What We Think Is Reality Is an Edulcorated Perception Shaped by Neurons Obsessed With Survival

Have you ever heard of the brain’s “reducing valve”?

We are confined by our ordinary perceptions of reality, unaware of the infinite expanse that lies “Beyond”. Image by Author.

We inhabit a universe far more wondrous, complex, and mysterious than our normal waking consciousness can grasp. As visionary thinkers have long realized, our minds and senses operate as a sort of “reducing valve” that condenses the infinite chaos of existence into a manageable stream of thoughts, perceptions, and experiences attuned to our biological needs and survival on this planet. Behind the veil of everyday awareness lies the vast, interconnected plenum of existence that some have called Mind-at-Large or the Over-Soul.

The influential 20th-century writer Aldous Huxley devoted much thought to this idea that, as he wrote,

“The brain and nervous system eliminate from the total cosmic experience everything except the narrow stimuli and signals important for biological survival in a given environment.This implies that our brains do not so much generate consciousness, but rather filter the universal flux of Mind-at-Large down to a trickle of utilitarian awareness, encoded in linguistic and symbolic systems.”

Consciousness

In his provocative essay The Doors of Perception, Huxley cited the Cambridge philosopher C.D. Broad’s speculation that the chief business of the brain and senses is “eliminative and unproductive.” What an astonishing notion — that our nervous system serves not to construct but to constrain experience! The implication is that each of us dwells at the vanishing point of infinity, our brains are like biological kaleidoscopes that select coherent patterns from a hyper-dimensional reality.

Over a century ago, the pioneering French philosopher Henri Bergson eloquently captured this idea of the human mind as a sort of aperture or narrow gate facing absolute Being.

In Matter and Memory, Bergson wrote that the brain provides

“a virtual focus into which the rays of light flowing from all points of the material universe converge.”

For Bergson, the conscious person is situated like a glowing filament at the centre of cosmic convergences, the radiances of eternity and infinity becoming highly concentrated through the aperture of mind and brain.

Echoes of this view ripple through spiritual and psychedelic literature. It closely aligns with Aldous Huxley’s model. Sixty years prior, Huxley’s grandfather T.H. Huxley, the noted 19th-century biologist who energetically proselytized Darwin’s theory of evolution, presaged these intuitions in his 1869 lecture On the Physical Basis of Life. There he declared:

“What we call the external world is only a certain order of states of consciousness… the world of possibilities exceeds its actual realization.”

Mystics go further and claim temporary emancipation from even this streamlined order of consciousness. By piercing the reducing valve of their brains through spiritual exertions like prayer, meditation, chanting, fasting, or vigil, they tap into Mind-at-Large: the unfiltered totality of existence, variously called Brahman, Tao, God, the Clear Light of the Void in Tibetan Buddhism.

However, one need not be a religious ascetic or recluse to catch occasional, evanescent glimpses beyond the doors of perception. Certain physical practices and disciplines, often requiring immense courage and perseverance, can unsettle consciousness from its biological habits. The history and lore surrounding human activities like high-altitude mountain climbing, marathon running, fasting, sensory deprivation, and holy madness indicate that extreme physical stress sometimes correlates with radical shifts in awareness and mystical consciousness.

Psychedelics

Likewise, researchers have catalogued many thousands of encounters with unfiltered reality facilitated by serendipitous triggers like near-death episodes, traumatic accidents, powerful dreams and visions, and other brushes with death. Techniques and experiences that more directly switch off what Huxley called the brain’s “reducing valve” include telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition (seeing the future), psychokinesis (mind-over-matter), remote viewing, out-of-body and near-death experiences, alien abduction experiences, mystical self-loss and ego-dissolution, and much more.

Of course, the most deliberate method for opening even a crack in the reducing valve of consciousness remains the ingestion of psychedelic plant medicines and chemicals. Peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, and LSD notoriously dismantle habitual modes of perception and cognition. They dissolve the structures of self and unleash awareness to commune with alien dimensions of reality, often described as profound, meaningful, and unutterably strange.

The metaphysical mapmaker Terence McKenna was fond of saying:

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing.”

They permit awareness to peer around the edges of the reducing valve, releasing primal awe, terror, wonder, and revelation.

