34 Comments
Oct 28, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

Happy Birthday, Dr. Setty! You are a voice of reason and compassion, and your wise balanced thoughts are inspirations. I have had two NDE's and can vouch to your understanding. The first occurred at the age of seven with my consciousness watching the appendectomy from above. When I was introduced to meditation & yoga in college in early 1970...and the Siddhis that accompanied my disciplined sadhana....everything made perfect sense. And the amazing truths in the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavan Gita all opened me to the truths inherent in prayer to that which is greater (which I call G-d). The second NDE occurred in my early 30s when my neck was broken in a horseback riding accident. Complete with a life review and given a choice to 'come back' or start over in another incarnation, I chose to return to this incarnation, knowing that I still had some dharma to complete. I am honored to have knowledge of your writings. Blessings to you!🙏💖

Expand full comment
author

Thank you for sharing! Holy cow. Two NDEs in one lifetime!

Expand full comment
Oct 28, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

Happy Birthday and thank you for a stellar post. I worked at LGH when you were there. Hopefully you always knew this but you were so well regarded among the nursing staff. I had an NDE as a young adult and your writing captures beautifully the dichotomy of that experience and our western medical and cultural traditions. I have hope we are moving toward a time where that dichotomy and the deceptions around covid, 9/11, etc fall away and help usher in a time of greater awareness regarding consciousness. Your writing is cathartic and beautiful!

Expand full comment
author

thank you!! What years were you there and in which unit did you work?

Expand full comment
Oct 29, 2023·edited Oct 29, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

I was in the ICU and CCU I think around 2008 to 2011. I came back a few years later and worked for 2 years as a night supervisor and per diem in the units. When I found your podcasts on 9/11 and your writing and podcasts on covid it was uplifting. Obviously b/c you are a gifted writer but it was also a great reminder that we are encountering people who share awareness even when we don't know it. I just laid out my enormous bias as I assumed I was alone at LGH regarding my thoughts on world events and western medicine :). All your work is exceptional but what is so valuable to me are your thoughts on human nature. I always struggled with medicine becoming a sick industry in light of my NDE (I went to off shifts for saner patient care). Your up there with Charles Eisenstein in my book!

Expand full comment

It is your birthday but you gave us a gift, a fascinating exploration into so many unanswered questions. Thank you.

Expand full comment

Excellent post. I firmly believe we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Death is not to be feared but merely a transition back to the spiritual realm. Reincarnation is definitely real and our spirits (or souls) incarnate numerous times to learn lessons on the earthly plane. To reach enlightenment (ie. stop incarnating) one must experience ego dissolution and realize the reason we are here is to be of service to others. All Are One and Love is the Answer.

Expand full comment
Oct 28, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

Happy birthday and thank you for sharing your wisdom. First it is truely crazy , ''it is understandable why some would justify the sacrifice of more lives now to prevent the loss of others in the future. Is this sensible?'' Great story about the medicine woman and the smoke. There is wisdom beyond what our logical western minds can comprehend. I know that I am more than my physical body through experiences I have had. In my 20s I woke up in the middle of an operation. I had been bleeding eternally for several dqys due to extopic pregnancy. I was on the operating table and I saw the nurses and doctor. I thought it wonderous that I was awake in the middle of an operation but felt no pain. I tried to speak and say "hey I'm awake". Then I decended back into my body. Since then I have left my body through holotropic breathwork. During that session I went to visit a friend in a different city. That evening after the session I called my friend and told her what I saw while I was out of body visiting her. I could verify that I had actually gone to visit her. Also I have done remote viewing. I know consciousness is not contained within the body. There are many more things I could say, getting visits from my deceased ex-husband. Love does not die. Let us cultivate the love that lives on forever.

Expand full comment
Oct 28, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

Happiest of birthdays, my brother! So glad to have you on the planet in these times!

Expand full comment

This is a brilliant piece, Dr. Setty. Thank you.

