Pip: Dippack Mistri has a question for neuroscience, and it is not a gentle one.
Mara: Today we’re in the territory of consciousness — what it is, whether science can locate it, and what the Hindu philosophical tradition has been saying about it for centuries. One theme, one sustained argument.
Pip: Let’s start with the question of whether consciousness can actually be banished.
Consciousness, the Self, and Science’s Blind Spot
Mara: The central tension here is whether what scientists study under anaesthesia, coma, and amnesia is consciousness itself — or something else entirely that they’ve mistaken for it.
Pip: The post opens with two New Scientist sources on anaesthesia research, and the findings are genuinely striking. The setup: “Both propofol and the inhaled anaesthetic sevoflurane inhibited the transmission of feedback signals from the frontal cortex in anaesthetised surgical patients. The backwards signals recovered at the same time as consciousness returned.”
Mara: So the upshot is that what these studies are actually tracking is the disruption of feedback loops between brain regions — not the elimination of awareness itself, but the collapse of the mind’s reporting machinery.
Pip: And that distinction is exactly the hinge of the argument. The post’s position is that scientists have mapped the five sheaths — body, breath, mind, intellect, bliss — with considerable sophistication, and then mistaken the outermost layers for the whole building.
Mara: The post draws on King Janaka’s discourse from the Tripura Rahasya to make the contrast concrete. In Nirvikalpa Samadhi, amnesia is total — there is no experiencer present to report — yet the practitioner returns. The question posed is: who exactly was absent?
Pip: Which is a sharper version of the same problem the scientists are circling. Their own source admits it plainly: “so many regions have been implicated it is hard to know which, if any, are the root cause of loss of consciousness.”
Mara: The post then brings in the Ulladu Narpadu, with its invocation asking whether a sense of existence is even possible without something that already exists — framing consciousness not as a product of neural activity but as the prior condition that makes any observation possible at all.
Pip: The argument lands here: an instrument records motion, time, and space. Consciousness, on this account, is motionless, timeless, and spaceless — which means no fMRI, no EEG, no app is even pointing in the right direction.
Mara: And the Bhagavad Gita gets the last word: that which cannot be slain cannot be banished either. The post’s conclusion is that science will keep finding correlates of the mind and calling them consciousness until it learns to look inward rather than outward.
Pip: Which puts the whole neuroscience literature in an interesting position — not wrong about the brain, just wrong about what the brain is a picture of.
Mara: The question underneath all of this is whether the tools we build can ever reach the thing doing the building.
Pip: Consciousness studying consciousness, using consciousness. The next episode will tell us what Dippack Mistri makes of that recursion.
DIPPACK MISTRI 