A discussion of altered states of consciousness (ASC), like one on politics or religion, invites strong emotional reactions. In this paper I question some assumptions about the accuracy and benevolence of the typical ordinary state of consciousness (OSC) while discussing some of the main functions of ASC. Three of the main arguments against ASC are that they: 1) go against what is normal and rational, 2) wreak havoc at personal and social levels, and 3) produce a delusional account of reality, as compared with the (OSC). Because we live in a monophasic (rather than polyphasic, see Laughlin, McManus, & d'Aquili, 1992; Whitehead, in press) society that primarily values our ordinary state of consciousness to the detriment of other states, these assumptions are rarely questioned.

1. Ordinary and altered states of consciousness

Regarding the first argument, we are immediately confronted by the relativity of what is "normal" and "rational." As various anthropologists have pointed out, what we consider "normal" in post-industrial, Western societies differs markedly from the experiences of other groups. Turnbull (1993, p. 74) gives a lucid example of how he could not even begin to understand the Mbuti of Congo until he transformed his consciousness to fully participate in their world:

As to rationality, Richard Shweder (1986) has cogently discussed how holding such ideas as reincarnation, which may at first blush strike the reader as irrational, may be based on a rational consideration of empirical evidence, although parting from different metaphysical axioms than those held by many in the secular West who hold different ones (and by definition axioms are not the result of rational consideration but a-priori assumptions).

As to the second issue, undoubtedly the search for and consequences of ASC can be destructive, as in the personal and social costs of drug addiction, which is why various traditional societies provide training on and ritualize the use of psychoactive drugs, which then cause no harm, in contrast with what occurs in our midst (Dobkin de Rios, 1984). Let me be clear that despite my cheery title it is not my contention that ASC are necessarily beneficent. Although evidence has accumulated that just having unusual experiences and ASC is not per se a sign of dysfunction (Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Moreira-Almeida & Cardeña, in press), this does not deny that hellish ASC are also encountered in the ravines of a schizophrenic or otherwise seriously disordered mind (Cardeña, in press), or that ritually-induced ASC to form in-group cohesion may not be used for horrible purposes as in the Nazi Nuremberg rallies. The other side of the coin, however, is that the vast majority of atrocities have been planned while in an OSC, from decisions to wage unnecessary wars and genocides to the socially accepted mistreatment of non-human sentient beings to save some money.

The final point in this section concerns the presumption that ASC "create phenomenal contents of consciousness that misrepresent or create delusional beliefs of the surrounding world and oneself" and the OSC does not (Kallio & Revonsuo, 2003, pp. 141-142; a re-statement of a position previously advanced by Natsoulas, 1983). This position goes against not only centuries old critiques of naïve realism in both the West and the East, but a vast amount of research on perception, cognition, and personality. For instance, perceptual illusions shows that our senses routinely distort stimuli in various ways, physiological habituation evidences that repeated exposure to a stimulus may make it imperceptible, and studies of other species show how limited our perceptual channels are as compared to theirs (Balcombe, 2010). To these we can add research on how the OSC is geared to detect certain aspects of the environment and disregard others (Ornstein, 1986), and on how emotions and cognitions routinely have a self-serving bias and distort how we evaluate and remember events (Greenwald, 1980). Thus, Western and Eastern spiritual ascriptions that state that we perceive the world through a glass darkly or the veil of maya (or illusion) are consistent with psychological and neuroscientific research. As to the argument that evolution should produce beings that do not create delusional beliefs or misrepresentations, research shows that a mere approximation to what may actually be "there" is selected for rather than a resources-taxing very accurate representation (Hoffman, 2009).

Instead of considering ASC as necessarily leading to delusions and misrepresentations, I concur with Mishara & Schwartz (in press) that ASC barely suspend or disrupt our consensual common sense ways of constructing reality, and that we cannot state a-prior what is the ontological status of these alternatives. A discussion of the main purposes to alter our consciousness constitutes the gist of this paper, inspired by multidisciplinary contributions to the study of ASC (Cardeña & Winkelman, in press a, b).

That most cultures throughout history (around 90%, see Bourguignon, 1973) until very recently have established forms to attain ASC (often during well-developed rituals) suggests that they have considered them positive rather than as the purveyors of misinformation. For example, the phenomenon known as shamanism, found in hunting-gathering societies across the globe, is characterized by the controlled practice of altering the shaman's (and often his or her audience's) state of consciousness or, in less secular terms, experiencing other realities (Cardeña & Krippner, 2010; Winkelman, in press). Eastern spiritual traditions have described and codified meditation techniques that aim to alter one's consciousness in the short- and long-term (Shear, in press), as have performance disciplines (Zarrilli, in press), martial arts, and sexual practices (Maliszewski, Vaughan, Krippner, Holler, & Fracasso, in press).

The West has also had a plethora of techniques to induce ASC, from the use of caves in prehistoric and Greek times, to drugs, dances, mystery rituals, hypnotic and other suggestions, meditative practices, and so on (Cardeña & Alvarado, in press; Sluhovsky, in press; Ustinova, in press). In our times, various groups have continued or modified previous techniques and enlisted technology with the goal of altering consciousness (St John, in press), but we have barely gone beyond the cogitations of Plato on altered consciousness (Cardeña, 2009).

