Stop choking to death

[Guest guest]

Hi,

Thank you Jessica, Andrew, Mort, and Manuel.

Let the fun times roll......

 

An interesting report.

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The oddest theory of consciousness to emerge today, though, came from Raymond Fink, an anesthesiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Fink announced, in effect, that the reason we are conscious is to stop us choking to death on our food. Both food and air pass through the pharynx, which leaves organisms with the challenge of keeping food out of the lungs. Fink claimed that the conscious forebrain evolved to regulate swallowing, since we can't swallow when we're asleep or anaesthetized (a claim that some in the audience seemed to gag on). "So wakefulness in vertebrates is a device for getting the food to go down the right way," he said. Moreover, mammals--and especially humans--have both more complex pharynxes and larger forebrains than fish, amphibians, or reptiles. Fink thinks this link between consciousness and eating also explains why we sleep. If you were awake all the time, he said, "well, you'd be overeating".

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I assume the term "consciousness" being used here is referring to the personal consciousness or the sense of the personal entitification, the identification with the personal body-mind complex. What seems to be suggested is that the sense of personal identification with the body-mind complex is needed for the "survival" of the body-mind complex.

So if enlightenment, awakening, apperception is about the end of the entitification, can the body-mind complex subsequently survive?

So were, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Ramana, and the dozens of enlightened sages down the line, all choking away? Is this the reason why sages normally have one meal a day and usually fruits ? Does entitification end or it continues and what is ended is the sense of personal doership, at the conceptual occurrence of the conceptual event of awakening.

 

Cheers Sandeep