Lehal Library

We began to work on questions about consciousness in general. What happens to it when we become unconscious through a hit on the head, shock, fainting, alcohol or drug overdose, anesthesia, sleep, or death? Is consciousness akin to a magnetic field produced by an electromagnet that ceases to exist once the electricity is cut off? If so, does it get weaker or stronger if we vary the “electrical” current? If we do this, we are doing it without any awareness of the “how” of it. How can we control such action, if at all? It is easy enough to raise these questions, which simply beget more questions with no trace of an answer. We soon became aware that a huge information gap exists. We needed some premise that might indicate a direction to follow. We moved away from seeking materialistic explanations to look at the other end of the spectrum. What if consciousness does continue when the current is reduced? Immediately we began to find examples. The problem is that when out-of-body we have lost consciousness and yet we haven’t, our memory is or is not impaired, some of our physical senses are working and some are not, and so on. At the least, we don’t have total consciousness as we like to think of it, and therefore we don’t regard this state as valid. One body of thought holds that if you can’t move your physical body, or if it doesn’t respond to stimulus, you’re not conscious as we understand the term. Or if you cannot communicate by current standards you’re not conscious. Yet there have been many comatose human beings who have continued to be conscious—they simply had not the means to communicate physically.