This experience has awakened in me a renewed interest in
life and death, time and consciousness. My wife Lynn was at my bedside for much
of the time I was unconscious, hallucinating, and semi-conscious, and related
my behavior during these times. I have no memory of most of this and from her
descriptions of the pain I suffered during some procedures I’m thankful I don’t
have a memory of it.
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| Mt Shasta Lenticular Moment |
When we are asleep it seems we still have a consciousness at
work albeit on a minimal power. We are aware of dreams and noises and some
actual noises we incorporate into our dreams. What I’m saying is even in a
sleep state we are aware or so it seems. While in ICU, my body shut down
completely for a time. Also, my body was shut down via drugs so I was in an
induced coma. During these times Jack Sutton seemed to have disappeared out of
existence. I say this because I am told
that there were times I was in excruciating pain, such as caused by medical procedures,
twice I was subjected to spinal taps. Most of the time I spent in ICU I have
absolutely no memory, that includes two separate times. Having no memory of past events can be a good
thing, especially when those events were traumatic, painful or unpleasant. If
you don’t have a memory, then you cannot suffer further from a traumatic event
by re-living it again. Why do we continually suffer from past events, it’s through memory and re-living these events that are brought back into consciousness through memory. Perhaps Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a good example of
this. So the question is, can we erase memories that are unpleasant so that we
only suffer once and never again by nasty experiences? I will return to this
later.
When I was a young man, I spent a lot of time in thought
experiments. One such experiment, involved imagining myself floating in outer
space. I would travel to the far reaches of the universe but could never get to
the end. I would contemplate questions like what’s beyond the end, what was
there before the beginning, question I could not grasp or answer. When I asked
myself these question, a brick wall went up stifling the thought. Years later
after I had explored Buddhism and Hinduism, taken the EST Warner Earhart
seminars, participated in the Avatar course, read the Course in Miracles, many
books by Eastern Spiritual Gurus and New Age wannabes, some dim light appeared!
One day I got the answer or at least a
direction to the next step. The concepts of what was before the beginning or
what’s after the end are thought limitations! We live and communicate in the
world of thought, nothing outside that world can exist as long as we remain and
communicate in the realm of thought. The Eastern philosophers grappled with
this dilemma and believed the way out is through meditation. I always thought when
asked, what is meditation, the best answer is It’s not what you think? Most spiritual paths, Christian, Muslim,
Buddhist and most others, emphasize meditation heavily. So in my present state
of spiritual development, I’m over the thought restricted question and
concentrating on where meditation might take me. I can’t make any super
spiritual claims, it’s a difficult path and may not yield any results, but to
me it’s worth pursuing.
Look at time; it cannot exist outside of consciousness. How
do we experience time, pretty much through consciousness? If I don’t see you for a
while, then see you, my mind immediately brings up an image of you, a memory
(not necessarily accurate) to compare with the present you. Since the two
images are not the same, I infer you have changed (time), you look older, and
thus time must have passed. Older/younger are thought restrictions that we have
adapted as true. Imagine floating in space, the only objects we encounter are
celestial bodies, through consciousness we calculate our relative position which
is stored as a memory. Then later we check the celestial bodies, then compare
to our memory of those bodies and determine the positions have changed and thus
re-enforce the time concept. Without consciousness, the bodies remain the same
or are always in the present moment, no time, no beginning no end!
Scientist creates models of phenomenon that they can test
against their theories of exactly what is happening in any given system. If the
results support the model, then the model is a good frame of reference to go
further. The model however may not be construed as representing the actual thing
being studied. We now have models for black holes, quarks, gravity and the Higgs boson particle;
they don’t really represent the actuality, but are a good reference in that
experiments are predicted by the models. Gravity is well understood and most of the advances in our world came able through the gravity mathematical model. However if you ask most scientist what gravity is, they cannot answer, the model works, but it is not gravity! As soon as experiments move away from
the model, the model is discarded and a new model created. Recently the
Higgs boson experiments have not behaved as predicted, so I suspect there are some scientist madly working up new theories and models.
I think some of the ancient eastern scholars where in tune with quantum mechanics without knowing it.
So what would the model of the known universe as we know it
look like? Hmmm, I thought about this and what pops up a lot for me is the world as we
know it is an illusion! Wow, we have really fooled ourselves and created an
illusionary world. Even some physicist after studying quantum mechanics have
said in deeply studying the universe, it eventually appears that we are
studying our own consciousness! This is
where thought ends and the unknown begins!
