In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley described something extraordinary.
Under the influence of mescaline, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in the peyote cactus, his brain activity didn’t increase — it decreased — yet his perception expanded. Colours deepened, time slowed, and he felt profoundly connected to life itself.
Peyote has been used for thousands of years in Indigenous ceremonial practices across the Americas, valued for its ability to open the mind to spiritual awareness. Huxley’s experiment was part of his own search to understand consciousness beyond the limits of ordinary perception.
From that experience, he proposed something radical: perhaps the brain doesn’t create consciousness — perhaps it filters it.
He suggested that the mind’s natural state is vast, but the brain acts as a reducing valve, narrowing what we perceive so we can survive without being overwhelmed by the full flood of reality.
It’s a beautiful idea — that what we experience as “ordinary consciousness” may only be a fragment of what’s possible.
The Everyday Filter
We can all see this filtering in our daily lives.
Imagine sitting quietly, paintbrush in hand, working on a tiny die-cast model. The hum of the fridge fades, the world disappears, and every ounce of attention narrows into the curve of the brushstroke. The brain is doing what Huxley described — filtering.
Filtering helps us focus, survive, and function. But the same mechanism that allows deep concentration can also keep us disconnected from the wider richness of life.
It’s the paradox of being human: we need the filter to survive, but we thrive when we remember to widen it.
ADHD and the Leaky Filter
For people with ADHD, that filter behaves differently.
The ADHD brain often struggles to separate what’s important from what isn’t. Sounds, lights, textures, emotions — everything arrives at once. It’s not a lack of discipline, but a different neurobiology. The brain’s “gatekeeper” lets more sensory input through, which can lead to overstimulation and fatigue.
And yet, ADHD also brings moments of hyperfocus — deep, sustained immersion in something that captivates the mind completely.
This is the paradox of the leaky filter: it can flood us or free us, depending on context.
The ADHD experience reminds us that attention itself is an art — not always about controlling the mind, but learning to meet it with compassion when it overflows.
Autism and the Precision Filter
Autistic and neurodiverse people experience attention differently again.
Many describe a world of intense detail — where patterns, sounds, and textures stand out vividly. The filter is tuned in a unique way: sometimes wide open to sensory information, sometimes tightly focused in what we might call hyperfocus or flow.
This precision of attention can be a gift — a kind of deep consciousness that others overlook — yet it can also lead to sensory overwhelm when too much enters awareness at once.
Autistic focus, in this sense, shows us that consciousness isn’t one fixed shape.
It varies across individuals, each brain filtering the world through its own rhythm, each mind revealing a different facet of reality.
Overstimulation and the Modern Mind
Our digital age has turned attention itself into a commodity.
Every scroll, ping, and notification competes for a slice of our consciousness, training our filters to stay half-open all the time.
Doom-scrolling keeps the RAS — the brain’s attentional gatekeeper — in constant vigilance, feeding it an endless stream of alerts, alarms, and emotional triggers.
The result?
A society of anxious minds, overstimulated yet undernourished.
We’ve learned to mistake constant input for awareness, when in truth it narrows the mind, reduces empathy, and fragments consciousness.
For children and young people, whose filters are still developing, this can be especially damaging. Their sense of safety and identity is being formed through algorithms rather than authentic connection — through comparison rather than compassion.
The Reticular Activating System and Survival Awareness
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) sits at the heart of how we filter the world. It decides what information reaches conscious awareness. Normally, it lets in only what seems relevant to our goals — but under threat, it instantly recalibrates.
I remember a day, long ago, when I experienced this with stark clarity.
An abusive partner’s footsteps sounded on the floor above me — heavy, deliberate, charged with anger. In that moment, my awareness shifted.
Time slowed.
Every detail became amplified — the creak of the floorboards, the position of my children, the space between one breath and the next.
That was my RAS and survival brain working together.
The amygdala had sensed danger, flooding my body with adrenaline. My RAS tuned in to only the most vital information: sound, timing, escape.
In that frozen moment, I noticed the smallest thing — a single drip of wine running in slow motion down the side of a glass.
It was surreal, almost suspended in time, and I later wrote about it in my book When I’m Gone.
That image has never left me. It captured the paradox of trauma — how the mind can expand in focus even as the body prepares to fight, flee, or protect.