2. Why Do We Seek to Alter Our Consciousness?

A visitor from another planet would surely find it puzzling that humans spend about one third of their lives in sleep states yet pay little attention to them. Besides this inbuilt alteration of consciousness, humans (and other species, see Siegel, 1989) seek to affect their consciousness in other ways. Some psychoactive drugs have been synthesized in the laboratory but non-urbane inhabitants have had at their disposal for millennia compounds with remarkable abilities to produce ASC. For instance, N,Ndimethyltryptamine (DMT) is found in many plants and animals, and its molecular structure is remarkably similar to that of the neurotransmitter serotonin (Mishor, McKenna, & Callaway, in press). Indeed, the most ubiquitous drug supplier we have is our own nervous system, whose function is based on various neurotransmitters with very similar structures to those of psychoactive drugs (the latter can affect us precisely because they mimic our endogenously produced substances; Presti, in press).

Contrary to what many of us were told about the artificiality of affecting our states of consciousness, it turns out that we have been using all along our biologygiven resources. But why do we try to alter our state of consciousness? Ludwig (1966) posited that ASC can have healing, social, or epistemological functions. In the remaining of the paper, I will expand that list and discuss how ASC can help us: A) make small adjustments so we can be more effective at our tasks, B) enhance the experience of life, C) explore nonfactual possibilities that may be actualized through creative ways, D) enhance the sense of meaningfulness in life and heal in different ways, and E) obtain alternate epistemological routes to comprehend better ourselves and the universe at large.

A) Making small adjustments in everyday life Because they are taken routinely and produce minor modifications, we generally disregard how we routinely affect our consciousness by using caffeine to make us more alert, chamomile tea to produce a gentle sedative affect, or nicotine as either a stimulant or a relaxant. Feeling low we may choose to initiate an energetic walk or, being tired of thinking about and writing this paper, I may decide to give my mind a break and let a good film director invite me into another reality or try to achieve a flow state (i.e., full immersion in an activity, Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) while playing tennis. I do not claim that these various activities generally bring about ASC (although flow states have a number of commonalities, such as time changes, with more radical alterations of consciousness, Cardeña, 2006), but at the very least they exemplify our propensity to affect our states of consciousness in subtle ways throughout the day.

B) Enhance the experience of life We do not need to embrace hedonism and declare pleasure the only intrinsic good to realize that one of the major joys of life is the experience with which our senses regale us. Throughout our development, however, we substitute more and more the expanded, open consciousness of the baby and infant for an ego-centered, focused, conceptual mediation of the world (Gopnik, 2009). Although pragmatic in many ways, this form of apprehension superposes conceptual layers on direct, sensuous experience. That many people find something amiss in a low intensity existence is borne by the myriad activities through which they seek to enhance sensuous experiences, from culinary to bungee-jumping adventures. These pale, however, when compared with the re-enchantment of the world which some find in the use of psychedelics or "esoteric" erotic techniques. While the term "hallucinogen" suggests that the main effect of a drug will be some kind of hallucinations, users may specifically look for an enhancement of their sensual experiences (e.g., Tart, 1971), perhaps akin to what some artists experience and seek to convey (Durr, 1970). We may thus induce ASC to become more childlike and immerse us in sounds, tastes, or the skin of the beloved (cf. Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardeña, in press).

Some excerpts from an account by psychologist Stanley Krippner (1970) after ingesting psilocybin will give a taste of what this experience is like:

C) Discover novel, creative ways to look at or express reality A recent finding in developmental psychology is that the creation and experience of fantasy during infancy and childhood is not only not opposed to analytical, rational development, but may be necessary to it (cf. Gopnik, 2009). The initial flowing spurts of game and created worlds tend to be overwhelmed later on by pragmatic endeavors, yet during ASC not only can we experience more intensely our sense data but become fully immersed in experiences in which ordinary physical or psychological constraints do not apply, have unusual associations, or try different solutions that could not be implemented during our OSC. It is not surprising that the propensity to easily transit among states of consciousness is positively related to creativity (Hartmann, 1991). Artists (Levy, in press), and writers (Cousins, in press), have explored dreaming, shamanism, meditation, hypnosis, and other ASC to develop their art in various ways or as a source of inspiration. For example, Van Gogh wrote that he would often look at a landscape for hours without a break until he would arrive to a special state of "lucidity," which may partly explain the intensity of his paintings (in Levy, in press).

Some eminent scientists have also linked ASC, brought deliberately or not (Koestler, 1964), with technical invention and scientific breakthrough, as in the case of dreams providing a guide in the work of Loewi, Elias Howe, and others (Krippner & Hughes, 1970). This does not mean, of course, that being in an ASC will ipso facto allow someone to produce a great work of art or have a scientific breakthrough, but that entering an ASC may generate novel ideas, associations, and experiences that may then be developed in that or an OSC.

