If this person actually referred to this state as ‘pure consciousness’ then he has misunderstood the meaning. What he experienced is simply concentrative meditation without seed.

Concentrative meditation with seed is meditating on the mental image of one object (a candle flame, a spot of colour, a chair, a barn, etc.) until the awareness of everything BUT that one object fades away. Even this takes a LOT of practice. Concentrative meditation without seed is far more difficult but still a simple concept. It is the meditation on nothing until the awareness of everything goes away. This can be very dangerous if someone can do it well and sustain it (you shouldn’t ever do it for more than an hour, but most experts – which I most certainly am not – will tell you that twenty minutes is a better maximum to aim for and may even warn you not to exceed this amount of time). If it is done successfully without another person or an alarm (person is better – I can do it without seed but I would NEVER even try it for a minute without another person right beside me) of some kind to pull you out of it then obviously you will have lost awareness of any concept of time as well as all physical objects. I add the warning because the ability to just make the whole world go away for as long as you want it to without going to the trouble dying could be very attractive to some people.

Just as in Vegas lounges, where the constant activity, lights (i.e. the artifice of daytime twenty-four hours a day) and stimulation of your excitement centres dull the passage of time and lets a person sit at a roulette table for thirty hours solid without moving, you can fuck your body up in a number of ways. Let’s say that someone has tried this by themselves and remained in the state for twenty-four hours. When they do come out of it (and this is not likely to happen without interruption by force) they will be unable to move because their limbs and joints will have frozen in position. Then comes the absolute, excruciating pain of your limbs waking up, only to be superseded by the AGONY of a bladder that has sealed itself shut for a whole day. This person would be unable to reach the bathroom without help and may even be unable to urinate without catheterisation. Add to this the fact that if they try to force themselves to move too quickly they risk heart failure and they have probably spilt several pints of drool over themselves and you get the not so pretty picture.

Pure Consciousness means the existence of the mind without the presence of the physical body, not the illusion of the existence of the mind without the body. Or, more simply put, all thinking no feeling, not because the mind has closed itself off from the body but because the mind is existing without it. As far as I know, it is a theory (perhaps even just a question) not a documented fact. Many sci-fi authors have written about someone’s mind being uploaded into a computer /robot/alien craft, etc. and the film Lawnmower Man (cheesy but good) made the idea of leaving your body for the complete freedom of being all mind quite alluring yet very frightening at the same time. I imagine it would be both if you did have previous knowledge of what it felt like to inhabit a body.

If you think about it, scientists who are trying to create artificial intelligence are trying to create this very thing, pure consciousness. Not a programme or set of values or lists of ones and zeros that interact with and describe each other in perfect simplicity, but a complete mind. This mind would never have experienced what it is to be confined inside flesh or to be acted upon by the laws of physics. This could be why there is such fear of A.I., because our subconscious minds are aware that anything born into pure consciousness would be completely alien to us. Here we are, so excited yet so scared of being found by an extraterrestrial race that looks and feels similarly to us (as so many of those we imagine are humanoid, despite the unlikelihood), and we are trying to create the most perfectly alien entity imaginable, thought and rationale without instinct and hormones. How do you fight against something that has no fight or flight response, no fear?

The idea is that if the mind is separated from the body, what and how would it experience, would it be able to travel anywhere in the universe/s or would it exist nowhere? There would be no physical stimuli or sense of levels of urgency in bodily functions to deal with, therefore you may experience perfect awareness, logic and analysis with no concept of time whatsoever. For creatures like ourselves who would previously have had feelings and sensory input, it would be the loneliest thing you would ever know. The closest we experience is in dreaming, when the you in your dream has no awareness of your physical body as it sleeps. But even this is flawed, for dreams where you do not also imagine yourself a body, however bizarre or unlike yourself, are incredibly rare. I’ve read some good explanations in textbooks but strangely the best way I have ever heard it described is in a short story by Stephen King called ‘The Jaunt’. It’s in his book of short stories ‘Skeleton Crew’. If you truly want a decent and no-nonsense description of pure consciousness and what it could mean then please read it.