This was almost about near-death experiences (NDEs), and may still go on to include them, but primarily the task I’ve set myself today is to describe states of consciousness and their possible relationship with reality. This has been of interest to me since soon after I started meditating, which must have been over forty years ago, and my thoughts on the matter are not necessarily particularly up to date because I’ve thought about them in a fairly piecemeal manner. This may in fact be the first time I’ve actually expressed myself clearly on the matter.
Okay, so there are maybe about seven clearly separated states of consciousness which may blur into each other. These are: wakefulness, REM sleep, NREM sleep, samadhi (meditation trance), dreaming, hypnosis and Ganzfeld. Of these, hypnosis may not exist, something which I’ll cover later. Ganzfeld probably needs some explanation. The Ganzfeld Effect is what happens when one is deprived of sensory stimulation, as in a floatation tank or with special blindfolds in an anechoic chamber, and involves the projection of hallucinations into one’s subjective space. As such, it seems to resemble Charles Bonnet Syndrome. More on that later. Each of these is characterised by particular brainwave patterns. There are also intermediate states such as sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, false awakening, near-death experiences and dementia with Lewy bodies. My own experience of B12 deficiency suggests that it can be quite similar to the dementia, and schizophrenia and delirium might also belong there. Therefore, a bit like the gender landscape, it might make more sense to think of consciousness as a plain with peaks representing the different states.
Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction
Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction between dreaming and wakefulness. I try to avoid prioritising one of these states over the other, because I think that phenomenologically both are equally valid and represent different relationships with reality. I also talk about dreaming in the present tense, although this is substantially because I don’t think English has a tense which can refer to dreaming accurately. Dreams are timeless in the same way as numbers and abstract concepts are, so if there’s a language with a way of expressing verbs timelessly, so that for instance the “is” in “two plus two equals four” is not in the present tense, I’d be using that method. It’s also supposed to make lucid dreaming more likely if one does this. I mentioned yesterday that Dennett has the view that dreams are not experiences but false memories. That is, on awakening one has a particular brain state which the waking mind interprets as consisting of apparent past experiences which occurred after falling asleep. But it’s the waking state that perceives it this way. Because dreaming and waking are equal, this fact, being a product of wakeful consciousness, is no more valid than dreaming experience.
Years on the Halfbakery ideas bank, have convinced me that ideas are discovered rather than invented, and that discovery and invention are the same thing. Hence at some point in the distant past people discovered the wheel. This makes sense, for example, when one thinks of Charles Fort’s idea of “steam engine time”. There is apple blossom or cherry blossom time, when all the trees of a certain species come into blossom at once even if they’re thousands of kilometres apart. Similarly, at least three civilisations have independently developed the steam engine because it was the right season for doing so. The various pieces of the jigsaw fell into place and the shape of the gap remaining became apparent. Likewise people come up with remarkably similar novels without apparent connections, such as possibly ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ and ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ or ‘The Hermes Fall’ and ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’. Likewise, dreams are “out there” waiting to be had, perhaps only by one particular individual. Hence they don’t happen on a particular night but one wakes up having discovered a dream which was always, and will always be, there, though more strictly outside spacetime, wherever numbers and steam engines dwell before we open a conduit to them and our world. Somewhere sub specie æternitatis, Everyperson is having tea with the Queen. The reason lucid dreaming, conscious control of dreaming, is important is that it amounts to Heaven, whereas nightmares amount to Hell.
I don’t want to make this post entirely about dreaming, although I have more carefully developed ideas about that state than others. That said, there are supposed to be tests for dreaming, one of which I try in a recently remembered dream. I took a shard of mirror and looked at myself through it, and not only was part of my face clearly reflected in it but it moved appropriately when I held the shard at different angles. This detail has caused me to doubt that the tests are reliable, and it also amazes me that my brain is able to produce an image that realistic, although I’ve successfully done that in Ganzfeld.
