Furthermore, since the recursive quality of experience displays discernable patterns, strips of experience themselves may be recognized. Our reflexive knowledge about consciousness in general thus involves knowledge of experiential episodes. These cognized and labelled categories of experience, and their mediating neurocognitive organizations, we call phases of consciousness . The points of experiential and neurophysiological transformation between phases we call warps of consciousness . When a society wishes to exercise control over the recurrence and quality of a phase of consciousness, it will tend to ritualize the individual's activity during the warp preceding the phase.
Warps are durations of neural transformation that are usually both short and very effective.
They also tend to be unconscious most of the time. For example, the hypnagogic warp before sleep lasts but a few seconds for most people in our society, yet its activity determines the quality of the dream phases that follow it. Tibetan dream yogis learn to control the hypnagogic by practicing certain rituals and are able to exercise considerable control over the organization of experience during sleep. For this reason, the ethnographer should learn to discern shifts in states of consciousness in informants and ascertain what, if any, ritual activity has been positioned so as to mediate the change of their internal state. Rituals are often symbolically rich events.