The states of
consciousness
Dr Bernard Auriol
As dreams are made of, and
our little life
Is rounded with a
sleep [1]
(Shakespeare)
The conscience constitutes the "locus" of the relations of a subject to his world. This conscience is not immutable, one knows various "states", in particular wakefulness, dream and sleep. The physiologists divide this last into "slow sleep" and "paradoxical sleep". Methods of relaxation allow to describe a "fourth state [2]", a special state of conscience to which we can give a special value. This state comprises peace, serenity, "absorption", even "presence", ineffability, etc. On the metabolic level, rest which can become deeper than the deepest sleep. This state of wakeful super-rest is called "fourth state" by some of neurophysiologists who were interested in, others, especially in linguistic english area call it : "hypnagogic state". The term "fourth state" is derived from the fact that we knew so far only three states of normal consciousnesses: wakefulness, sleep and dream. But this fourth state was described in every culture. The knowledge of it, is generally related to a theological or philosophical construction belonging to each of that cultures. The state of consciousnesses can be defined by means of physiological and psychological criteria, phenomenological subjective insight. They produce also a certain number of observable consequences, either in laboratory or in the wild life.
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Let us summarize
some historical data on this subject :
Prehistory of states of
Consciousness
Platon
He already urged, as old tradition, a purification of
soul which consisted in "gather one’s thoughts, to concentrate from all
parts of the body, to live, as much as possible, insulated, as untied of the
body". With great relevance, he put closely this loosening of the
untiedness of the death and saw it like a training to face it, while being put
"under conditions which bring us closer to death status, as much as possible
"... This idea is quite close to the yogis one, when they name "shavasana", i.e. "asana of
death" the relaxation posture. The topic is to be perfectly flexible in
the hand of the relaxologist, obeying his movements "perinde ac
cadaver".
Turyia and Vedanta
Vedanta
distinguishes, as we do, three standard states of consciousness :
- Wakefulness
- Deep sleep
- Dream
They add a fourth
state of consciousness whichh consists of living simultaneously deep sleep and
awareness: being wakefull but perfectly in rest, without moving or thinking.
For the yogis this state makes us in
touch with the pure absolute being, in other words with the fundamental
reality. This state, called “Samadhi” is, after Mircea Eliade, an “enstatic”
more than an “extatic” state.
Ishihiro
During
Zazen, id est seated meditation, a
japanese buddhist trie to be situated in a just balance between “contention”
(too rigid posture), and sluggishness (too lax posture), between excitement and
drowsiness. Varied transformations of consciousness and body feeling are
observed without struggling against them neither complying to them. Even so
they are painfull or blissfull. Thinking without thoughts, beyond terrestrial
borders on earth, thinking beyond life or death, in the between of two deaths,
empty spirit open, facing vacuity.
Monotheisms, Orison, and Ecstasy
Christian mystiques
Teresa from Avila
depicts the “supernatural orison state” as an inner contemplation which is felt
by the soul; during it it seems want to dissociate oneself from the trouble of
the external senses; sometimes even, it involves them after it. Soul
feels the need to close the eyes of the body, nothing to hear, nothing to see,
be occupied only with what occupies it then very whole: "to only discuss
with only God"... It is appropriate, "without null violence, without
noise, it tries to prevent thinking from discoursing, without trying to suspend
it, either that imagination". The heart can be inserted in a suave and
more or less "fruitive" quietude . This pleasure [ 3 ] does not go
without sporadic divagations of thinking and imagination which is advisable to
let go without attaching importance to it. In the full union, there is total
suspension of all the powers: will, intelligence, imagination. The duration of
this rapture is generally short, and appears be more still than it is it
really...
Jewish mystiques
Hassidism in its research of perfection uses traditional
means of mysticism, in particular asceticism [ 4 ] and meditation. Isaac Luria
(1534-1572) asserts meditation is the
best way to reach enlightenment. Cabalist meditation open us to én-sof, the
unbounded being, impossible to name and to know ("who ?”) . For us it can
seem to be nothingness ("ayin").
muslim mystiques
“fana” [5] ("to die, to cease existing"), (complete
abandonment of oneself and realization of God) is one of the stages of the sufi
mystic to obtain unity with God. “Fana” can be reached by a constant meditation
and contemplation of the attributes of God, coupled with condemnation of the
human attributes. When the sufi succeeds in entirely purifying terrestrial
world and being lost in the love of God, it is said that he destroyed his
individual will and that he died to his own existence to live only in God and
with God.