D) Enhancing the meaningfulness of life/improving medical and psychological health Anomalous experiences overall are experienced as enhancing creativity and the meaning and purpose of life, in contrast with obtaining wealth (Kennedy, Kanthamani, & Palmer, 1994). While it is arguable that near-death-experiences (NDEs) provide evidence for the survival of consciousness after death, they are a primary illustration of how ASC can improve the experients' life. The majority of those having undergone an NDE seem to become more harmonious in the long-term (in the short term they may have to adapt themselves and others to their experience), caring more for others and the environment and being less materialistic and selfcentered (Greyson, 2000). Similarly, an experience with psilocybin in a supervised setting was not only described as extremely meaningful by experients, but made them better people as judged by those close to them (Griffiths, Richards, McCann, & Jesse, 2006).

That a psychoactive drug is not required can be seen in research with very high hypnotizables individuals who reported positive changes after experimental sessions without specific suggestions. Previously they had reported such ongoing experiences as "the overwhelming serenity of it," "all the feelings that are good… There's a bright light, I'm in it… It feels like I've been here before" (Cardeña, 2005, unpublished data). The ultimate ontology of these and other ASC can be contested, but not that they increase the perceived meaning of experients' lives.

Healing is a multivocal concept that includes experiences of health improvement that may or may not be related to actual improvement in health indexes, besides being used to denote finding greater meaning in life irrespective of changes in health. Ever since shamanism have ASC been associated with the ability to induce or experience healing (Winkelman, in press), and often that purported ability has followed real or symbolic injury and illness, as in this fragment of a North American shaman:

Accounts of some form of healing after ASC do not occur only in traditional societies as illustrated by an account of an NDE in which after the person experienced "the kind of love that cures, heals, regenerates" his brain tumor disappeared (in Dossey, 2011, p. 59). We require far more systematic research on the connection of ASC and such "spontaneous remissions" (Krippner & Achterberg, 2000). Techniques that can produce alterations in consciousness such as hypnosis and meditation have been found to have a therapeutic effect in a variety of psychological and medical conditions (Horowitz, 2010; Mendoza & Capafons, 2009), but we are still a long way from being able to determine what factors, including possible alterations in consciousness, effect positive outcomes. Mishara and Schwartz (in press) propose that the alternative self-world representations created by ASC may disrupt maladaptive psychobiological patterns and bring about improvement in symptoms or, at least, in the way they are experienced.

E) Provide valid knowledge about reality The final issue goes to the core of what is the most contested issue about ASC, namely whether they can provide alternative and valid knowledge to that offered by our OSC. The import of ASC for ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics has been discussed by thinkers of the stature of Plato and Descartes, and continue to intrigue contemporary philosophers (Windt, in press). Let me start with less controversial claims and then move to more challenging ones.

A mainstream theory of the functions of sleep maintains that by keeping new learning to a minimum during that state we can consolidate and reorganize recently acquired information (Hobson, 1995); this seems to be the case especially with respect to emotional memories (Wagner, Gais, & Born, 2001). A less investigated purpose for ASC is that they may provide insight into aspects of cognition that generally remain opaque. Besides the insights into one's psyche that various drugs and other forms to alter consciousness may provide, seeking to affect ordinary consciousness through meditation may reduce the effect of perceptual illusions (e.g., Brown, Forte, & Dysart, 1984) and reveal the architecture of cognition (Hunt, 1995). That ASC may provide access to valid information at least with regard to the experient is borne out by a study in which traumatic dreams provided a significant indicator of the extent of the, until then unascertained, heart damage of the dreamer (Smith, 1987).

Yet the most daring claim is that the alternative perspectives about reality engendered by some (by no means all!) ASC is a more real or at least a complementary view than that provided ordinarily by our senses and reason. The clearest instance is the view enunciated by mystics throughout the centuries that we are interconnected within an all-pervading unity (Wulff, 2000). Mystical reports include sensual experiences such as "I was immersed in sweetness words cannot express. I could hear the singing of the planets, and wave after wave of light washed over me… I was the light as well" (in Wulff, 2000, p. 398) or instances of pure awareness: "[In my meditations]I just remain in the Absolute for the entire sitting and nothing else seems to happen, other than the feeling of bliss permeating me completely (in Shear, in press). Regardless of these differences these and other reports imply a general sense of unity with all there is. Serious consideration for this view of reality has come not only from mystics and artists of various stripes but from eminent psychologists and neuroscientists (cf. Cardeña & Winkelman, in press a, b), and quantum physicists such as David Bohm. Just compare Bohm describing his theory of implicate order "We must learn to view everything as part of "Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement"… On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow" (Bohm, 1980, pp. 11, 48), with a fragment from Lord Shelley's poem Adonais:

The growing research database on parapsychological phenomena also suggests that not only do we seem to be affected independently of time and space constraints, but that this happens more often (or at least we become aware that it happens more often) during ASC (Luke, in press).

Thus, not only consciousness as the capacity to have experiences and observe events, but also ASC must be taken into consideration as we ponder the nature of the universe. This suggests that the world is found not only in a grain of sand but in the state of consciousness that intuits that connection.