The fundamental natural processes which are not part of the specific social linguistic surround (language, culture, social structure, expectations etc) programmed into the brain of the individual are revealed as primary experience. These avenues of experience go previously unexperienced because the organizational structure created as a result of the genetic development in its environment never created opportunities for exploring such states of mind. It's as though the turned on individual gains an intuitive understanding of how the world operates. Instead of following known norms and specific experiences, previously disparate mental faculties intertwine and become manifest in new combinations and permutations, and in doing so navigational experience gains new dimensions (specifically, dimensions of foreseen potentialities created by the combined and permutated thought-forms). Thus the extraordinary variability in life experience explains a massive amount of variability in psychedelic experience (the self as an immense part of set and setting).

Is there a fundamental misunderstanding of consciousness?

So in talking about consciousness, there are several things going on. One of them being awareness that something is real. That is, sensory perception itself is considered a form of consciousness. Animals possess consciousness. What is most often misunderstood in this debate is the role of learning in conscious control, and experiential navigation and goal-directed behaviors as higher forms of consciousness.

They say psychedelics make unconscious material conscious. But maybe the unconscious is in reality a hyper-consciousness... that is, an awareness of the non-linguistic surround.