If psychedelics reliably peel back layers of experience that our baseline brain actively suppresses, doesn’t that logically mean everyday consciousness is incomplete? Not broken. Just optimized for survival, not truth. Alan Watts used to bounce off this exact wire. He didn’t treat waking life as the whole story, but as a highly edited transcript. Alan Watts argued that the egoic mind is a necessary fiction, a lens that flattens the multidimensional into manageable slices. I’ve always bought that. It tracks with Karl Friston’s predictive processing framework, too. The theory suggests our brains don’t record reality—they run constant top-down guesses and only update when prediction errors get too loud. Psychedelics basically quiet the error-correction system. The raw data floods in.

Tarot keeps mirroring this back to me. Look at The Moon card. It’s not about fear or illusion. It’s literally the phase where the sun’s light is blocked, and you’re forced to navigate by reflection, by what’s submerged. The card shows a path winding between two towers, a crayfish rising from water, a dog and wolf howling. It’s a map of the subconscious bleeding into the conscious. When I’ve sat with that imagery mid-session, it never felt metaphorical. It felt like a schematic.

Crowley’s whole “do what thou wilt” framework always rubbed me the wrong way. It treats altered states like a permission slip for ego inflation. But Watts? He treated them like a systems check. A way to notice where the wiring gets crossed. I’m leaning toward the idea that baseline consciousness isn’t the complete picture. It’s a working model. Highly functional, brutally efficient, and deliberately blind to everything that doesn’t serve immediate navigation.

I’m not saying we should chase