Aldous Huxley, always drawn to daring frontiers of experience, captured the essence of this phenomenon in The Doors of Perception. Reflecting on his first encounter with mescaline psychedelics, he wrote:

“I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence… I was directly perceiving something more substantial than any symbolic phantasm or verbalized vision.”

Psychedelics throw open what Huxley famously called the mind’s “reducing valve,” flooding consciousness with the normally invisible, overwhelming actuality of pure Being. Knowing this, one grasps why religious zealots and totalitarian bureaucrats reflexively attempt to censor or criminalize such gateways beyond cultural constraints and consensus reality. Their strident reactions testify that state-sanctioned consciousness rests upon a precarious foundation of lies, omissions, stories, assumptions, and selective filtering that cannot bear much direct scrutiny of truth.

Everyday perception

Yet everyday perception hardly resembles an innocent, accurate mirroring or mapping of objective reality either. Despite its feeling of being stable, coherent, consistent and predictable, normal awareness seethes with arbitrary interpretations, projections, assumptions, value judgments, and opinions passing as facts, reactions and distortions. It operates within strict biological parameters useful for adapting to the terrestrial habitat and social game structures into which we are born.

We are confined by our ordinary perceptions of reality, unaware of the infinite expanse that lies “Beyond”. Image by Author.

Consensus reality parallels what Buddha called samsara: the illusory projection of psychological suffering rooted in deluded perceptions and existential confusion. For the medieval Zen master Dogen, it also aligned with ignorance of one’s Buddha nature or awakened mind. Plato and other philosophers called it doxa as opposed to episteme: conjecture or popular belief rather than true understanding. Gurdjieff labelled it like being “asleep” in contrast to periodic “waking up.”

Whatever semantic tags it travels under, habitual awareness remains thoroughly permeated by learned linguistic, cultural, psychological, and biological biases that shape a status quo useful for social coordination but severed from deeper truths of unity and transcendence.

At most, ordinary consciousness can only claim an abstract, intellectually conceived connection to reality. Intuitions of a mystical ground as nondual, eternal, boundless, inapproachable, unmade, spontaneously complete, and pervading all phenomena simply do not fit within its everyday presumptions and innate cognitive processes.

Perennial intuitions found across the world’s wisdom traditions concur that everyday awareness occupies the opposite end of the spectrum from enlightened knowledge of ultimate reality. In various metaphors, it is portrayed as a land of shadows, a cave of ignorance, a house of mirrors, a fog of confusion, a desert of mirages, a realm of inverted projections, and more. The ancient Taoist sage Lao Tzu, speaking from the liberated perspective beyond the doors of perception, put it thus:

“The five colours blind the eye. The five notes deafen the ear. The five flavours dull the taste.”

The upshot is that our nervous system and perceptual faculties should not be overly enshrined or deified. They manipulate awareness to fabricate functional but ultimately illusory representational models of reality. They lock consciousness onto certain attractive patterns and filters for meaning-making and biological need satisfaction, blinding it to the boundless depths behind those temporary forms. The brain’s reducing valve admits only thin trickles of phenomena arranged into evolutionary narratives about self and world that are demonstrably porous and inaccurate.

Huxley surmised something similar decades before the cognitive and neuro-sciences revolutionized our understanding of subliminal informational processing, neural filtering, memory distortion, cognitive defects and deficits, confirmation biases, and other bugs or glitches in the human program. He concluded:

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.”

Only then, he implies, does bare awareness get edited down into a culturally conditioned consciousness useful for negotiating social contracts and tribal expectations.

Conclusions and Takeaways

This is no trivial side issue in the quest for expanded knowledge, wisdom, and human flourishing. It cuts to the bone in perhaps the most urgent existential question we can fathom: What is my true identity before thoughts and outside this lived story I call “my life”? Am I fundamentally equivalent with the totality of being, or am I this separated separate self?

Such questions expose us to life’s deepest grounds of meaning, healing, and liberation. It orients one to the blind spots and unrealized potentialities of consciousness itself as opposed to remaining enthralled by its content and localized reference points. It connects us to others who have plumbed these mysteries across diverse cultures and eras through spiritual practice, psychedelics, creativity, scientific investigation or unclassifiable adventures to the edges of cognition.

