Ouch! Pain! Is there a pill? What’s nature telling you? Are u aging, dying, or just dreaming? What do symptoms say about world tasks, or your opinion of your looks? These questions arise with fears about aging and symptoms. Nature uses symptoms for us as individuals, for our communities and world to bring out often marginalized experiences and states of consciousness.

In what manner are our symptoms Non-local?? Symptoms are relieved by bringing out and expressing marginalized experiences; if often appears as if this new consciousness is connected to relationship and group processes at a distance. More research is needed here.

By Arny Mindell

For most of us, and for many therapists, the body appears as a central topic only when there are severe symptoms. It is still a relatively surprising to discover that symptoms can be enlightening.

After completing my Jungian studies and becoming a training analyst in the 1970’s, I realized that if dreams were meaningful, the same must be true for all personal, physical and dreamlike experiences. I began studying how the dreaming mind appears not only in our nighttime dreams, but also in every little thing we notice all day long.

I was amazed to discover the dreaming process in our everyday minds and in all our body experiences- including symptoms. Whatever we experience is recognizable in our dreams. Based upon these and other observations, together with many friends in Zurich Switzerland, I began developing what is today called, “process oriented psychology”, a non-pathological approach to everything we experience from body symptoms and dance processes, to relationship issues and large group situations.

The central theme of all my ideas is about process, as understood in Taoism and physics. Process allowed me to use my background in applied physics, Jungian psychology and the “Tao that can not be said.” I found new approaches to altered states of consciousness including psychotic and comatose states. Spiritual experiences appeared in an entirely new light for me.

Read the full article…

Thanks to Phyllis Kramer, we saw this video about a man who was thought to be in coma for 23 years. However, he was aware of everything around him. Click here to see this msnbc video about him :   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31388323/vp/34111007#34111007

Our challenge, everyone’s challenge is now to statistically validate the subliminal connections we notice when speaking with people and noticing feedback, that is applying process oriented coma work to states of consciousness where people seem”not to be there.”

• We are researching how our psychology interact with our allergies.

• The following article about “Doctors missing consciousenss…” seems crucial to the potential for consciousness in coma. So we reproduced the entire article; thanks to “New Scientist” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17493-doctors-missing-consciousness-in-vegetative-patients.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn17493 .

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“Doctors missing consciousness in vegetative patients”

* 12:47 21 July 2009 by Celeste Biever
* For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

If there’s one thing worse than being in a coma, it’s people thinking you are in one when you aren’t. Yet a new comparison of methods for detecting consciousness suggests that around 40 per cent of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are in fact “minimally conscious”.

In the worst case scenario, such misdiagnoses could influence the decision to allow a patient to die, even though they have some vestiges of consciousness. But crucially it may deprive patients of treatments to make them more comfortable, more likely to recover, or to allow them to communicate with family, say researchers.

In a vegetative state (VS), reflexes are intact and the patient can breathe unaided, but there is no awareness. A minimally conscious state (MCS) is a sort of twilight zone, only recently recognised, in which people may feel some physical pain, experience some emotion, and communicate to some extent. However, because consciousness is intermittent and incomplete in MCS, it can be sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between the two.

In 2002 Joseph Giacino at the JFK Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey and colleagues released the first diagnostic criteria for MCS. Then in 2004, Giacino released a revised coma recovery scale (CRS-R) – a series of behavioural tests based on criteria that can be used to distinguish between the two states.

Alarm ‘appropriate’

To see if the revised scale improves diagnoses, Giacino and Caroline Schnakers of the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege in Belgium, with colleagues, spent two years using CRS-R to re-diagnose patients admitted to a network of Belgian intensive care units and neurology clinics with head injuries that resulted in some kind of disturbance to consciousness.

The clinics and units all used a “clinical consensus” agreed by a range of specialists to diagnose patients. Some of the specialists relied on qualitative, “bedside” observations to diagnose patients, others used older diagnostic tools, but none used the CRS-R – the only one designed specifically to distinguish between MCS and VS.

Of the 44 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state by the clinicians, the researchers diagnosed 18, or 41 per cent, as being in a MCS according to the CRS-R.

“We may have become much too comfortable about our ability to detect consciousness,” concludes Giacino. “I think it’s appropriate for there to be some level of alarm about this.”

Giacino concedes that, because there is no objective way to measure consciousness, he cannot exclude the possibility that the reason for the discrepancy is that the CRS-R is over-diagnosing MCS.
Examiner bias

However, Schnakers argues that CRS-R should be more accurate because it specifies how many times each test must be repeated – and how many responses are needed to give an indication of consciousness.

This, she says, guards against missing awareness in someone who pops in and out of consciousness, or mistaking a reflexive response for a response based on consciousness. It should also control for “examiner bias”, where someone subjectively decides whether the patient is conscious or not, adds Giacino.

