At the frontiers of epilepsy
Nubor Orlando Facure

Epilepsy sufferers such as Dostoievski e Machado de Assis made use of protagonists in their romances in order to describe their own crises.  Renowned figures of History have had epilepsy, but, for the common man, it is on streets kerbs that he normally comes in contact with it and becomes frightened with the violence of the convulsive crisis.

Although Hippocrates has made in his writings a brilliant description of the crises of the Great Mal, indicating the brain as being responsible for all this symptomatology; epilepsy was seen as a mental disease for centuries and only after the emergence of Neurology, in the last century, is it that epilepsy went on to be understood as a syndrome resulting from an organic lesion in the
brain.

Today epilepsy is understood as an electrical discharge which reaches the cerebral neurons provoking symptoms correlated to the affected cerebral area.
Although the mediumistic accounts of the size of In the Greater World and In the Domains of Mediumship, dictated by the Spirit known as André Luiz, make unmistakable descriptions of epileptic symptomatology in their main characters, who are compliant to the frankly obsessing spiritual interference and present day medicine rejects any spiritual presence in the origin of epileptic crises, especially because of the fear of seeing the resurgence of the harmful participation of “demons” from biblical texts, versions from which the Middle Age and Inquisition knew how to take advantage.

Today’s sophisticated texts of identify traumas, infection, tumour and degenerations amongst several other causes of an organic nature as aetiology of epilepsy. However none of these tests is appropriate to detect the vibes of the spiritual realm that would make us understand in depth the essential nature of the problem of epilepsy.

Not even remotely do we intend to exclude the cerebral origin of the epileptic manifestation, but the exclusivist materialist view of allopathic medicine surrounds epilepsy in a stupid obscurity which does not allow it to be identified with another universe of interference that is situated within the spirit dimension which, as cause or aggravation, interferes in the frequency and in the constellation of symptoms which the epilepsy sufferer manifests.

By denying the interference with the spirit, medicine is unable to see that through the study itself of epilepsy, it would have much to learn, for example, with that which the sufferers experience during the so called “psychic crises”, in which one can observe a richness of cognitive clinical expression which the simple disarrangement of neurons in “short-circuit” does not offer arguments to justify.

On the classification of epileptic crises, Neurology highlights a type of crises called Focal or Partial Crises in which there is no impairment of conscience and the symptomatology will be the result of the area affected in the brain by the disorganised neuronal discharge.  In the motor area, the patient will present muscular contractions in the hand, arm, leg or in any other part of the body corresponding to the motor region of the affected brain.

In a sensitive area, the symptoms are referred as numbness, odd sensations or deformations in the affected limb.

The psychical crises are included within the focal crises group, in which the patient reports subjective sensations experienced spontaneously and with variation of duration from minutes to hours or days.

The classical descriptions of psychical crises make more common reference to the crisis “Dejá vu"  and "Jamais Vu". These two pictures are recognised as resulting from lesions on the base of the brain at the temporal lobes region.

The epileptic person, sometimes, manifests an odd sensation in known places

During "Dejá vu", the patient reports a sensation of familiarity with the environment or with people, even if they are strange to the patient and that are seen by the patient for the first time. The patient can have his crisis in a completely strange place, feeling a strong impression that the place is known to him or he has already being there before.

During "Jamais vu" (never seen) crisis, the patient manifests an odd sensation in places or with people known to him.

Both situations described here can occur with any normal person, but these sensations are commonly repeated and lasting in the epilepsy sufferer.

However many epileptic sufferers present frequent psychical crises that have deserved little emphasis for being commonplace such as sudden mood changes, a sudden sorrow or an unmotivated and out of proportion aggressiveness bordering on violence.

In this article I am interested in reporting other types of psychical crises. They are relatively rare and the patients themselves have much difficulty in finding adequate terms to describe them.  In my opinion they deserve a meticulous study, attempting to value the true sensations of these subjective experiences, which the patient tries to convey to us, even to the point of frequently feeling the incredulity manifested by the majority of doctors on listening to their accounts.

