13 - Unconsciousness, Sleep and Pain
There is much confusion regarding the supposedly possible condition known as “being unconscious.”
When we sleep, or are anesthetized, we say we are “unconscious.”
We cannot be unconscious. We have always been conscious without the slightest awareness of it.
Our confusion in this respect lies in mistaking sensation and thinking for consciousness.
When we stop thinking, whether asleep or awake, we do not stop KNOWING, nor do we cease being consciously aware of our Being. We but cease to set our knowledge in motion to express idea through the pulsations of thinking.
Conscious Mind does not sleep. Sleep is merely the negative half of the wave cycle of electrical awareness of sensation. Wakefulness is the positive half.
All nature sleeps when the sunlight lessens the ability of all things to manifest life. Sleep is the death half of the life-death cycle.
One may say, “I am unaware of this or that,” but one cannot say “I am unconscious” when one is always conscious.
Conscious awareness is KNOWING. Unawareness means that one does not yet know.
Knowledge is within him which he can know when he desires to know.
Sleep and wakefulness are positive-negative waves parts of a wave cycle, just as birth and death are opposite ends of a life cycle.
Sleep is but an anesthetic. Sleep can be induced chemically, either to the whole body or any part of it by desensitizing its cells. When the body or parts of it are thus “put to sleep,” they have not been rendered “unconscious”; their voltage has merely been lowered.
The dentist does not refer to a local anesthetic as having produced unconsciousness; he refers to it as a desensitizing condition, but when the surgeon desensitizes the body, it is then supposed to be “unconscious.” We assume that the brain has stopped thinking The brain does not think, therefore it cannot stop doing that which it never does. We assume that bodies cease to be conscious, but consciousness is never in bodies.
A local anesthetic stops pain. Pain is a too intense electric current. The voltage is too great for the nerve wires to stand the strain. They burn out, and the over-charge of burning out causes the pain.
When the nerves of the body FEEL an electric current running through them, the body is aware that something is happening to throw it out of balance. When the body is in balance, it has no sensation.
When the body is unbalanced, sensation informs it when and where, otherwise it could not function.
Wakefulness and sleep are merely the charging and discharging of the uncountable electric batteries of the body. If these batteries were kept constantly charged, there would be no such alternating conditions as sleep and wakefulness.
This planet is carrying us on our uphill journey to our pinnacle. The sun is the generator which charges its batteries. The sun is that generator, but the earth is turning toward and away from its generator continually.
As the sun's charging light disappears from one edge of the planet's rim at evening, everything goes to sleep. Conversely, all things awaken at the dawn. The batteries of all things on earth are being forever charged daily and discharged nightly.
“I center the moving shaft of My universe, yet I move not, although its power to move springeth from Me.
“I center growing systems, and changing cells of growing systems, yet I change not, e'en though their changing patterns spring from me.
“I center living things which manifest My life, but they live not. I alone live.
“Growing things are moving things in man's sensing, though they move not in man's knowing.
“Moving things are changing things in man's sensing, yet they change not in man's knowing.
“E'en though fast moving things of man's sensing move fast, they simulate the rest, while moving, from which they sprang into seeming motion.”
- from The Divine Iliad
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