Dimensions of Consciousness - George Mashour

[@ContentFrog]

Dr. Mashour rocks!

[@Cotten-]

*StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson brought me here to learn more from George.* ❤

[@ClassPunkOnRumbleAndSubstack]

There's a nice gap for drugless mystical experiences to sit in, in that diagram, since they require enough relaxation to shut off linguistic thought and falling asleep in them can make dreams more desirable tying into lucid dreaming. Astral travel experiences may be tied to drugless mystical experiences, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis connecting to locked-in syndrome. Mystical experiences from meditation likely require practice with relaxation where the body is similar to locked-in syndrome or sleep paralysis, explaining that meditation is more popular in methods where the body is still. Whereas moving around in mystical experiences is more difficult because the mind has to be relaxed to a point where it is more out of touch with the movements of the body as though some part of the mind consistently believes the body is sleeping and still, tying into the ancient sayings in Advaita Vedanta that "You are not the actor/doer"; maybe I'll be able to use this if I ever get around to building a theoretical model of the first principles of mystical experiences.

[@jps17183]

I'm sorry, but how can we be certain that we are not conscious during coma, for example? Just because we don’t remember any experiences doesn’t necessarily mean there were none. It’s possible that we simply forget them, or perhaps the content of conscious experiences during deep sleep is incompatible with our memory system. Think of our memory like a PlayStation that only runs PlayStation discs-it can’t read Xbox discs. Similarly, any state we consider unconscious might be due to a similar memory system limitation.