I will say just one more thing about dreaming and wakefulness. There are mixed states where both are involved. For instance, when I had B12 deficiency I began to enter a psychotic state involving phantosmia and anosmia. I constantly hallucinated the odour of peppermint and sometimes confused dreams and wakefulness when I first woke up in the mornings. Objects and people in my dreams appeared in the room I was sleeping in (which was the living room incidentally, but that’s another story). This is similar to dementia with Lewy bodies, where older people cease to distinguish clearly between dreaming and waking life. Bearing in mind that these people’s lives are approaching their end, it raises questions about near-death experiences. Finally there’s Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where deteriorating vision leads to patterns or even detailed scenery involving people and places. This is similar to the phantom limb phenomenon in my opinion, and also to tinnitus and hearing voices in some ways. All of these are somewhat dreamlike.
They’re also similar to Ganzfeld. This is a state of consciousness which results from uniform sensory stimulation or the lack of stimulation entirely, and is sometimes sought by people in floatation tanks and anechoic chambers, as mentioned above. The brain amplifies neural noise and turns it into complex visual impressions, I would imagine very similar to Charles Bonnet Syndrome. It can also be done using white noise, which I’ve tried myself and found I could hear music in it after about half an hour. It also constitutes a second way into lucid dreaming, so I’m told, because apparently if you lie still in bed in a cold dark room for at least half an hour you will begin to have these impressions. I don’t know how easy other people find lying still, or lying still without falling asleep, and I know that I’m supposed to be genetically predisposed to moving around a lot during sleep and to having restless legs, so it’s unlikely that I will find a way in this way. There is a Tibetan Buddhist practice known as mun mtshams (I cannot currently write this in Tibetan script but it might be མུནཚམྶ), involving shutting oneself away in the dark alone as practice for dealing with བར་དོ and realising འཇའ་ལུས་, thereby, I presume, avoiding reincarnation. This is rather reminiscent of the use of lucid dreaming for a similar end.
And that brings me to samadhi, समाधी. I should point out at this point that my own opinions and experience of समाधी seem to be different from what other people say about it. This is the meditative state of Raja Yoga, and I expect Sarada will have things to say about this. My understanding of how to enter this state is that it tends to be easier in certain asanas, such as Padmasana of course but also others such as Sukhasana, then one practices Pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses, followed by focussing on a mantra or other object of thought and grasping its essence, then removing that essence entirely, leaving consciousness in a non-intentional state. I’m told that this is not what Samadhi is, and that the Christian understanding that this is in fact the nature of Samadhi is a major reason for seeing Yoga as Satanic. The fact, phenomenologically speaking, that for me it’s a state of consciousness without an object of consciousness has made me sceptical about Brentano’s analysis of mental states, where he insists that they are a number of things I do agree with, including incorrigibility (cannot be doubted) and having a number of other properties including “aboutness”, which is in fact generally considered the most important quality of mental states. This is what’s rather unhelpfully referred to as Intentionality (with a capital I, constrasted with “intentionality”) and may or may not be the same as intensionality with an S, which is to do with meaning and contrasted with extensionality. Presumably Pratyahara could also be used to enter Ganzfeld if one was so inclined. I understand that other people use the word samadhi to refer to a consciousness of unity with the object of meditation or even the Cosmos or God, and I’ve experienced that too but tend to perceive it as pathological, for me anyway. It’s unwelcome and seems unhealthy to me. In Buddhism, this state of consciousness is the last element of the Noble Eightfold Path. I can’t really do justice to all of this here, partly because I’m using words but also due to wanting to describe other states of consciousness. Because I try to balance the value of different states, the idea that this is a higher state is hard to come to terms with, but its role within dharmic spirituality has always been prized. The reason many Christians disapprove of it is that they believe an empty mind, which is how they see this, invites Satan or evil spirits in. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that I don’t respond to psilocybin, the only psychedelic I’ve taken, so this may reflect my atttitude towards samadhi.
Hypnosis may or may not be a state of consciousness. My own view is that it’s stateless and a form of role-play, although that has a function as serious as many others in spirituality and other aspects of life. I’m also suspicious of hypnosis being misused because I think many symptoms are there for a reason and removing them outside the context of hypnotherapy would be likely to lead to the underlying cause being manifested in a different and unpredictable way. Interestingly, Sarada thinks exactly the same thing about lucid dreaming. Having said that, I do believe hypnotherapists are usually professional and take pains doesn’t happen. I used to practice hypnosis for fun when I was about twelve, quite successfully, but that was probably reckless and irresponsible, and I’ve also done self-hypnosis. An early non-state definition of hypnosis was offered in 1941 by R. W. White: “Hypnotic behaviour is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotised person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the client”. That said, there are changes in brainwave activity in some hypnotised individuals, and the question of how it causes amnesia occurs to me.
