Transcript

Altered states refers to a mode of consciousness or awareness that takes us out of our ordinary everyday sense of the world sense of ourselves, we can enter altered states, when we get intensely focused on something deep concentration will bring you into an altered state. Sometimes people like to talk about how athletes get into the zone, or they get into flow. 

Those are all everyday altered states, but they come from being intensely focused on some activity, or in the moment itself. And of course, altered states can come from drugs, or from being an unusual physiological state fever can bring on an altered state. And of course, the 60s and 70s saw a huge upsurge of people interested in exploring altered states, through psychedelics. So altered states are temporary conditions that when whatever it was that brought on the special state of awareness, leaves, then the state fades.