The conspiracy to reduce consciousness to intellectual awareness of the physical world has been in evidence for at least five thousand years. Over the centuries the mental and psychic powers that only mystics and seers now possess have been filtered out of most people. So we now assume that our narrow, tightly-bound consciousness is normal and natural. "Ordinary consciousness" is "normal" only in the strict sense of "statistically most frequent," not inherently "good" or "natural" as the term is sometimes misconstrued to mean.

When contrasted with supernormal consciousness experienced by certain people in specific instances, our current rigid, intellect-based awareness is highly abnormal and unnatural.