Altered awareness states
The ancient
Buddha, Siddartha, is said to have self-induced mild to deep allegedly lucid
reduced awareness (i.e. coma) states (called the 4 Jhanas) by gradually
reducing his focal (meaning contact response) range (hence consciousness)
from wide-angle (i.e. selecting a lot of stressor responses) to narrow angle
(i.e. selecting a few stressor responses), to on-end (i.e. selecting one
stressor response) and finally to no-end (i.e. avoiding any stressor
response, thus avoiding re-birth) and which produced, so he claimed,
awareness (itself a response, hence itself a stressor) of emptiness,* Sanskrit: sunjata). He self-induced the
various selective awareness (i.e. coma) states
firstly to eliminate (i.e. de-select) contact with the world, both outer and
inner, and to which he (possibly an Asperger’s syndrome victim; note he
showed now signs of personal warmth though plenty of cool non-directed
compassion) appears to have responded with chronic stress = suffering, and,
secondly, to achieve euphoria (to wit, “the bliss of liberation” (possibly
from distress, possibly from its cause)). Likewise,
some ancient Hindus (i.e. the Vedantins) claimed
that the deepest restricted awareness (interpreted as sleep/coma) state
(called: turīya, i.e. the ‘fourth’) brought about euphoric
oneness of the self, i.e. the atman, with the Self, i.e. the Brahman,
meaning one’s personal self as all, because alone. Recent
experiments into normal human sleep/coma states have discovered 4 distinct
brainwave patterns that happen during ordinary (or induced) sleep (likewise
in hypnotic and meditation induced selective awareness/non-awareness). That
might suggest that there is no fundamental difference between normal sleep
(general reduced awareness) and artificially induced (i.e.
by means of hypnosis, meditation or barbiturates) sleep/coma. The Scottish
East India Company surgeon James Esdaile performed more than 300 hundred
major surgical operations on patients he or his helpers induced into a highly
reduced = deep (actually lucid, because the subjects claimed later on that
they were not unconscious) coma (meaning selective unawareness) state by
means of mental misdirection (i.e. mesmerism)). His
surgical operations appeared to have been pain free. Moreover, post-operative
infection was reduced to a minimum and which suggest further experiments into
the affect of normal and induced (via, for instance, barbiturates) coma
states on immune system functioning. On his return to England, Esdaile’s
medical peers ridiculed him and rubbished his technique (don’t they always!)
probably because he failed to prove his point by being unable to reproduce
the profound selective non-awareness (i.e. coma)
state he had been able to induce back in India. In the
1950’s, genial American hypnotists like David Elman, Gil Boyne and Milton
Erickson regularly induced the Esdaile deep coma/sleep state (to wit, the 3rd
Jhana). Indeed, Elman claimed that he could induce an even deeper coma/sleep
state, and which he called hypno-sleep. * A note for those who have chosen any one of
the 84.000 pre- or post- modern Buddhists selective non-awareness (hence
non-rebirth) paths to personal liberation. Hearsay has it that the Buddha (and
who never called himself Buddha but chose the name Tathagata) originally
understood ‘empty’ to mean: ‘empty of abiding substance
or essence’ (to wit: Pali: atta,
supposedly meaning self), meaning: impermanent
(Pali: annica). Later on and following the deliberate
ad absurdum reduction of all traditional Buddhist dharmas by the loony
Mahayana Buddhist scholiast Nagarjuna (born and educated a Brahmin, a true 5th
column saboteur), the content of emptiness, namely ‘abiding substance or essence’, was dropped so
that the bland and meaningless surface structure notion of ‘emptiness’ (as
such) remained. By so doing the initial (deep structure) emptiness focus was
reduced/flattened so that it could be freely generalised, indeed
universalised. The more intense response to the reduced notion of emptiness
was equated, falsely, with both full awakening (Pali: samma-sambodhi)
and full liberation (but not enlightenment). This sorry (Occam’s Razor like)
reduction from more to less (so that the less could be generalised to more =
all) can be clearly observed in the full version of the Heart Sutra.
Nagarjuna’s deliberate, dastardly reductionism reduced Buddhism’s distinctive
because unique message to nil. A few centuries later Buddhism had completed
disappeared from India and the Brahmins once again ruled as top dogs. |