The possibility of changing consciousness was discovered in the Orient 2500 years ago, at least. Techniques were discovered to quiet the mind, pacify the mind, remove emotional compulsions. These were organized into the science of Yoga. As John Lilly says, “Yoga is the science of the East. Science is the Yoga of the West.”
Science is a yoga, too. Science is a way of trying to reach an objective level in which your emotional compulsions and prejudices aren’t twisting all the facts to fit in with your reality tunnel.
The scientific worldview grew up in the west between 1500 and 1750, largely due to mystics who were known as Hermeticists. This Hermetic scientific revolution saw theology as its enemy, and there was no conflict between Hermeticism and science. They were both based on experiment, find out what happens if you “do this,” and they were both opposed to the authority of the Church.
Shortly after 1600 this began to split, and this Hermetic tradition faded into the background, and we developed for the first time in history a science that had absolutely no connection to anything except pure reason. The hermetic tradition was that there is no such thing as pure reason, you have to first work on your own perceiving apparatus to correct your prejudices, and the scientist is not separate from what the scientist observes.
The general yogic attitude, “you are the master that makes the grass green,” –western science lost that insight, and from Newton onwards we have the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are, if you follow scientific procedure you’ll find the truth.
This began to break down after 1900, due to Sigmund Freud, who pointed out that even scientists, they’re human beings, they may have neurosis, and they may have elaborate rationalizations for neurosis. The influence of Karl Marx also pointed out that no matter what you’re theorizing about it’s a mirror of your economic status.
Anthropologists started coming back with reports of alternative reality tunnels, and that no matter what reality tunnel you live in, the world will organize itself in your perception to be compatible with that reality tunnel.
So, science began to have data to look at science itself critically. That’s how intelligence increases, when intelligence looks at intelligence and criticizes intelligence. So we got to the point where we could look at science and say, “science is the product of people!”
People are doing this, and their prejudices are getting into it. It’s not just enough to say you will be objective, you’ve got to learn to change yourself from the inside out before you can even approximate towards objectivity.
When Albert Hoffman, after accidentally ingesting LSD, when through a profound experience… It took him 40 years to figure out what LSD meant. In 1982 he wrote an essay in which he said, “There is no objective reality separate from us.”
This became obvious to others due to quantum physics. Physicists discovered that the atomic world is just not describable in terms of Aristotilean logic. You can’t describe anything on the quantum level accurately unless you include the observer in your picture. So quantum physics turned out to be saying exactly the same thing as the psychedelic revolution was saying: that there is no objective reality separate from us, all we know is the reality that we are co-creators of. The reality perceived, conceived and put together by our nervous systems.
At this point it becomes obvious that intelligence can be raised, consciousness can be altered, all we have to do is learn how to change our nervous system and we can go to wider and wider reality tunnels, and bigger and bigger levels of perception.
Nobody has made pranayama illegal yet because it is impossible to enforce. You just have to read a book on yoga, learn how to breath, and you find you go into an entirely different consciousness state. Then you go back into your ordinary consciousness, think about that state, then go back into that state and think about ordinary consciousness. Already you’re in I- squared, you’re finding out how your nervous system works.
We are moving more and more to the place where we can change our nervous system, change our reality tunnels. Once you look down on your reality tunnel, whether Methodist, Jewish, hippy, capitalist, or Iranian Muslim fundamentalist… you can compare reality tunnels, and then you’re on a higher level of intelligence already. Because you’re no longer a conditioned mechanism just following the reality tunnel that was accidentally imprinted or conditioned, and you can start choosing between reality tunnels.