Humans' tendency toward a mechanistic view is one that I challenge regularly in my work. Mostly people find me because they are in physical pain or because they are seeking the purported benefits of pilates. I own a structural integration studio with my partner; Redcord, pilates, kettlebell, Rolfing, and vibrational sound therapies. During the first session we do an FMS (functional movement screen) and discuss what we see, and what we believe would be the best course of action for the client. During this session we also present the "mind-body connection" as a cliché of fallacy. This moment is often met with a degree of surprise, as one usually expects us to say something quite the opposite.

Our position is that the mind and body cannot merely be "connected"...because this implies that they could be disconnected - and that day is day of reckoning. The mind and body are one thing, with no separation and no distance between them. Your essay, and really your life's work, certainly present an interesting extension to this conversation. What we have observed over the course of our tenure (20 years for me, 30 for my partner), is that as space is created in the body, so also is it created in the mind.

As the body, so does the mind.

"Moreover, it invites us to consider the possibility that awareness continually exists without interruption but we are not always able to access our experiences retrospectively. We then commonly but inaccurately describe these events as “losses of consciousness”."

This calls to mind the work of Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) for me. Memory of trauma encoded in the viscera as a means of survival is astounding. The mind's ability to compartmentalize, to sometimes "forget", so that the body can continue on is another example of the mystery of human existence. One that the mechanistic approach failed to explain for quite some time, and thus went unrecognized. Only recently have we seen true progress on the successful treatment of PTSD...now that there is "proof" of it in the body. Candace Pert and her work, documented in her book, Molecules of Emotion, offers much on this "new" science.

"We are now considering a real dilemma, not one based in hypotheticals or history where “the truth” has been dictated to us or revealed over the years. We basically have two paradigms to choose from. On the one hand there is no proof that our existence doesn’t continue after the death of our bodies. There also is ample indirect evidence that there is more to this life than this material body. We have the accounts of hundreds of people who have died, by our own standards of death, and returned to tell us we have been wrong about the whole thing. "

I think this speaks to the human need to explain - and to prove, within our paradigm of current understanding....examples of which we have seen abundantly recently. Your essay on Israel's 9-11 illuminated this particularly well. James Corbett's 5 min version is also a great synapsis (https://www.corbettreport.com/911-a-conspiracy-theory/).

Humans are able to perform incredible feats of thought gymnastics, to explain the path to outcomes which they have determined to be certain. In my summation, it is far more likely that humanity only understands a fraction of the factors at play in the grande organization of existence, than it is possible that we can draw a definitive conclusion about the vastness of consciousness, life, and death.

I only meant to comment briefly here and I have failed at that....

This is the 10 year anniversary of my father's death, and I found your thoughts incredibly synchronistic. My dad was a dermatologist and died after a 10 year battle with stage 4 melanoma. His first oncologist gave him 6 months to live following his diagnosis...

The life he lived in those 10 years not only far exceeded his prognosis, but gifted me a perspective for which I will always be grateful. The night after he passed, I had a dream so real that I cannot possible articulate with words. He came to me and I was overwhelmed with comfort. He was chuckling...laughing...and told me not to worry. Not to spend a moment being afraid, or consumed by the silliness of this experience on earth. Because it is but a blip...and will be laughable to think of all the energy and stress we spend here on things that do not matter.

This was "just a dream", of course. But t I knew in my gut that the experience was real. I'm solidly sure of it to this day. It reminds of accounts of spontaneous healing where there is always a report of knowing. A deep KNOWING that the disease was gone - before scans or tests. Knowing. Bernie Siegel's Love, Medicine, & Miracles documents this beautifully.

Thank you for your thoughts and insights, Dr. Setty, particularly on this 10 year anniversary of my dad's passing.

And happy birthday to you! The world is a better place because of people like you.