Many soufis supports that fana as itself alone is a
negative state, because even if to get rid of the terrestrial desires, to
recognize and condemn the human imperfections are things necessary for any
excessively pious person, such virtues are insufficient for those which embrace
the way sufi. However by "fana of fana" ("destruction of the
destruction"), the sufi manages to destroy human attributes and loses any
conscience of its terrestrial existence; it is then revivified by the grace of
God and the secrecy of the divine attributes is revealed to him. Then it will
be able to reach the more sublime state of "baqa’ "(subsistence) and
will be thus ready with the direct vision of God [6].
Le testimony of
the sufis – without regarding to theological references - do not seem different in its feeling from
what say to us the Jewish, Christian, hindouist and buddhist mystics.
The four States of Consciousness
The trivial [7] sleep or slow sleep
The pressing appearance of sleep could be compared with
an instinct [8]. One regards it as a defence against
exhaustion of organic and psychic functions. It is described like a "small
death", a kind of intermezzo, whether it is lived as salutary or is qualified
as “wasted time”. That sleep should be nearest what death is, is attested
by mythology as well as etymology [9]. According to Western thought, it would
exclude any explicit self – consciousness…
However, the sleeper can wake up when meaning sounds arise:
the tears of the baby awake his mom immediately; however she does not notice
the noise of planes’; the stop of TV-shows awakes the televiewer whom they
had put to sleep ! The persistence of these possibilities during the sleep
differentiates it from the coma or chemical narcosis and attests of a partial
consciousness that yoga would possibly reinforce in the form of a "conscious
sleep"!
Very different is the nightmare [10] which constitutes a pathological form of sleep in which the subject faces
an intense hallucinatory experiment, shows a certain degree of sleepwalking
and sleeps very deeply, even though he opened large eyes!
During the sleep, the various functions and regulations
of the body are preserved. On the other hand, apart from the signals of alarm
which keep an access road, perceptions and actions on the environment are
removed; probably, it is not possible to learn while sleeping [11]. Behavior during the sleep of animals
is recognized easily thanks to their posture. Some muscular tonus persists
during the sleep (for cat, for example, muscles of the nape).
After Jouvet, “Slow sleep, manifests
itself in the presence of a synchronized cortical activity of spindles (16
c/s) and/or of high-voltage slow waves
(“delta” : 2 or 3 c/s)”.
Drowsiness is characterized
by muscular immobility and modification of the cerebral electric activity
with appearance of "spindles" of waves, followed waves delta, slow
waves of high voltage. The slower the waves are and the more difficult it
is to wake up the sleeper [12] ! It is because
of this slow rate/rhythm that we give the name of slow sleep to sleep itself
(or trivial sleep). The spindles of sleep are produced in a thalamic nucleus
[13] whose rhythmic activity prevents the thalamo-cortical fast activities, necessary
to the mental activities that one observes during the wakefulness or the dream.
When this mechanism is put out of order, one speaks about insomnia. The body
which suffers the most deprivation of slow sleep is the prefrontal cortex;
one deduces from it that the essential function of sleeping is to regenerate
it. This cerebral area give us our adaptability, flexibility of imagination
and of reflexion [14], attention, concentration, behaviour
planning.
The wakefulness causes its own
inhibition in the following way:
it exists a quantitative relation between the duration of
wakefulness and the intensity of slow waves of the sleep: the longer the animal
remains awaked, the more the slow waves slow down and develop when it falls
asleep! During wakefulness, certain neurons, located very high in the system,
present regular discharges every second, like a clock. They seem to measure
the duration of the wakefulness. This involves (by mediation of serotonin)
the setting of a system which will inhibit the wakefulness executive network
and release the thalamic system as we saw before.It exists also another system
responsible for falling asleep. Located in the bulb at the level of the nucleus
of the solitary tract, it receives the signals of tiredness coming from the
parasympathetic system; among these signs : the irritation of eyes which become red, yawning, the decrease
of muscular tonus ", etc.
