I recently found myself needing a few medical procedures, and I’ll admit that hospitals have never been a comfortable environment for me. I doubt many people enjoy them, but for me, the combination of needles, drugs, and anesthesia has always made me uneasy. A few years ago, during what should have been a routine procedure, I worked myself into near panic and had to rely heavily on grounding myself with meditation techniques just to get through it.
This past week, I was back in the hospital for a sudden but ultimately routine procedure. As things moved along, I noticed that familiar anxiety rising again. Specifically around the idea of going under anesthesia. It’s something I’ve always had a phobia about, so rather than trying to push the fear away, I decided to look more closely at it.
What unsettles me isn’t pain or discomfort so much as the idea of losing conscious awareness. Breathing a gas or receiving an injection that almost instantly removes any sense of experience, only to wake up later feeling as though a section of life has been erased, has always deeply disturbed me.
Sitting with that fear raised a more fundamental question. Why was this so unsettling? What exactly did I believe I was losing? Was consciousness actually disappearing? And more importantly, did I even have a consciousness of my own to lose in the first place?
After anesthesia, it’s tempting to ask where consciousness went. If I can be something one moment and nothing the next, what does that say about what I am? The question sounds reasonable, but it rests on an assumption—that consciousness is something individual, something I possess, something that could disappear and then return.
Once that assumption is seen, the problem begins to loosen. The “I” that vanished under anesthesia was not some essential self. It was the egoic sense of identity. The mental activity that generates continuity, memory, narrative, and the feeling of being someone moving through time. When the mind was shut down, that entire structure went with it. The question “Where did I go?” was really being asked by the very thing that had been temporarily taken offline.
This is where the search for “where consciousness went” starts to feel misguided. If consciousness were individual—something owned or contained—then anesthesia would pose a real problem. But what if consciousness isn’t individual at all? What if there is only consciousness itself, infinite and undivided, and what comes and goes is merely the ability to recognize it through the mind?
Seen this way, nothing essential was interrupted. Consciousness didn’t disappear. What disappeared was the capacity to register experience, to remember, to form a sense of self around it. Anesthesia numbs recognition, not reality.
At that point, I found it helpful to set the word consciousness aside altogether and use a different one I consider a synonym: Life. No one would seriously suggest that life went away during anesthesia. The body remained alive. Life continued uninterrupted. What paused was the story, the awareness of being a particular someone.
We don’t own life. We don’t generate it. We participate in it. Each of us is a temporary form through which life expresses itself. Under anesthesia, the form continues, life continues, but the mind that reflects on it goes quiet. And without the mind, there’s no experience to report, no memory to retrieve, no “I” to claim ownership of what happened.
That doesn’t point to a loss. It points to something more basic. We cannot become nothing if what we truly are is not a thing to begin with. We are not separate from life; we are expressions of it. And what is never separate does not need to be found again.
[Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay]
