by definition, are about taking us beyond ourselves, beyond our own existing frames of perception. And it is this, Blain argues, that we need to incorporate if we truly want to build the kinds of new paradigms that many in ecological, systems change and sensemaking communities dream of.

This is the inspiration behind Non-Ordinary Sensemaking, a brand new online course Trish and I have designed together which starts in mid-July. It’s designed to help people dive deeply into these different ways of knowing and apply them practically to day to day life. You can read all about it below, and for a limited time you can get a discount with proof of purchase of my book.

A New Reality

Talking about creating new paradigms of perception is always tricky, because the concept has been so abused by the New Age. One of the challenges of this kind of approach is moving beyond the ‘woo-woo’ of the New Age to something more robust and critical.

At the same time, non-ordinary sensemaking invites us to challenge the assumptions underlying the metaphysics of consumer culture, namely the idea that reality is only composed of matter, or Physicalism, a topic I explored in Reality Eats Culture For Breakfast. Physicalism has contributed to a culture of state-absolutism. There is one state from which we are allowed to legitimately make sense: the waking state of calm rationality from which we can conduct scientific measurements. A state that doesn’t really exist outside of an Enlightenment fantasy of how the mind works.

Instead, it makes more sense to see humans as continuously traveling through a spectrum of states. There is a range which we can refer to as normal, otherwise it’s hard to agree on anything. However, those non-ordinary states that stray from that, whether a mystical experience, or a runner’s high, are not aberrations. They are crucial aspects of the human experience without which we are trapped in a narrow, boring, inaccurate view of the world.

A more expansive way of understanding reality also opens us to the magic and weirdness of the world. A world full of unexplained phenomena that cause our normal sensemaking to fail, from the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena that governments now seem to be taking seriously, to countless parapsychological phenomena reported every day.

To embrace weirdness and use it to broaden our vision, we need to draw on new skills and abilities. Navigating a new reality means adopting an additive approach to how we interpret, learn from and choose to experience the many states we have access to. It invites us to seek out novelty and build extraordinary new adaptations and solutions. To dance with reality, seeing in that movement the hints of deeper patterns and meaning that can change not just how we think, but who we are.