Hermes and the matter of the unknown; Holding altered and non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Some experiences disrupt the boundaries of what we take to be real or meaningful. When such an experience occurs, even if it is unforgettable, we do not always have the language or conceptual clarity to understand what happened. Sometimes these moments can include phenomena that seem anomalous, uncanny, mysterious, unitive, expansive, or even supernatural. While these experiences may be difficult to qualify, what is often clear for the experiencer, is that something changes. Their everyday baseline of consciousness changes, even if only temporarily, although this may not always be the case. When this happens, people report encountering themselves in unusual or novel ways, and that encounter can illuminate as well as destabilise.
Transpersonal psychology has termed these experiences altered, or non-ordinary states of consciousness (ASC, NOSC). This phrase refers to moments in which awareness radically reorganises when compared to one’s ‘usual’ everyday state of mind. This does not simply mean that consciousness becomes more intense, instead, it means it also becomes different. That is, perception changes. Meaning can also intensify during the experience however; the self does not occupy its usual position. Something qualitative shifts.
NOSC are often associated with, and may be intentionally cultivated through meditation, breathwork, ritual, spiritual practices, and psychedelic substances. They can also arise collectively and interpersonally. For example, on a dancefloor, in a ceremony, in moments of heightened relational intensity like during therapy. Often they arise spontaneously and unannounced. This may particularly be the case when the experience emerges through personal crisis, which are all too often quickly medicalised. It’s important to say here that the state does not determine its status, the context does. For example, when such experiences occur, depending on the setting, it could be defined as therapeutic, spiritual, recreational, pathological or even criminal. Meaning, while the structure of the experience may be similar, the interpretation can be far less than neutral. This means then, that what changes is not only the reorganisation of awareness, but also the very frame through which awareness is understood depending on circumstances.
In my previous essay Dionysus on the Dancefloor, I wrote about the phenomena participation mystique — moments in which the boundary between self and other, and self and world disintegrates and experience appears deeply shared rather than strictly individual. Those states are rarely described as altered or non-ordinary in psychotherapeutic language, yet phenomenologically they involve the same qualitative shift. Broadly speaking, psychotherapy can sometimes reduce unitive and shared interpersonal states in several ways. Commonly, this includes neuroscientific, mechanistic explanations of the brain processes that underlay attunement, empathy, and attachment. Psychotherapy also heavily relies on social constructivist frames. It’s not uncommon that unitive and shared interpersonal states are interpreted as being developmental, even pathological, occurring through mechanisms like projective identification, transference, and other unresolved infantile psychological states including symbiosis.
Mid-twentieth-century clinicians such as Stanislav Grof explored LSD-assisted psychotherapy as a way of working deliberately with such reorganisations of consciousness. Later, figures like Alexander Shulgin arguably complicated the boundary further, synthesising compounds that would circulate between laboratory, therapy room, and underground culture – most notoriously MDMA, becoming one, if not the driving force that propelled dance music culture onto a global stage. This affected millions of lives along the way. More recently, renewed interest into the efficacy of psychedelics for mental and emotional wellbeing has reopened clinical interest into these profound shifts of perception, identity, and meaning. What moves between these domains is not simply chemistry, but the question of how intensified states are entered, understood, and integrated.
It’s perhaps taken for granted that psychotherapy itself routinely works with qualitative shifts in consciousness. Breakthrough sessions reorganise perception as part of the normal therapeutic process. For example, grief processes can alter identity. Moments of deep relational attunement can radically change how the self is experienced and perceived. These may not be labelled altered states as such, yet structurally they involve the same processes of reconfiguration albeit within a contained setting.
So it seems that the tension arises not from the existence of altered states, but from how they are framed. Psychotherapy draws from multiple philosophical assumptions about mind: developmental, neuroscientific, behavioural, relational, depth-oriented and others. These frameworks do not always sit well together. Depending on the orientation of the therapist and their availability to grapple with this complexity, the same experience may be interpreted as regression, trauma, archetypal emergence, neurological event, spiritual opening, or dissociation. The phenomenon does not necessary change so much as the explanatory lens through which the therapist looks.
In the Hermetic tradition, the figure of Hermes, sometimes known as Hermes Trismegistus, represents mediation between domains. From a depth psychological perspective he can be interpretated not as an actual deity to be believed in but a symbol, or faculty of translation. That is the ability to move between worlds of meaning without collapsing them into one another. Hermes stands at thresholds. He thrives at crossroads, and he carries a message across the boundaries.
Invoking Hermes here is not to make a metaphysical claim. It is simply meant to name a function. Altered states force us into that mediating position, we must navigate perception, contradiction, paradox, complexity and interpretation. Often in ways one might not have even conceived were possible. When consciousness reorganises, interpretation must follow. When experience moves beyond what was known to be normal or usual, our explanatory frames scramble to account for it. We find ourselves standing between these very frameworks, developmental, neurological, spiritual, pathological. Each of which offer a different account of the same event. Here Hermes holds all of them together. Hermes holds this space for all understanding. In this way, Hermes helps One to create the space for the golden dawn – the alchemical symbol of the sun, the Self, to shape and re-order the self through its own centre.
The holding then is not about proving or declaring which ontology is correct. It is about recognising that experience moves between worlds of interpretation. Altered states expose both the faultlines and the scaffolding beneath our explanatory systems. They reveal that meaning is assigned within context. To hold is not to collapse difference, but to remain aware of it, committed to its understanding.
Rather than reducing intensified experience to a single explanatory frame, we can ask: what assumptions are shaping our interpretation? What philosophical commitments are already operating implicitly? Also, one might even consider how such commitments were acquired, and to what degree do these represent one’s own lived experience. The question here is not whether altered states occur. They do. The question here is how we understand them, and who authorises that understanding? This is not antinomianism; this is a matter of understanding how unexamined metaphysics and cosmology shape what can be permitted as real and meaningful.
Seen this way, the holding is not symbolic abstractionism. It is an epistemic position, and arguably a responsible one. It is the awareness that the same shift in consciousness can be sanctified, pathologised, commodified, or even criminalised depending on its container. To recognise this is not to romanticise altered states, nor is it to reject professional structures, it is to illuminate the tension between experience and interpretation.
If participation mystique once described the collective immersion of a generation on a dancefloor, perhaps altered states of consciousness more accurately describe something broader and more enduring about the human condition. That is to say, the recurring propensity and capacity for qualitative reorganisations of awareness. To grow. To heal. To expand. These states unsettle us not because they occur, but because they challenge and destabilase the hold of the ordinary frame. They invite us to reconsider what we take to be real, meaningful, and possible.
To hold is not to escape structure. It is to see structure. And in seeing it, to hold experience with greater care.
