Phantom Limbs:


The areas of serious research which bring forth interesting corollaries to delve into for the person seeking a real understanding of the mind-brain-soul continuum are varied and voluminous. Here is one from a book by Jay Ingram. This deals with a person who has lost a limb. Is there any possibility that the ‘phantom soul’ exists?


“The majority of people who possess a phantom also suffer phantom pain, and the descriptions make clear just how awful this can be. It is described as knifelike, burning, crushing, twisting and grinding. ‘It feels as if someone is trying to pull your leg off’; ‘Like an electric shock’, ‘As if someone is sawing it off.’ Patients have felt as if their thumb was being pushed through the palm of the hand, or that the fingernails were being lifted from their beds. From descriptions like that it is clear that these are not merely mimicking some previously experienced sensation—these are wholly new and horribly vivid pains coming from a nonexistent limb or hand. Amputees have committed suicide as a final escape from constant, searing pain. And sadly most attempts to alleviate the pain are unsuccessful. Implanting electrodes, stroking or applying pressure to the stump, hypnosis and/or anaesthetics—nothing is very effective. Even cutting out the piece of the brain where these pain sensations should be arriving has been tried, mostly without success. {Gee—why don’t they just cut more out like they do in lobotomies?}…


Imagine the area in the sensory homunculus o K. G.’s brain that was devoted to the right leg. What would happen to that area after the amputation? In the short run, it would fall silent because there would be no more sensation coming to it. But there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that this situation would be temporary. The brain can’t afford to have a patch of cells in the cerebral cortex with nothing to do. Experiments over the last ten years or so {Book written in 1994} have established that brains in general (including the human brain) are much more flexible and less hard-wired than they were once thought to be, and that the sudden removal from one part of the brain of all sensation from an amputated leg would be a little like exposing a patch of garden soil by tearing the flowers out—it wouldn’t be long before other plants had taken root. This is an inexact analogy, because the brain cells in the leg area of the homunculus would remain unchanged; the difference would be that they would be receiving signals from a different part of the body, {Or perhaps something not of the body as we showed in the study of the Cosmic Thought Field. If it were from the body would we not be able to understand the specific sensations such as the twisting or tearing off of the leg?} by virtue of having established connections with a replacement set of sensory neurons.� (2)

also see "Phantoms in the Brain" by Ramachandran

A person who uses the name Raven on a community forum I belong to had this response to the above. Indeed Wilder Penfield thought long and hard about where the seat of consciousness might actually be.
“Robert back when I was a college student we studied this phenomena in psychology class there was a trial study, they had conducted experiments using mirrors with amputees and people that had lost limbs with rather amazing results, patients that claimed to have cramps in there limbs etc were cured. Basically what I remember about it was that one of the test subjects was complaining about his hand (missing hand) being cramped and it causing sever pain. With mirrors they set it up so that it looked like his left hand was his right hand and after he was able to open and close it bend it etc..... the pain went away; similar results were obtained with other patients using the mirrors to show the missing limb. Don't ask me why it worked but it did.
Perhaps it’s as you suggest even though physically the amputated body part is no longer here, the soul or the psyche radiates its own energy in the time space continuum.�
A book on Chi Kung by that title provides us with something that relates to feeling outside of the nervous system as well.
“So what is this Chi or energy that is everywhere and within everything? How do we experience it, and how does it manifest itself? The experience of Chi has most often been described as a flowing current.
This may be because of our experience of flowing water, how we feel the flow of water over our skin. If you pour some warm water on the top of your arm, you feel it flow down the arm to the hand and fingertips. When you swim or bathe in warm water, it produces a particular sensation on the surface of the body. A flowing current is similar—it is a sensation of something moving from one place to another. It has a distinct feeling and is a specific event. It is like “mains hum,� the basic energetic level of what is in us—the “buzz� of life itself.
The effect of Chi during Acupuncture treatment can be felt by quadriplegics—people who suffered severe injury to the central nervous system—even though they experience no feeling in the body or limbs deriving from the action of the nerves.� (3)