(Edited from Oct 17 and 18, 2921)
Sunday, October 17, 2021
I want to tell of a thing that happened, and maybe get a word or two about it from you splendid invisible gentlemen.
On Friday I went to Martha Jefferson Hospital for a minor operation. One minute I was talking to the anesthetist, he showing me the latest thing they use – and that’s all I remember till I woke up three hours later. I had gone into the procedure thinking maybe I could retain some awareness at some level. But as I say, I lost even the preliminaries. One moment I was chatting, the next moment was three hours later. This is prologue to the interesting thing.
When I woke up, I woke up. I didn’t feel groggy or only somewhat there, the way you do sometimes when you wake up. I could talk to the nurse and could understand her, and in general I just felt a little tired. By 11:30, I was dressed and being wheeled out to my neighbor’s car (bless him) and then I was home, not too lively, but not in pain.
Over the next few hours I functioned normally. But here is the strange thing I observed. All through the day, two contradictory things were happening. At any given moment, if you had asked me, I would have said I was myself again, I was back. Then would come another tiny increment of presence and I would realize that I was more “here” than I had just been. And this slow making of the tide went on for eight hours, until there was a final increment, a “click,” so to speak, though of course it was no click, and this time I knew I really was back.
But what was all that? At any time I would have said I was there. I functioned, normally, as far as I know. But then, smoothly as the incoming tide and not much faster, another little bit of extra something would click in, and I would realize that, “I wasn’t here till now, but now I’m here” – until the next increment repeated the process.
It wasn’t unpleasant. But I am puzzled. It was like a rheostat, slowly being turned up. The quality of the consciousness didn’t seem to change, but the intensity – the quantity? – did, consistently over the space of a third of a day.
Anything you care to tell us about this?
[TGU] We wanted it on the record, if only to encourage others to examine and perhaps relate their own experiences, for of course some of your readers will have had extensive experience with surgery or with deliberately altered states not caused by the personal, but by the shared, subjectivity. (That is merely another way of saying, caused not by an individual’s own action but by the action of others – in your case, the anesthesiologist.)
A third analogy occurs to me. As I understand it, the difference between a complete hologram picture and any smaller part of that picture considered separately is that of blurriness. The full picture is sharp. Cut off a corner and that corner still contains everything the full picture does, but it’s blurry, or less intense somehow. In a way that’s what I was feeling. I didn’t experience the descent into unconsciousness, but I did experience the long slow float back to normal levels of awareness.
The rheostat, the tide, and the hologram are three slightly differently nuanced analogies that serve well enough. A rheostat gives the sese of a control that may be altered at will, though it has the disadvantage of being a mechanical analogy. The tide, slow, relentless, dependable, natural, gives the sense of a normal biological process of recovery (as, indeed, it was), only omits the ability to interfere with it at will. The hologram well shows the paradoxical nature of consciousness, at once undivided and yet different. This was not an altered state of consciousness; more like an altered quantum of consciousness. More of the same, but still amounting to an ill-defined difference.
And the reason you wanted this on the record for others?
As we said, to encourage them to give some careful consideration to their own everyday experience of consciousness. We may have to invent some new specialized vocabulary at some point, though we don’t like doing that, to distinguish between consciousness and awareness. At present they are sort of interchangeable to casual thought, the way spirit and soul were before we went to some lengths to distinguish them….
Awareness and consciousness (2)
Monday, October 18, 2021
7:25 a.m. Okay, open for business. I got that you had something more to say about consciousness and awareness.
Yes. Think of it this way:
- All the terrain within your eyesight. Everything within the circle of your horizons, in other words. This is what there is to be seen from wherever you happen to be standing.
- But there is also another factor, and that is, how brightly lit is that territory? Even if you are living on a mountainside, or are up in an airplane, and have a tremendously long line of sight, you can’t see much on a starless night! You can’t see as much at daybreak or at sunset as at high noon. How brightly lit the scene is, helps determine how much and how well you can see.
- And there is your intent. If you are very alert, you see more and better than if you are half-asleep or are thinking of other things.
Now, take Hemingway as example. His talent – storytelling – came as a result of a lifetime of practice. He worked to learn how to tell his stories as effectively as the material would allow. But his genius (his innate ability that he developed by all that effort) was that he had a natural intensity of interest, and an inherited expectation
His father had so exaggerated a gift of sight. I think you’re saying Hemingway took that for normal, and overcompensated to overcome his own defective vision.
We are speaking strictly of inner vision here, however.
Well, I’m not sure you are. His inner vision was very strong – his imagination painted him scenes as brightly lit as other people’s external vision – but his external vision was equally keen. He saw detail; he put together clues. He didn’t miss things.
Let’s try saying this concisely. Interestingly (to us, at least) this is the first time both us and you are struggling to express what is a rather simple insight.
Yes. Why is that?
Perhaps when you have strong and definite ideas about a subject and they are not wrong, it makes you less inclined to be patient with our reaching for it.
- Hemingway saw (with his 3D eyes) what was to be seen. Because he learned the habit consciously and unconsciously by watching his father, he observed. A lifetime hunting and fishing reinforced this habit, of course.
- He also saw with his imagination. It was less his working to imagine something than his receiving a movie to watch. The work for him was in finding the right way to express what his imagination brought him, it was not in trying to think what to imagine.
- Most of all, until his body was broken and never fully repaired by the accidents in the 1950s, he was fueled by this tremendous vitality, which in effect was a well of enthusiasm. That was a very high-octane fuel!
So you have a range of consciousness and you have intensity. Your world is bounded by the two.
And this is what I experienced, Friday? The range of consciousness wasn’t affected (as far as I noticed), but I watched the intensity refill its tanks?
This is one more reason why you in 3D should learn not to judge one another. Everyone has a different level of intensity and a different range of consciousness. You already know you don’t all live in the same world. Now realize that you don’t all live in the world with the same range of resources. You don’t acquire an intensity like Hemingway’s by an effort of will. You are born with it, or aren’t. Now, you can be born with that intensity and let it slide, perhaps; you cannot be born without the intensity and build it by intent.
But life can.
Yes, true enough. A hellish situation might smelt someone into a person of greater intensity.
See you next time, then, and our continued thanks for all this.