The seventh state, which I have yet to discuss, is NREM sleep, also known as dreamless or orthodox sleep. This is in some ways the odd one out, as it seems to involve the absence of consciousness. There is no paralysis and the parasympathetic (P for Peace) nervous system is dominant during it. The EEG shows theta waves and sleep spindles, which are rapid bursts of electrical activity building to a crescendo and then declining. Theta waves occur at four to eight times a second. Delta waves are prominent. There are also K-complexes, which are the highest voltage physiological spikes of electrical activity in the human brain. I have more of these than most people because they’re associated with restless legs syndrome, but have no idea what their significance is. It doesn’t seem possible to describe NREM sleep phenomenologically because it seems to lack phenomenology entirely, but since I’m panpsychist this is either a challenge to my beliefs or means I must assert that consciousness is there, just as it is everywhere else, but in a similar way to how it would inhere in an organism with nothing analogous to a nervous system. To be honest I don’t know what to do with NREM.
On the subject of brainwaves, it’s probably worthwhile describing this kind of activity with respect to the other states. Dreaming is closer to wakefulness than NREM in this respect, hence its other name, paradoxical sleep. Theta and gamma activity is widepread and the brain stem seems to initiate activity in this state, suggesting to some that dreaming is an attempt by the conscious mind to make sense of vegetative neural processes in the absence of sensory stimulation of other kinds, which makes sense because so many dreams involve frustration and paralysis of some description. In meditation, alpha and theta waves are more active, and with habitual meditation it used to be thought there were permanent changes but recent findings have not shown this to be so. However, habitual meditators’ brains do age more slowly with respect to memory. The possibly related mindfulness is said to have a number of disadvantages, including over-exertion, ignoring intuition, exacerbating anxiety and triggering depersonalisation. It isn’t clear to me how close mindfulness and samadhi are to each other though.
Hypnosis shows more active alpha waves, but these are often used in imaginative states so it may not indicate that it’s a separate state of consciousness.
Another possible approach to consciousness is to see them as phases like those of matter, which can perhaps be shown on a graph. This has been done, for example, with meditation. Denis Postle has attempted to model the different states of consciousness on the butterfly catastrophe graph, which has four axes. Unfortunately I can only remember arousal and relaxation. Catastrophe theory has gone out of fashion nowadays because although it’s valid, there are few situations which can be reduced to only a few significant parameters. Whether that’s true of consciousness I don’t know. Even so, the idea of there being some kind of space or hyperspace with regions corresponding to different states of consciousness seems to be a good one.
There are also other states of consciousness which we may potentially have but don’t experience in everyday life. For instance, there is a case of a hiker who fell off a path in a remote area and was found alive long after he could be expected to have succumbed to exposure, and it’s thought that he may have entered an obscure state of hibernation. There is one known species of primate who does hibernate, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur. It is of course much more common in other mammals, but for humans this state could be useful for long haul space travel, so if we were ever going to do that, and we aren’t of course, it would be worthwhile looking into. Speaking of space travel, the question of out of body experiences as a separate state of consciousness arises. Is astral travel a distinct state or is it more like dreaming or Ganzfeld? Then there are NDEs. Soon after the heart stops, the brain enters a state whose electrical activity resembles that of NREM sleep, followed by a final burst of sudden activity as the neurones cease to be able to compensate for their increasingly hostile environment and lose their polarisation. That could also be a separate state of consciousness in its own right.
To conclude then, I haven’t really done this subject justice in the limited time and attention span available, but one final thought does occur. Is it right for me not to prioritise any state of consciousness over any other? Most people would probably say samadhi is a higher state than the others, but on the other hand Tibetan Buddhism appears to employ Ganzfeld as such a state, and there are also trance-like ecstatic states used in other forms of spirituality which might correspond more to hypnosis, if that is indeed a state. Whatever is the best way to arrange these, it certainly seems worthwhile to consider their relationships with each other and also with reality. I feel I’ve done this quite thoroughly with dreaming and wakefulness, but not the rest, and it definitely seems like a valuable exercise.
What do you think?
A Box Of Chocolates 