What’s more, the revised scale also makes use of some new insights. One sign of consciousness is whether someone follows the path of a moving object, known as “visual pursuit”. Many clinicians simply look at whether someone follows a moving pen or person, says Schnakers.

The CRS-R specifies the use of a mirror, which she argues may prompt a reaction in someone who is conscious, but who does not respond to a moving pen. “When you move an object, it is less powerful,” she says.
‘Death or survival’

So why do clinicians still use the qualitative assessment? “Their focus is more typically on death or survival” and on biological factors that need treatment, such as how long a patient needs to be in an intensive care unit, says John Whyte of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. “For their purposes, the distinction [between MCS and VS] doesn’t matter much.”

For the patient and the family, the difference between MCS and VS can make a huge difference, though. Drug treatments, painkillers, physical therapies designed to stimulate the brain, as well as techniques for encouraging communication, are more likely to be given to someone in a MCS.

In some jurisdictions, whether food can be withdrawn may depend on whether or not they are in a VS, says Whyte. “It’s very important to be sure of the diagnosis,” says Schnakers.

Journal reference: BMC Neurology (DOI: 10.1186/1471-2377-9-35)

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Fall 2007

Thanks to Dr. Fi Knox for pointing out to us the following information about free will. The research comes from the neurophysiologist, Benjamin Libet. According to Libet, so called “free will” is not as “free” as we think. In his article “Do we have free will?” Libet states,

“The volitional process is …initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome. It can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded.  These findings put constraints on views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act, but it could control performance of the act”. (Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman, Keith Sutherland (eds). THE VOLITIONAL BRAIN: Towards a neuroscience of free will. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1999: p47-57.)

What others call the “conscious mind”,  or what we call our “primary process” is, as we have said already in the book, the RIVER’S WAY,  not entirely at our disposal. The primary process too arises spontaneously. It can then bend and mold itself to some extent, but it can not create itself!

May 2006

Researchers at the Neurology department of the University of Kentucky define near death experiences as a time during a life-threatening episode when someone experiences what they feel is an “out-of-body experience, unusual alertness or sees an intense light or feels a great sense of peace”.

These researchers suggest that there is a biological basis for these experience, but wonder about its potential meaning. Professor Kevin Nelson says, “However, I hesitate to call it dreaming or dreaming while awake.”(our italics) (See news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4898726.stm for more)

We, Amy and Arny Mindell applaud the neurologist for his biological theory and for his saying, “the theory did not automatically rule out a spiritual dimension to near death experiences.’ We are researching near death experiences. We are studying how learning to “dream while awake” (See Arny’s book with that name) may possibly ameliorate or at least assist making such near death experiences a more integral and meaningful part of life (as well as the death experience). At this point, it seems to us that near death experiences are examples of what we call the “big U”, a central part of personal myths. In addition, we are researching the social impact and significance of such experiences.

Our general research shows the following cartoon sketch of what happens in the course of pre-symptom experiences. When relating to symptom energy it is quite common at first to ignore the symptom, then tell it to go away using normal medicine. If and when that does not work, you begin to fight it internally, get terrified by it and in the best cases make it less troublesome by bringing its energy into your life.

by Pierre Morin, MD, Ph.D (pierrem@compuserve.com )

“Physical, emotional, and spiritual health is a privilege that we often take for granted. Most of us will recognize that privilege in hindsight once our health or the health of a friend or family member gets challenged. At that time, many of us will feel that their sense of stability and peace of mind is threatened. With physical and mental illness comes a questioning of our everyday identity and our goal and purpose in life. Some of us will be forced to reorient themselves, face issues of loss and grief, and search for new meanings. In this brief article I will try to develop the idea that illness can be an opportunity for transformation and growth and introduce you to an innovative mind-body practice called “Dreambody.” [more ...]

(We, amy and arny are happy to publish this remarkable verbatim story from Mr. Matthias Turtenwald . His wonderful story includes his own inner and outer coma “realities”, and together with the report (see below) of his friend, Theresa Koon, gives hope to those worried about comatose states.)

by MATTHIAS TURTENWALD, email: MTurtenwal@aol.com.
Accident at the 14 January. 1996

At the 14 January. 1996 I was alone at home with my three kids. In the afternoon we decided to go to a tower not far from us to see the sunset.

I drove up there with my kids and we climbed the tower. The sunset was very beautiful.
When we went down again, my two older kids Stefan (11 years old) and Felix (9 years old) went first and
I went with the smallest son Franklin (5 years old). Approximately at the second level from top Franklin told me that he was scared about going on. Just to soothe him I lifted him into my arms. At this moment I slipped with my shoes and we toppled over the banister.

We both fell 28 feet and I hit my head on concrete. My son fell on my body. I was immediately in coma and I was brought in a university hospital at the same day. A neurosurgeon made the operation. The neurosurgeons thought that there is no chance for if, than only and me to survive as a vegetable.

It took 6 month until I went back into live. …

Download Matthias’s full account …