/lit/ - Literature

>>16995846
According to Advaita Vedanta the answer to your question is given in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and Mandukya Upanishad. Before this though it should be said that this sentience is not identical with what we normally regard as our waking sentience, but it is in fact different from the three states of waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep as that in which they occur and which observes them as something different from them. The condition or distinction of having an intellect being illumined and controlled as it were by consciousness in the waking and dream states, and the lack of having this occur in dreamless sleep are distinctions.

Distinctions such as these are observed by consciousness. That we are able to observe and make this distinction between the presence of the intellect/mind and their absence is because our sentience itself is separate from the mind and that it does not go in and out of existence, but that it registers this change (the appearance or vanishing of the mind) as what the same unchanging thing observes. Our sentience, consciousness or Atman is transparent, formless, immediate and self-revealing; it has no features other than its constant revealing of its own presence to itself as well as the objects and sensations reflected in it. When there is a complete absence of sensory data, the same sentience is still there abiding, but it is not observing the intellect, thus there is an absence of exterior object and inner objects in the forms of thoughts and memories. In the same way the eye never sees itself but in the absence of light it only registers darkness while still itself existing.

So when you ask what happens to the soul under anesthesia, you are only asking what happened to an exterior sensation or change that sentience detected as something fundamentally extrinsic to itself. The sensation of observing and controlling ones minds, thoughts and body was replaced with and witnessed as the sensation of darkness, which was replace by a sensation of dream or waking for the same abiding entity.