La enseñanza de una determinada religión

Awareness of person, knowledge and self is the foundation of emergency practice. There are a number of interpretations of consciousness. The nature of consciousness was central to the thinking of William James a century ago (Travis & Pearson 2000). A review of the Oxford English Dictionary reveals six definitions of consciousness:

1. Interpersonal cognitive relations

2. Remembering on a first hand basis one’s past actions or experiences 3. Occurrent awareness of any object

4. Immediate awareness of one’s mental-occurrence instances 5. The totality of mental-occurrence instances that constitute our

conscious being

6. Potential forms of conscious entirely different. (p306)

These definitions do not assist our understanding of the concept of consciousness. As a Western society there is a level of comfort with the first five definitions as they are based in the cognitive/ mental instances theme. Awareness of self and others is related to cognitive structure and is part of the tacit nature of emergency nursing. James (1890) stated that no subjective states can be its own object of experience (cited in Travis & Pearson, 2000:78). The Eastern cultures however, are not in line

with James’s comment as they explore the sixth definition, consciousness as a pure experience but with objective markers.

Travis and Pearson (2000) conducted a phenomenological study on Eastern Transcendental meditation as an experience of consciousness. The major themes uncovered were, absences of space, time or body sense; peaceful and unbounded. Consciousness was found to be self awareness isolated from the processes and objects of experience. This finding removes consciousness from conscious and unconscious processing but not non-conscious processing. These findings provide weak support for a relationship between consciousness and non-conscious

processing.

The Japanese Zen Buddhist Saint, Hakuin Zenji described consciousness as being distinct:

Before long you will find that the mind-nature has become settled in you – like a rock, unmovable and peaceful…[Then] the one pure, unconfused truth, all, as it were, in one whole, will rise up before your very eyes. (1963:117).

There is physiological evidence that the body responds to this level of consciousness in a manner unable to be elicited by any other means. That is, apneustic breathing, an increase in the peak power of the EEG and an increase in skin conduction. These changes are not seen during waking or sleeping states and appears to be unique to a high level of consciousness found during mediations (Travis & Pearson, 2000). Vaneechoutte (2000) further supports the premise of physical changes associated with consciousness. As a chemist he examined enzymes that react to subtle changes in mood/ emotion or lack of it and concluded that certain enzymes could be regarded as devices which interpret the environment by picking out only certain molecules and which can be different in varying moods. The author described the subtle effects that occur at a cellular level. On this level it is possible to describe the cellular experience

in the same terms used for enzymes. These changes may be responsible for the gross physical changes described by Travis and Pearson (2000). All these responses are without awareness, that is, without consciously processing and in response to a change in the environment. The environmental change can also be sensory or tactile input.

It is still believed that only humans have symbolic language and symbolic language allows the storing of experience and the encoding of this information thus providing a frame of reference. Vaneechoutte describes consciousness as reflexive awareness, defined as experience which is possible because symbolic language enables us to observe experience as if we were a third person looking at ourselves. The discussion appears to have moved from a conceptual to a philosophical stage with this concept as the nature of consciousness and awareness are not tangible like experience. It is the use of symbolic language to say that the “I” of awareness is different from the “I” of experience. Consciousness permits language to be used to describe experience with embedded awareness. Consciousness allows the phenomenon of experience to be related without reflection as to reflect is to become aware.

Consciousness is synonymous with experience that is lived non-consciously. Nixon (1999) believed that it can be any experience which does not separate an inner subject from its outer world. Experience is probably a continuum of sensation in which environmental stimulus and instinctive response are experienced as a unity. A link may now exist between consciousness and phenomenology, consciousness does not remove the context but rather the context is integral to the experience of

consciousness. If consciousness is perceptive and innate then this intuitive nature of consciousness must also be linked to phenomenology.

Philosophers such as DuBois-Raymond, McGinn, Nagal and Fodor held that as humans we never possess the pre-requisite concepts to represent or comprehend or

represent facts even if our species lasts forever (cited in Turner, 2000). Merleau- Ponty (1942) described the philosophical thinking in France at that time as the existence of parallel philosophies. The first is one which makes of every nature an objective unity that constitutes consciousness and on the other sciences which treat the organism and consciousness as two orders of reality. Perhaps this is arguing that science and philosophy can and does co-exist with some kind of accord? DiLollo, Enns & Rensink (2000) does not believe that co-existence is possible. He writes that consciousness is a competition that is in need of standard scientific explanatory practice. He reduces consciousness to a product of a restricted class of cognitive process generated by a functionally restricted brain. With this kind of thinking human consciousness can be replicated by a computerised robot as suggested by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986).

Standard scientific explanations are not always appropriate when exploring the nature of what is to be human. This thinking is contrary to the Dreyfus and Dreyfus belief that the mind is superior to a computer. Rosenthal (1997) further confused the discussion on consciousness by arguing that there are two types. The first type is a state having a characterised content and the second as a state poised for use in reasoning. The first type appears to be related to subliminal perception and the second for concerns such as control of speech. Both concepts appears to be out of place in the discussion as it is not related to the aware “I” but rather the thinking cognitive “I”. Forman defined consciousness as a wakeful but contentless (non- intentional) experience; one neither thinks, nor perceives nor acts (1998:5). Loosely describes how intuition ‘feels’.