The
trivial wakefulness
During the state of wakefulness, the brain perceives informations of external or
internal environment. It decodes them, evaluates them, integrates them and
compares them with information received before. Thus it will be able to answer
them in an optimal way. Certain diseases can be deceitful, so that the ego
fails to be aware of its acts which however have all the attributes of vigilance:
one quotes the case of an individual who drove his car on hundreds of kilometers,
took a hotel room and awoke there completely perplexed! Its recording electroencephalographic
testified that it indeed sometimes happened to him to act, the open eyes and
in a way adapted enough in a true state of deep sleep. In other pathological
states, it is rather called "trance", "possession" or
"multiple personality". The person shows several ways of being,
several identities, sometimes extremely contrasted, whereas it is in all these
cases conscious of his ego – be it provisional or coexisting with others versions
of oneself - and in a cerebral state of wakefulness! One is maybe there in
one of the possible forms of paradoxical wakefulness. From the point of view
of the cerebral electric waves the state of trivial wakefulness is accompanied
by a fast, low voltage, electric activity ( 40 hertz) [15].
"It was shown that the systems of wakefulness were
laid out in networks, id est that the pharmacological excitation of one is
followed by the activation of all. There exists however, at some "nodes
" of these networks, strategic places of which inactivation can inhibit
the whole network. Executive network of the wakefulness includes various structures
[16] exciting cortex. They use various
transmitter substances, such as histamine [17], glutamate [18], serotonin, noradrenalin,
Gaba and acetylcholine. One knows the exciting role of amphetamine which gives
place to drug-addiction (ecstasy). Contrary to amphetamines, a rather recent
product, the modafinil, would give neither tolerance (which obliges to increase
the amounts), nor dependence. Wakefulness may also be modulated by factors
of hormonal type (for example the "corticotrophin releasing Factor [19] and the vasopressin
arginine system). Stimulations coming from the body itself and the external
world contribute to the powering of these systems and thus support the state
of wakefulness. Some slow, weak and repetitive stimulations, can act in
the opposite direction.
The paradoxical sleep (dream)
Philosophers insist on the lived reality which the dreamer
experiences. The emotions, themselves, are deep and sharp, sometimes more
than those of the awake state! Descartes [20], to illustrate
the difficulty in deciding if the feeling of reality is enough to distinguish
reality from the dream, quotes the case of a slave "who enjoyed an
imaginary freedom when being asleep" but soon "he starts
to suspect that his freedom is just a dream, fears to awake and conspires
with these pleasant illusions to be longer deceived by them [21] “. Pascal echoes it "if a craftsman were sure to
dream every night, during twelve hours , that he was a king, I believe that
it would be almost as happy as a king who would dream every night, during
twelve hours , which he would be a craftsman".
To be out of illusion,
we claim to use a reciprocal control of the senses : "pinch me, I
believe that I dream! ". It is clear that such a process has no
effectiveness, no more than the agreement of other human beings : if I dream
of them they speak to me and agree with me or fight me to mistake there! Otherwise,
the nonsense of the dream is perceived by the dreamer after the dream, just
when he does not dream any more ! According to Schopenhauer [22], " life and dreams are the layers
of a single book; the successive reading of these pages is what one calls
the real life; but when the accustomed time of the reading (the day) passed
and that the hour for rest is coming, we continue idly to divide the book
into sheets, randomly opening it at any page and falling sometimes on a page
already read, sometimes on one which we do not know; but we read always in
the same book "
“Thus, isolated dreams are distinguished from real life
in what they do not get in the continuity of the experience (…) and it is
the alarm clock which clarifies this difference".
The assimilation of the paradoxical sleep to the oniric
activity is due to the work of the Chicago school [23]. The awakening of subjects during paradoxical
sleep involves very precise memories of dream in more than 80 % of cases,
while subjects who are awake during paradoxical sleep seldom remember to have
dreamed
Paradoxical sleep is recognizable thanks to cardinal
signs:
- irregular breathing
- Rapid Eye Movements under closed eyelids.
