Squeak – Sorry to take so long, but I missed seeing your entry.
But I was in a coma for a while after having a serious stroke. But the truth is that we all are in a comatose state every time we sleep, for then we no longer have any conscious awareness of who we are.
The questions you ask arise because you have been led to look at things from a scientific viewpoint. So I will try you explain things from a very different view.
For your personality, your sense of self is nearly always dependent on the brain and its recent memories. But because your brain has been injured, your sense of self, your personality has been injured also. But your brain is a new thing, new in your body, but no plant or tree grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb was as old, and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom in you.”
So, your physical seed was older even than human kind, and you carry that wisdom in you. Millions of people believe that their beginning was in the slime of their parents mating. That slime and the tiny tadpoles it carried was a replay of an ancient past, that took place about three and a half billion years ago. That was the seed/cell that your body grew from, but the seed that the Creative Impulse gave you is even more wonderful. For your core seed came from a being beyond time and space – and holds within it an extraordinary past, in which a whole universe of creatures found unity – it is beyond understanding, only experiencing
So none of us was made from scratch. Every human being develops from the fusion of two cells, an egg and a sperm, that are the descendants of other cells. The lineage of cells that joins one generation to the next — called the germline — is, in a sense, immortal.
This suggests that in fact your personality is only a small part of a huge memory, memory people call the unconscious. In fact you were not born with a personality already in you, but it develop out of the new memories and experiences gathered by the new brain, but beneath that were influences gathered by a long line of seeds, which gave rise to the miracle of your body. See
http://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/animal-children/#Program But as most of us only know the memories of this body/seed, we are only aware of a tiny part of who we are. Obviously that doesn’t solve the problem of your devastated brain, just as it doesn’t solve problem of my own brains injuries.
So I believe there are at least two things you can do, the first is you can slowly build your personality with the memories you have and are gathering.
Secondly you can access the huge you underlying your present brain and person. To do this you have to break through the barrier between the conscious you and the massive you that preceded your present life. I know it can be done because it did it when I was fifteen and many times since.
Here is what I experienced after my stroke: “Look, because I don’t know who I am in that area, I feel as if all emotions have gone, so I can’t say whether I loved anyone or not, I didn’t feel anything, no response, no love, nothing. So I felt like I’d lost my soul in some way, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. Having no feelings, I didn’t feel bad about it or good about it, just no emotional response. It felt like I was wrapped in cotton wool, nothing could get in or out. Looking back from where I am now, I can see that gradually little bits of emotion began to break through. I watched a film and I felt moved. Something moved in me for the first time. And then gradually it came back, until recently, talking to a loved woman again, I had immense emotional response. But an aspect that I lost and hasn’t come back is my ability to respond sexually, no erection, no ejaculation, nothing.”
So I had to either rebuild it or wait – both were part of my rebuilding. As for my fifteen year old experience see
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/lucidity/ Other ways of going beyond ones present personality are
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/lifes-little-secrets/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/mountain-path/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/news/my-body-is-a-moving-sea/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/integration-meeting-oneself/#Shaman -
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/integration-meeting-oneself/#Ox Tony