Case Study of Anaesthetic Unconsciousness - Discussion
Today I had a general anaesthetic for minor elective surgery (hernia repair - all good). Discussions sometimes crop up on the DhO about about unconsciousness versus cessation and path moments. So I thought I would add my experience as a datum. Sorry it’s a bit personal, but I don’t have any other source of mental phenomenology!
The last thing I remember was on the table, noticing that the anaesthetic was not cold despite the warning. (The anaesthesiologist used a vein in my hand, as he couldn’t find the vein in the elbow.) Then I had a sense of formless dreaming and time passing, and then being dragged up from unconsciousness by the nurses waking me up. I had the sense that the dreaming occurred after the surgery, and it was formless in the sense that it had very little conceptual overlay. There seemed to be a gap in time and memory immediately after the anaesthetic and before the dreaming, but there was no sense of missing time or discontinuity. I knew intellectually there was a gap in time, but my body/mind didn’t perceive the gap as having occurred, and didn’t react to it.
The experience was unlike any discontinuities or path moments I have experienced in mediation. There were no missing frames. There was no obvious mental shutdown and reboot. There was no twisting or re-viewing of the world. No flash that illuminated the truth. However, the formless dreaming seemed to be deep in the in the pre-processing of the mind sense, albeit very fuzzy and neither dual nor non-dual in perception.
So for me, the general anaesthetic unconsciousness was not remotely like a meditative cessation or path moment. The sole similarity was the lingering shutdown of conceptual processing in the pre-wakening dreams. This was a bit like a very mild purification or A&P in one of the sense bases (the mind sense). Otherwise, the mind did not show any changes, and did not notice or react to the fact that it had stopped for a while (if indeed it had).
No doubt this is a very incomplete description - and I don’t want to overgeneralise. Still, I hope it is useful to illustrate differences between cessation and path moments, and mere anaesthetic unconsciousness.
An obvious point, I guess, but maybe helpful for those who wonder about this issue.
Malcolm
P.S. There was some good sukkah after the surgery, but I think explanation is something other than the unconsciousness.
And there were definitely no bliss waves.
The last thing I remember was on the table, noticing that the anaesthetic was not cold despite the warning. (The anaesthesiologist used a vein in my hand, as he couldn’t find the vein in the elbow.) Then I had a sense of formless dreaming and time passing, and then being dragged up from unconsciousness by the nurses waking me up. I had the sense that the dreaming occurred after the surgery, and it was formless in the sense that it had very little conceptual overlay. There seemed to be a gap in time and memory immediately after the anaesthetic and before the dreaming, but there was no sense of missing time or discontinuity. I knew intellectually there was a gap in time, but my body/mind didn’t perceive the gap as having occurred, and didn’t react to it.
The experience was unlike any discontinuities or path moments I have experienced in mediation. There were no missing frames. There was no obvious mental shutdown and reboot. There was no twisting or re-viewing of the world. No flash that illuminated the truth. However, the formless dreaming seemed to be deep in the in the pre-processing of the mind sense, albeit very fuzzy and neither dual nor non-dual in perception.
So for me, the general anaesthetic unconsciousness was not remotely like a meditative cessation or path moment. The sole similarity was the lingering shutdown of conceptual processing in the pre-wakening dreams. This was a bit like a very mild purification or A&P in one of the sense bases (the mind sense). Otherwise, the mind did not show any changes, and did not notice or react to the fact that it had stopped for a while (if indeed it had).
No doubt this is a very incomplete description - and I don’t want to overgeneralise. Still, I hope it is useful to illustrate differences between cessation and path moments, and mere anaesthetic unconsciousness.
An obvious point, I guess, but maybe helpful for those who wonder about this issue.
Malcolm
P.S. There was some good sukkah after the surgery, but I think explanation is something other than the unconsciousness.
And there were definitely no bliss waves.
