Sunday, October 17, 2021
1:30 a.m. I was thinking we would resume work on the Orphic Sayings, but first I want to tell of a thing that happened, and describe it as best I can – which is only poorly, as it happens – and maybe get a word or two about it from you splendid invisible gentlemen, and then maybe we can go back to Alcott. I get pretty strongly that you’re nudging me to tell it, so we’ll see.
On Friday I went to Martha Jefferson Hospital for a minor operation which, though outpatient, was to be performed there. I was curious why I would not be allowed to wait an hour or two and then drive the short distance home. But the rules were quite strict: After anesthesia, no driving any motor vehicle within 24 hours.
So my neighbors got me there – at 5 a.m., bless them! – and at 7:30 I was wheeled into the operating room. At quarter to eight, 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 couldn’t figure out why I didn’t remember the last few moments before they put me out, and finally on Saturday sometime it occurred to me that they must have put anesthesia in the i.v. drip, though why they would be using two forms of anesthesia escapes me.)
Anyway, I had gone into the procedure thinking maybe I could retain some awareness at some level, I always being ready to experience altered states of any kind. But as I say, I lost even the preliminaries. One moment I was chatting, the next moment was three hours later.
Now, all 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 for a second time).
So, I was home, not too lively, but not in pain, and over the next few hours I did a couple of the Sunday New York Times Crossword puzzles (from a book), snoozed a little, read, ate – in short, functioned normally. But here is the strange thing I observed. All through the long afternoon – really from 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. – 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 that long stretch 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.
I am not complaining; it wasn’t unpleasant. But I am puzzled. It was like – the analogy that comes to me now – a rheostat, slowly being turned up. The quality of the consciousness didn’t seem to change, but perhaps 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, let’s say, 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 presumably precipitous descent into unconsciousness, but I did experience the long slow climb – or float, really – 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. Maybe when we finish with the Orphic Sayings.
Speaking of which – ?
Later. This is enough for now.
Okay, talk to you later today, maybe.