If consciousness comes from the soul, how does anesthesia make us lose consciousness?
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Transcription:
what happens when doctor apply local anesthesia to avoid pain to some body part? How chetena(sensation) disappear from chemical reaction ? Can chemicals make our soul (Atma) chetena(sensation) free?
No , consciousness and its attended property of sensation, is an integral part of the soul and that is always inherently there with the soul. At the same time the soul’s consciousness is rooted through certain channels, so in a normal function in a body, the soul consciousness is rooted through the whole body through certain sensory mechanisms int he body , Now the interaction of the spiritual soul with the material body is a technical subject, and I don’t want to get into technicality in this brief answer, but the the principle is that the soul uses the body’s mechanisms, So just as the soul gives energy to the body to function, at the same time the body also needs to take food. It is like the car needs the driver to drive and at the same time the car needs fuel. The driver makes the car run but the fuel is also needed. So the food is like the fuel and the soul is like the driver of the car. Now , if say the connection between the ignition engine and the starting key on the driver’s panel, is broken, then the driver may move the key in the ignition socket, but the car will not start. That does not mean that the driver has lost the ability to drive the car, It simply means that the internal connections in the car are malfunctioning. So similarly, when somethings in the body goes wrong in its normal functioning, then the body may be incapable to doing certain functions, and that does not mean that the soul has lost the capability to do those functions, but it is the body which has lost the capacity to execute those functions. just as the driver still has the ability to drive , but the car has lost the capacity to be driven. So what do the chemicals do ? Whether it is in anesthesia or it is a psychedelic drugs,when people try to take drugs and it alters their consciousness ,is that, the channel through which the consciousness is transmitted to the body are altered or disrupted. so in the case of anesthesia , if I am given anesthesia to my arm, then the chemicals are used to temporarily render dysfunctional, to temporarily stop the functioning of the channels that are the transmitters of the consciousness and the receivers of sensations. Now modern science understand these channels to be the nervous system, and not going into the technicalities of that. Even if we agree with the point that nervous system is the conveyor of the conscious intention and the receiver of the sensory impressions, then the nervous system may dysfunctional by the application of the anesthesia and the person will not be consciousness of that particular part. So, if the doctor touches the anesthesia part of the patients body, and says “do you feel any thing” and the patient says “no”, Now even when the patient says no, that means that he is conscious. So if the soul had lost the capacity of consciousness then the patient would have not been able to respond at all to the doctor. So he has still the capacity of the consciousness and that’s how he responds to the doctor but the physical channel though which the conscious is transmitted within the body has been temporarily blocked and that why the person is no longer conscious.
So to summarize the chemicals does not effect the consciousness of the soul but they effect the channels through which the consciousness transmits and that’s why the person may not be conscious of certain parts when those parts are anesthetized and the connection for the flow of consciousness are checked by that.