Out Of Mind, Out of Time

What is a mind? It is not yours; therefore it is “mine”. No, not the right term usage here. Sorry.

Is mind synonymous with brain? Sometimes, having a brain does not necessarily mean one has a mind, like for example when one could not even count from one to ten or spell the word “photosynthesis” (many thanks to the gritty Microsoft spell check for helping me with this one).

Where is your mind? How come your thirty-five years old with four kids and your just sitting there infront of the computer all day long doing God knows what you’re doing with that square contraption in your face? Now that’s my wife with her usual vitriolic tongue aiming and shooting at me and observe carefully how sometimes she thinks I am completely of no mind.

We all know what mind is. It is something within the brain that is impalpable and ethereal, having no physical form. It is the one thing that controls another formless fact of our being, consciousness. See also how consciousness is as formless as mind and examine circumspectly how we all feel it and know it but just could not see it or touch it. Yet we know it is there, our consciousness, like a timeless shadow.

Any old guy with a whiff of something between his ears would surely realize this, that we are a being mostly dependent on consciousness for every movement or act that we make, even those we do without intending like breathing or blinking our eyes, for they just become automatic and routinely. It is like Sting—-watching us with ‘every breath we make’ or ‘every vow we break’.

We have all gotten so extremely familiar with consciousness—-so familiar in fact that we hardly give a thought about it most of the time. If it is true what many says about familiarity breeding contempt, then we’d be trashing and elbowing and smacking-down our consciousness like hell by now. This despite that it is probably the most startling reality of our own being, and perhaps the most important of all.

Even scientists are far from certain where consciousness comes from or how it actually permeates from the material brain. They have already uncovered the minutest element of the brain and had discovered how the cells inside it emits varied and myriad of electrical pulses that allow the whole human body—-and being—-to function as it is. But how this happens exactly is what they are at a lost. Perhaps like a computer’s central processing unit, the electrical pulses send commands and programmed codes in order to move the hand, to instill feelings, to smile or frown, to cook, or blog, to ride a jeepney or eat a budget meal, to love and hate—-such and such things.

Now scientists have actually delved into an in-depth examination of the consciousness, as neuro-scientists in Chicago have deduced how out-of-body experiences are not so outlandish afterall, contrary to popular belief. By using virtual computer technology, they have observed how subjects put under a virtual mindset have actually felt their virtual selves being threatened as they were beaing approached at (virtually). I am not so particular at how the experiment really went but generally, it was reached as a conclusion that even in mind—-without physical structures of the body involved—-human beings would react positively to non-physical intrusions or introductions and thereon bolsters the probability that out-of-body experiences might just be a probable human experience. Read this very concise discussion on consciousness and the attempt to uncover it.

Easily, this could be set aside as merely the result of extreme imagination for the mind could imagine possibly everything and when it perceives a threat even just in mind, the body reacts accordingly—-physically and mentally.

Yet despite of this major loophole, the study abovementioned is a major headway into the investigation of the human consciousness and then, ultimately of the soul.

Previously, information on out-of-body experiences have been collated solely through accounts by those who have experienced traumatic experiences, mostly by those who had cardiac arrests, as they gain full consciousness after being declared clinically dead. We must note very well how in every such experience, it is extremely startling how every account of an out-of-body experience consists of one very unifying theme, that of seeing tunnels and a bright light at the end of it. As an empirical basis, these testimonies from those “who have came back from the dead” are generally weak and undependable, but as a circumstantial evidence, it is pretty strong and establishing; for how could one effectively explain the astonishing similarities in those accounts despite that they have came from different people living in different geographical locations, having had no contact with each other, and those traumatic incidents being separated by years in occurrence.

When I was so young, way before my highschool years, I was once told a story or rumor by older cousins about how a woman in Subanipa (my grandfather’s hometown in Olutanga Island just south of Pagadian City) died and was about to be buried (probably in the islands before, when one dies, embalmment would be so inconvenient that sometimes those who died are buried on the soonest time possible) yet the woman suddenly rose up from where her cold body was laid and just walked away from the vicinity. Everyone present at her wake was startled to no end of course. As the rumor goes farther, she went on to tell everyone that had inquired about the circumstances of her amazing ressurection how she had seen a long dark tunnel and a bright light at the end of it, so bright in fact that the light was so bright and she had to adjust her sight because of this, but the light she said, had been very comforting, and very pleasing to the senses that she had felt a joy she had never felt in the living world.

Now—whether this story was merely fabricated or not—-this account of an out-of-the-body experience approximates what were collated all over the United States throughout the years and it had happened when our world does not yet communicate as effectively as now, no Internet or cable news yet, and that was way before I have started to read similar accounts on Reader’s Digest. Those who had been an ardent Reader’s Digest reader over the years would surely know what I am saying.

For certain, it is not possible that those who have out-of-body experience in America have heard about this rumored woman in Subanipa and replicated her story about death and dying.

Such is how startling these out-of-body experience accounts—-we have heard many of them every so often from time to time, through those who have gone thru very traumatic physical incidents and had read or heard how they all had testified to the same circumstances, of tunnels and light, and yet whether we like it or not, we could not just as easily believe this as an incontrovertible truth.

Like how we can always believe that there is a sun circling above or below us, but we just do not know exactly how it came to being or what actually consists it.