That was my RAS and survival brain working together — the amygdala sensing danger, the RAS focusing attention, adrenaline flooding my body to act.
Within seconds, I had moved my children out of harm’s way, moments before his rage erupted and a table crashed across the room.
Terrifying, yes, but precise. A pure expression of the body’s will to protect life.
It wasn’t thought. It was instinct — a focused, timeless state that felt both terrifying and sacred. My consciousness didn’t expand in beauty; it expanded in survival.
And it saved us.
The Cost of Survival Mode
After experiences like that, the RAS can stay switched on.
It keeps scanning for danger, long after the threat has passed.
A creak in the floor, a raised voice, even a subtle shift in energy can send the body into high alert. This is trauma’s residue — the nervous system learning from history and trying, tirelessly, to keep us safe.
But when the brain filters for danger more than for life, the world begins to feel smaller.
Anxiety, hypervigilance, and exhaustion take hold.
The filter becomes too narrow, the mind too guarded, and consciousness contracts into survival.
When Safety Feels Unsafe
When the RAS has been tuned to threat for a long time — perhaps since childhood — even safety can feel unsafe.
The nervous system becomes so accustomed to reading danger that calm can feel foreign, suspicious, even unbearable.
Kindness lands heavy on a body that has learned to brace for harm.
A gentle word — “you’re looking really well today” — can cause the same visceral recoil as a threat, because the body doesn’t yet recognise tenderness as safe. It reads tone, energy, and proximity through a lens calibrated to survive cruelty.
Just as survivors flinch at sudden movement, they can also flinch at affection, praise, or care. The mind may understand it, but the body contracts, narrowing awareness again, pulling back behind invisible walls.
It isn’t rejection — it’s protection.
This is why healing can’t happen through the mind alone.
Traditional “mental health” work often focuses on thoughts and beliefs, but trauma lives in the body — in fascia, breath, posture, and heartbeat. The nervous system must relearn safety through direct experience: slow breath, grounded movement, eye contact, connection, presence.
Integration is what allows safety to stay.
When mind, body, and soul begin to work together again, the filter shifts — no longer tuned only to threat, but to connection, curiosity, and love.
Expansion Through Stillness
Healing begins when safety returns — not just around us, but within us.
Through practices like mindfulness, breathwork, prayer, nature, art, and even simple rest, we teach the RAS that it can soften its grip.
Modern neuroscience now shows what ancient wisdom has always known: when the body feels safe, the brain’s “default mode network” quiets, and awareness naturally expands.
Stillness doesn’t empty the mind; it reveals it.
In that openness, we rediscover connection, creativity, and compassion — the very qualities trauma tries to erase.
Consciousness and the Future of Awareness
If each brain filters reality uniquely — shaped by neurodiversity, trauma, attention, and environment — then consciousness itself is not fixed, but fluid.
It evolves with our experiences, our technologies, and our collective values.
When education rewards performance over presence, when media feeds fear more than curiosity, our shared awareness narrows.
But it can also widen again — through self-understanding, empathy, and intentional slowing down.
Through reclaiming the power to direct our own filters rather than letting them be hijacked by survival, distraction, or design.
In closing…
Huxley believed the brain’s purpose was to limit consciousness so that we could survive it.
Perhaps our task now is to learn to use that filter wisely — to know when to focus and when to expand, when to protect and when to open.
Survival once required narrowing the mind; thriving now requires widening it.
Awareness grows the moment we notice what’s shaping it — the scroll, the noise, the pace, the fear — and choose, even briefly, to pause.
In that pause, consciousness awakens.
For me, this is where STAND becomes a daily practice of presence:
Stop — pause long enough to notice what’s shaping your awareness (the scroll, the noise, the pace, the fear).
Think — name what your nervous system is doing (threat-focusing or safety-widening).
Act — choose a regulating step: breath, grounding, connection, a kinder word.
Never Doubt — trust your inner truth and the body’s wisdom that safety and connection can return.
Survival required contraction.
Healing invites expansion.
Awareness begins the moment we Stop and make space to Think, Act, and Never Doubt the possibility of wholeness.
In that pause, consciousness awakens — and maybe that’s where the next evolution begins, not through more information, but through presence.
Q. When was the last time you felt truly present — not thinking about life, but living it? – Answers in a journal please 😉
References
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