There may be no final objective answers here, only ever-deepening exploration fueled by courage and radical questioning. What made certain pioneering psychonauts and philosophers so insightful was their recognition that reality-tunnel epiphanies and consciousness expansion catalyzed by substances like LSD, psilocybin, or DMT now seem less like mere hallucinatory delirium. Rather, they expose the hallucinatory or dreamlike nature of conventional awareness itself. They sketch the outlines of our existential situation: pure sentient awareness subjected to biological base programming and distortion filters before it stabilizes into a culturally conditioned adult ego.

This turns the issue inside out. The ultimate trippers are not hippies indulging expanded sensation and perception or visions induced by substances, but ordinary people trapped inside lifelong programmed hallucinations mediated by the reducing valves in their heads. By using nature’s vehicles to decondition consciousness from its usual cultural embedment, some psychonauts learn to observe these processes with detached interest rather than become unwittingly defined by them. This form of “meta-programming” the programming that silently programs us, as it were represents a promising path for rewiring perceptual habits and exploring the depths of the reductive machinery that underlies consensus consciousness.

The fleeting visions granted by psychedelics, near-death encounters, and other extreme experiences, though profoundly meaningful, lack permanence. They fade like dreams upon waking, failing to crystallize as enduring states of enlightenment. Thus for Huxley, though pivotal in his lifelong philosophical growth, psychedelic liberation alone did not suffice. It catalyzed profound insight, yet required integration to benefit humanity:

“Visionary experience lacking integration with ordinary life remains meaningless, unable to transform society.”

Mystical glimpses through consciousness’ reducing valve spotlight life’s boundless, cosmic depths, but gain significance through embodied action. Like flickering candles, they illuminate possible pathways between poles of reality — relative and Absolute, unity and separation, personal and transpersonal. If nurtured carefully, their transformational fire can ignite much-needed renewal.

What integrals and conduits enable these temporary yet vital visions to permeate our lives? How might we carry their sparks into societal change? Can wisdom gained in mystical states re-envision scientific paradigms or reshape economic policies? What questions arise as we integrate these experiences, alchemically transforming glimpses into enduring light?

As our global crises demand the very traits momentarily visible through the doors of perception — ethics, empathy, creativity — processing these visions becomes imperative. Some may inspire artistic expression, others social activism. Some may revolutionize philosophy, others interpersonal relating. Regardless of the outlet, embedding visionary seeds into culture remains essential for their ripened fruits of healing and renewal to bless our species’ passage forward.

As a Vedanta learner

As a Vedanta learner, I find great merit in Terence McKenna's vision of an "archaic revival" aimed at recovering modes of consciousness unbound by cultural conditioning, as presented in his book Food of the Gods. Above all, I support a key aspect of his proposal:

The attempt to loosen the constructed framework of reality imposed by society, to unveil forgotten depths of being. This aligns with the Vedantic imperative to see through the veil of illusion (maya) that obscures our true nature. As the Bhagavad Gita states,

"That which seems like wisdom but is not is said to be of the nature of ignorance."

(Bhagavad Gita - 18.47)

Then, the refusal to passively accept the status quo of consciousness recognises its narrow and utilitarian orientation. McKenna rightly revolts against the homogenizing attitude that how things are now is how they must continue to be. Vedanta echoes this in Gita’s declaration that:

“In this endeavour, there is no loss or diminution, and a little advancement on this path can protect one from the most dangerous type of fear."

(Bhagavad Gita - 2.40)

The essential meaning is that even a small practice of dharma, even a minimal effort in the right spiritual direction, is never lost and can protect the person from the great dangers of existence (represented by "Mahato bhayāt", the great fear). We should never fear exploring truth on our terms also because:

“It is better to live your destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”

(Bhagavad Gita - 18.47)

This aligns with Terence McKenna's call to challenge constricting frameworks of reality and shake ourselves free from homogenizing social narratives. His proposed "archaic revival" is a provocative call to recapture this spirit of fearless investigation into the hidden potentials of consciousness.

Though never final answers, the questions arising here unravel new possibilities for connecting timeless wisdom to this troubled age. May our journey beyond familiar lands of consciousness guide us compassionately through coming storms.

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