- muscular relaxation
- sexual excitation.
After Jouvet “This sleep mode reveals
itself by a low-voltage fast cortical activity similar to arousal activity
[activated sleep (122) or paradoxical or rhombencephalic sleep (254)]”.
Although there is a fast electric activity, similar to that
of wakefulness, the paradoxical sleep is a very deep sleep, so much that it
is more difficult to wake up the sleeper than during the major stage of the
"slow" sleep. This oddity results in naming "paradoxical"
this state! If, however, one awakes the subject, he generally can tell a dream.
We do not know if these two electric
aspects of sleep are the manifestation of a single hypnogenic mechanism or the
manifestation of two fundamentally different states.
The paradoxical
wakefulness (sophronic state)
Mélinan [24] discovers
the difference between the experience of dream and wakefulness as "we
never awake of what we call wakefulness. We never pass in another state, of
where we could, in its turn, judge reality by far and top, as reality judges
the dream "
He observes that under the normal conditions of human
life, there is not a fourth state which would be to reality what reality is
to dream.However he wonders if the passage of life to demise could not constitute
a kind of awakening of the wakefulness! He continues: "it seems that
there is for certain men, already in ordinary life, at least a half-arousal;
some men approach this new state, even if they do not reach, a state in which
the sensitive world seems a dream [25] ". It is this idea which was developed
by researchers such as Desoille, Wallace, Benson or Caycedo. I proposed the
term "of paradoxical wakefulness [ 26 ]" rather than of "fourth
state of consciousness" in order to mark the symmetry of this state of
consciousness in its function of cleaning memory, restoring, purifying, in
opposition to imaginary enrichment and to the setting in memory related to
the state of paradoxical sleep. Horne (1988, 2000) ensures that the body,
at the cellular level, recovers better in this state that during the sleep!
The study of relaxation techniques and their effects, allows us to bring them
close, on the physiological level, of the states of consciousness modified
by various methods of meditation or orison.
During the paradoxical wakefulness, the various functions
and regulations of the body are preserved. If the alarm signals remain effective,
perceptions consist of notable distortions, such as a tiny rustle can start
a strong reaction whereas an intense noise passes unperceived! The function
of alarm is revived whereas distractive perception disappears.
Out of an alarm, the action on the environment is
removed as well as all worry: thus the paradoxical wakefulness is characterized
by a decrease in the muscular tonus which will be limited to the maintenance of
the posture. One observes a deceleration of the electric activity of the brain
with increases in "coherence" between his various parts (front /
back, right / left). This slow activity would make possible to
name this state "slow wakefulness" in opposition to the “trivial
wakefulness” with its rapid rhythms.
Breathing, also, become slower and very regular, in a
spontaneous way. However, the pranayama of yoga makes this consequence a cause:
the respiratory deceleration is used [ 27 ] to deepen further this state of
awoke rest [ 28 ]. One observes even phases of respiratory stop with (or by)
reduction in the requirements out of oxygen. These moments are accompanied by
feelings of "bliss", occasionally diverted in favor of the Master who
transmits the technique [ 29 ] .
It is advisable to distinguish these apnea, limited to
a few minutes, of the apparent respiratory stop of the yogis who are locked
up in a restricted space and survive several hours with an amount of very
reduced available oxygen. In this last case, breathing continues; but the
state of rest obtained "being very succeeded", the oxygen uptake
is extremely weak, the diaphragmatic movements are almost unperceivable.
Other physiological manifestations will insist on the
generalized rest which accompanies every relaxation response:
·
deceleration and stabilization of the pulse
·
rather decreased tonicity of peripheral
vessels
·
normalization of Blood Pressure when the
disorder is of "neurotic" origin.
·
Decreased metabolism
·
Psychological process of unification and
simplification.
·
distance, increased tolerance of frustration
These phenomena, as a whole,
can be compared to radically various anti-stress phenomena such as dormancy
(hibernation) or even swoon, faint, blackout, lipothymies in the event of
aggression, ecstasy, mystical rapture and certain forms of lethargy.
