You lie naked in the pre-operative room, with only a single sheet over you. It is not cold, yet your teeth chatter – an involuntary reaction of consciousness. You try to calm yourself: a routine procedure, nothing will go wrong, and yet a shiver runs right through you. You are already floating, and a moment ago there was bustle all around you, but even then the noise never fully reached your consciousness. Now silence, waiting. The machines hum – the ventilation, the dosing equipment – and something around you whistles, whirs and beeps.
You try to give yourself up to the floating. The outer world seems to cease, and within there is serenity and peace, but somewhere between the two, perhaps on the borderland between body and soul, between the outer world and the inner, lies an unconscious terror. Then the door opens, and it is as if you were surrounded by green Martians, but, curiously enough, they speak to you. They bring a syringe, you know this is everyday work for them, they fiddle with something on your arm, and a few plain words are spoken: How are you? Did the preparation go all right? – but you know this is only a check. You try to answer, and in your bright, carefree voice – which all the same trembles a little with visceral terror – you get a third of the way through the sentence you meant to say, and then – cut. Cut to black, a few milligrams of chemicals and complete darkness of consciousness, shutdown, no picture, no sound. They carefully took your weight on admission, because the drug is dosed per kilogram of body weight.
Consciousness altered? No, consciousness switched off.
Hypnos is the Greek god of sleep, a kindly but fleeting creature. He is the son of night and the twin brother of death: every falling asleep is a little death, and perhaps death, too, is only a great sleep? He wears wings at his temples, and how good it would have been if you could still feel your temples throbbing, but nothing.
You wake in the afternoon, everything floating even more than before the operation, and you are dazed. Your fellow patients look at you strangely, and later you learn that you were shouting when they brought you back. What you shouted, you did not ask, and they did not say. Stretched out and flickering, you regained consciousness, a little over to this side, then back again after all, and at last here for good. Then pain, and sleep, sleep and pain. A few hours have dropped out of your life. You cannot account for them.
From a spiritual point of view, what is this about? About something taking power over you. Of necessity, you have ceded influence over your consciousness to someone else. Others have your consciousness, and even your life, at their disposal. In an emergency, during a surgical procedure, this is trust beyond measure on your part, and seen from the other side, complete helplessness.
Man's greatest decision: to whom does he hand over the power of control? Even with no emergency and no surgery, it is a serious question. Loss of consciousness is possible even in a seemingly waking state. You yield yourself to the influence, and you begin to see the world and yourself and others the way you are told. Teaching, instruction, ideological training, scientific schooling, the flood of information, and even the store of your own experiences are all part of a hypnotic, mesmeric dream. They cast a veritable spell on you, and deep, and not restful, is this waking sleep. That is why, in spiritual processes, coming to awareness is called awakening.
When they wheel you out of the theatre, you come round without any particular intervention, whereas from the great, dazzling dream of life something must wake you. Take away this dream, and Reality remains. Take away someone's consciousness with a narcoleptic anaesthetic: nothing remains. To be under an influence is this: a waking dream or a dreaming wakefulness. Though man is a conscious being, yet for the most part he acts unconsciously. Whoever wakes, however, will see the world differently. He places himself under a different influence, for it seems certain that man is under constant influence. There is no escape from this, but choose with care to whom you cede influence over your consciousness, over your life.