Expand full comment
author

Thank you for the kind words and the deep share

Expand full comment
Oct 28, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

I am glad your mother had an alternative to birthing you, given the circumstances. My mother and I never got on so well after that first day of mine; Dad had taken a fishing trip, Moms doctor was on vacation too. I was delivered by an intern, and it wasn't simple. One leg came out first, and that leg had to be pushed back in so that both legs could exit....(was good at the splits as a youth at least!!). Given all that, Mom and I did our best. I think I came out trying to run away. My personality follows suit, I always approach things a bit 'backwards' and have deep intuition that I trust, that kept me from getting jabbed. Still, part of me will be apologizing to Mom forever for the difficulties. A midwife would have probably tried to turn me around manually, in the womb, I know they do that. Cool.

Expand full comment
Oct 28, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

Happy birthday!

"It is not the brain that generates consciousness, but consciousness receives a brain that it uses". (c. dulcan, neurologist doctor, professor)

Expand full comment
Oct 28, 2023Liked by Madhava Setty

Happy Birthday! Have A Glorious One!

Expand full comment

Happy birthday beautiful man. So grateful for your gifts, your work and your friendship. 🙏❤️

Expand full comment

Happy Birthday, Dr. Setty! The story of the little girl who had been married to the man who didn't believe her until she recounted the story about the stolen money only they could know is enough proof for me. She is alive now. She was alive during the time she lived him. That is reincarnation. What other explanation is there?

Expand full comment
author

There’s always the possibility that the whole story was fabricated by Stevenson and his colleagues. The interesting question is why some people will assume that is the case rather than accepting that we reincarnate. What is the resistance to the possibility? Imagine if we all behaved as we did reincarnate. We would have to accept that we have been responsible for humanity’s past. But it also means that we will reap the benefits of what we do now far into the future. We obviously would make much different decisions and policies. Refusing to accept reincarnation may be why we keep going in circles repeating the past.

Expand full comment

Oh yes, of course. The old fabricated story trick.

Our birthdays are almost the same. Mine is tomorrow, the 29th.

Expand full comment
author

Happy Birthday!

Expand full comment

The late Christopher Bernards, son of the late Walter Bernards, was a lifelong friend, and Walter was like a father to me. Both were anesthesiologists, devout Catholics, unafraid.

I would offer nothing new to the compendium here, as, in my (sic) thinking, consciousness is never not present, not independent of anything, and is nothing to get hung-up about.

Happy birthday, be well!

Expand full comment

I was thinking about something you wrote. Awareness may be continuous although lapses occur in the recognition of it. Is this accurate? Sleep is a good example. Most often, the moment sleep begins isn't known and then consciousness is experienced as dreaming. Also the sense of time is altered. Do you use awareness and consciousness as synonyms? Thank you for your posts.

Expand full comment
author

A thoughtful question.

"Awareness may be continuous although lapses occur in the recognition of it." Yes. That is accurate.

It is also the fundamental basis of why we cannot independently confirm awareness when it has gone non-local in such states as deep anesthesia or in NDEs, unless the subject can recall the experience.

We assume that if an observer sees no signs of awareness a person is "unconscious", however there is no way to know if awareness was continuous if the person has no recollection of that period of time. The term "unconscious" may not just be inaccurate but completely misleading in the sense that unconsciousness, as observed, may actually be a "superconscious" state wherein the person has become aware of what exists beyond the material plane.

Here I caution us from getting entangled in semantics. From the perspective in the essay, the defining attribute of consciousness is being aware, but aware of what exactly? The dreamer is experiencing something very real and meaningful while those who are not dreaming are oblivious to it. Although it may seem appropriate to ascertain awareness based on the recognition of objective events or phenomena, awareness and consciousness are fundamentally subjective.

It is also worthwhile to consider a situation where someone is conscious in circumstances where there are no sensations, thoughts or dreams, say in deep meditation in a sensory deprivation chamber. If there are no phenomena available is it possible to be aware? It's a question one has to explore for oneself. The answers are out there but they are shrouded by the nature of our life experience which continuously floods us with targets for our attention.

Expand full comment

Fascinating, lucid and -- fearless.

Thank you for your open mind and for helping to open mine..

Expand full comment

wowwwwwwwwwwwwwww♥

Expand full comment