Paradoxical wakefulness
and dormancy
There are very few environments in which the organisms
are not prone to any kind of stress [33]! The
evolution set up a way of avoiding a repetitive steady stressing environment:
the state of dormancy. In this state, the organism saves to the
maximum the quantity of available energy and ask its environment the minimum!
Dormancy: state of reduced
metabolic activity adopted by many organisms under conditions of environmental
stress or often, as in winter, when such stressful conditions are likely to
appear. It is more specifically called also hibernation, estivation, etc.
Another definition
is “dormancy - a state of non activity during which sleep
brain waves cannot be detected.” !
Value of
dormancy
In terms of
evolution, dormancy seems to have evolved independently among a wide
variety of living things, and the mechanisms for dormancy vary with the
morphological and physiological makeup of each ...
For a number of organisms, dormancy is becoming an essential
part of the vital cycle [35] ,making
it possible for an organism to bypass difficult phases with a minimal impact
on the organism itself! This state of dormancy can be determined by many variables,
in particular:
·
lack of food or drink,
·
lack of oxygen or carbon dioxide.
·
changes of temperature (in more or less)
·
exposure time to the light,
Timing
The timing in the annual rhythm of activity and dormancy
is very important: the Arctic squirrel, kept in a warm laboratory, however
puts itself, when winter comes, in a state of torpor and extreme idleness!
In the same way, when hibernating animals are subjected to a cold temperature
out of the normal season, they react like every animals by increasing their
thyroid activity and their metabolic level to maintain the normal temperature
of their organism. On the other hand, when autumn comes, the cold causes them
to lower their thyroid secretions and their metabolism; for certain species,
a reduction in food must be added.
However, the state of hibernation is not continuous:
with interval of a few weeks, they wake up by themselves and make some movements,
especially at the beginning and the end of winter.
Many data could seem purely anecdotic; they suggest us
a very significant idea, namely that dormancy is rather largely available
according to numerous adaptive methods. It is perhaps an extreme development of
a very general aptitude for living a particular neurophysiological state quite
as significant as sleep, dream or wakefulness.
Types of dormancy
The term “hibernation” is often used for any state of
dormancy, torpor, or inactivity [37]. Beside "true
hibernating beings” [38]
one describes "the light hibernating ones" which can remain inactive
and lethargic as far as we consider behaviour, with a discrete reduction in
their temperature, by periods of a few weeks [39]. The light hibernation
is a compromise between the minimal requirements in energy for one deep hibernating
and the great expenditure of the animals which remain active during all winter.
In the arid regions some animals who become torpid during the very hot and
dry summer, one speaks then about "estivation".
physiological Changes
during Dormancy
Typically, dormancy is practised in a protected den [40]. The internal
organs (digestive tract, endocrine glands) are almost completely inactive!
The body adapts to maintain its metabolism at the minimum level necessary
for survival. The organism stands in between life making possible the exit
of hibernation and reduction of the metabolism close to death. The peripheral
nervous system and the spinal cord get an increased sensitivity for certain
stimuli whereas the brain massively reduces its electric activity [41] but remains
able, even in its deeper torpor [42], to record the
relevant variations of the environment! A cerebral particular zone remains
vigilant : the hypothalamus which manages hunger, temperature as well as cardiorespiratory
and endocrinal functions. During dormancy, the body temperature is more or
less considerably lowered. The heartbeat and respiratory rates slow down becoming
unperceivable. The blood pressure decreases without breaking down completely
(thanks to the quasi-closing of the vessels which feed the non-vital bodies
[43] ).
The fast, solid and liquid, involves a slimming which
can reach 40 %. The urine secretion is negligible. The oxygen uptake and the
carbon dioxide production are surprisingly low. The endocrine glands activity
,metabolism accelerating, is very reduced [44]. The thyroid
activity largely decreases at the time of dormancy. On the other hand, "the
parathyroid ones are very active, as inter scapular brown grease which is,
at the same time, a reserve of grease and a gland with internal secretion
playing an essential role in the temperature control [45] ". One generally observes a reduction of
the activity of sexual glands.
