ABSTRACT
Consciousness, like pain, is something we know directly from experience. Yet, definitions of “consciousness” and “altered state of consciousness” are notoriously elusive and unsatisfactory even in the context of shared cultural assumptions, let alone in an attempt to capture what the experience of an altered state of consciousness was in the context of medieval asceticism and spirituality. It appears that the metaphors we ordinarily employ to describe and understand our daily experiences are based upon our bodily and sensory experiences and therefore are particularly unsuited to the verbal delineation of abstract mental concepts, such as consciousness.1
