Being Sick Increases Consciousness

[AtmanIsBrahman]

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but I notice that when I get sick my consciousness paradoxically increases. I’m talking about a common cold by the way, not serious sickness.

This is interesting because you would expect consciousness to go down, but what I find is that you get closer to the “bare existence” experience when you’re sick. Since you can’t do the things you normally would do, it’s like a small reset button for your life, and you get a chance to really reflect. Also, you get closer to a samadhi “nothingness” experience (which I suspect is what death is like).

Bernardo Kastrup actually argues for something similar to this point. He says that mystical experiences were more common in the past because it was harder to survive, so it was more common to have sickness or injury as a part of normal life. Just like how psychedelics correspond to low brain activity, mystical experiences could correspond to low brain activity as a result of sickness or, in the extreme, near death experiences. I’m not sure Kastrup is completely correct about people in the past having more mystical experiences, but he’s definitely onto something.

Have you noticed the same trend of more sickness, more consciousness? If not, try tracking when you get sick over the next year and find out what the trend is.

I’m interested to hear your opinions!

[Hojo]

Yes, like fever dreams. I remeber having scarlet fever and my conciousness was leaving my body. I was seeing the room from every area at the same time. It was like I was looking at myself from the staircase from behind the couch from the ceiling flashing at the same time.

Edited 19 hours ago by Hojo

[aurum]

No, sickness does nothing for my consciousness. 

At best it forces you to slow down. But even there, the sickness is not causing the increase in consciousness. Slowing down is.

 

[Natasha Tori Maru]

2 minutes ago, aurum said:

No, sickness does nothing for my consciousness. 

At best it forces you to slow down. But even there, the sickness is not causing the increase in consciousness. Slowing down is.

 

My experience also.

[Joseph Maynor]

What does it mean that your consciousness increases?

[aurum]

1 hour ago, Joseph Maynor said:

What does it mean that your consciousness increases?

What's the difference between when you're asleep and right now?

[Carl-Richard]

If you get sick, less thinking going on, but you may also be in pain and you may think about that. If you can get through the pain and sit in a restful posture so that you no longer care about the pain or the pain dampens, then you could enter a state of less thoughts, but you could also do that while not sick (i.e. meditation). When you're not sick, its easier to get lost in thoughts because you are able to think and move around and do stuff all day, while when you're sick, you have to sit down and rest more.

[UnbornTao]

I think you're comparing apples and oranges.

The point of "becoming conscious" is that you're in touch with the nature of something beyond any possible state or condition you might be in.

Whether you have cancer, are bored or angry, you're "conscious" of the subject matter, and circumstances shouldn't alter that fact when it is a solid apprehension. When using that word, people generally refer to their experience and the ability of their minds to make sense of that - or cognition, that is.

When we inspect our own experiential understanding in an incredibly sobering way, we realize that we are generally pretty sloppy in our distinctions of each of these, which suggests we really don't know what we're talking about. We can't even make an honest assessment in the first place as we're likely to still be operating intellectually, failing to see what's in front of us.

That said, whatever increases one's sensibility in that domain of experience is also a welcome change.

Edited 3 hours ago by UnbornTao