Before: On Being and Nothingness

Have you ever awakened from deep general anesthesia?
I've had that experience three times and each time it was a profound experience.
I awoke with all my memories intact, quickly got my bearings and got oriented to being in the hospital, but for days after, it bothered me: Where had I been?
Before I emerged from that darkness, where was I?

There was no sensation, no sound, sight, sensation. It was very unlike sleeping or dreaming. It was just--nothingness.

Nothingness is a very big idea.

It was, presumably the same non experience or non place I came from before I was born. 
Nowhere.
The thought I might return to that after my death is not particularly frightening--it was not unpleasant, although it does put a certain pressure on life.
Life is much more fun and interesting than nothingness. At least here in America. If I lived in parts of Africa or India, I might prefer nothingness to that.

Is this  not a question which we should ponder?  Where were we BEFORE?
That is, before we were born.

I can deal with the idea of "after" much more easily. Religions almost all have some dogma about where we, as individuals  are heading, but few, as far as I know, spend much time on where we were before we were born.

Cultures have creation myths, but there isn't much about where you and I, as individuals came from before we came to consciousness here. And in normal life, we come to consciousness only gradually, imperceptibly. It's not like awakening from anesthesia having been nowhere and then--poof--you are fully conscious with memories and language and you can still read and write and you do not have to relearn everything.

Consciousness is a strange and essential thing--and unconsciousness even stranger.

There was a movie once, I think called "Flatliners" where medical students or someone use cardiac paddles to induce "death" a cardiac arrhythmia and then they resuscitate each other with the same paddles, just for the experience of "death," and resurrection.

But, of course, by definition, it was not death, because death is irreversible. That's the thing about death. It is no return city. But anesthesia, that is nowhere.

I suppose brain activity persists during general anesthesia and certainly heart and vital organs continue to function, but the "self" the "mind" that is gone, gone, gone.

Once  you awake you are left with only that blank space. You cannot look back over your shoulder like Orpheus. That void is behind you and gone. For a while at least.



What came before is an ultimately interesting question. As in: What came before the big bang? Must have been something , if it banged. You can't just have a bang from nothing. Had to be something.
And how can there be anything without a beginning?
A circle, of course, has no beginning and no end. But nothing in our existence, except for that construct of the circle, has no beginning.
How do you imagine no beginning, just "always was?"

This is the mind bending stuff of Stephen Hawking and Dark matter.  I never make it through those books about the "beginning" of time.

Anybody out there have any ideas?

All you blokes in Ukraine and France who apparently click on this blog regularly and say nothing: Now's your chance to offer some enlightenment, rather than just observing like some far off gods.

Alice and Martin Provensen