The reports of these crises at a first sight seem to be inconsistent, untruthful, superficial, getting mixed up with the patient’s symptoms of anxiety exhibited by them when also having to live with this type of crisis. They can be very lengthy and not have the character of suddenness that is a part of convulsive crises.   The consciousness is not affected, but perception of complex functions are, such as perception of time, space, reality, movement, notion of Self and even of thought.

These several sensations at a level of psychological experience of the individual seem to provide precious observation of the frontier between physical or spiritually lives experiences by these patients.

There are cases in which the patient has the constant sensation of living in a dream 

A few accounts taken from these patients have helped me to confirm that the mental world of each one of us moves in a spiritual dimension which transcends physical experience.

One of them is a doctor. He has frequented my clinic since childhood due to having convulsions resulting from neurocysticercosis and, recently he and his wife visited me with certain restlessness, intending to report that in the last few days prior to his visit, he had lost the capacity of following the passing of time.  It was not to do with the identification of time, of hours or day and night. He reported having a loss of the “notion of time”. Events took place in his mind and when he realised, these events had already finished happening. On driving to my clinic, he was riding his car along the motorway, following the road’s curves, but always with the idea that this did not take his time because it occurred in his mind, literally speaking, before happening physically. That which he had in mind, of the trajectory that he took, was not imagination, but the event itself. He reported that before and afterwards did not make sense because everything that took place in sequence he had experienced taking place simultaneously. His wife helped him as an anaesthesia assistant and during the interview she told me that despite having these sensations he described all the time, he carried on normally whilst anesthetising his patients and said that all the attitude he had already taken seemed to me to have already occurred not as a premonition but as a event “already carried out”; if we can so say; by him and on finishing anaesthesia, to his mind the facts seemed to carry on taking place.  

Neurology describes it also a state of psychical crisis in which the patient has the constant sensation of living a dream. It is called “Dream States” by the classical authors.

We have had two patients that reported episodes in which they felt an alteration of what they called “reality.”A Young lady told that these sensations disturbed her for years, mainly at night and if she was near to many people. This made her feel insecure. She seemed to carry things out by instinct. She insisted on saying that during the crises she had the sensation of being living in a “step before reality”.

There are patients that feel they are outside the body, which Neurology gives the name of “depersonalisation”

Another patient with similar crises added that he also had the impression of “not living in reality” and that everything he did “felt that for him it did not have any emotional content”.

Two children and two young adults who we have been following up for a while due to past convulsions, reported to us episodes of perception that was altered in the movement of objects and of one’s own thought. I heard from them expressions of the type: “the movement of things and of people seemed to be accelerated”; “when reaching out to pick up an object, his gestures seem to be very quick”; “people crossed the streets very quickly”; “it is difficult to cross the street with cars flying by all the time”; “everything around me seems to be in accelerated mode”; “people seem to speak too quickly”. One of the boys reported being woken up by the crisis. To one of them, during the crises, his own growth seemed accelerated.

In these times he avoided dialogue with people for fear of showing his disturbance to others. One of these patients, a 23 year old, is a painter and said that during the crises he felt everything passing slowly, his own gestures on dealing with the paint brush seemed to take place in slow motion, even though his friends did not confirm such slowness. He felt in such way for longer than a week, however entering and coming out of the crises without any apparent reason.

A lady, who was attending follow up appointments due to fainting episodes, had an ECG with focal alterations in the left hemisphere and brain scans typical of neurocysticercosis. She reported that she had had episodes in which she felt to be shifted; she felt to be very far away, “as if in another world”, “occupying another space”. These episodes lasted 20 minutes and she kept herself lucid during them and felt her head empty, felt herself going pale and panting. Other more complex, and sometimes more elaborated accounts have been branded as hallucinatory and commonly related with dysrythmias of temporal lobe or pathologies of sleep.

Some patients tell of feeling outside of their body, a sensation that neurology names “depersonalisation”. To others, the objects that they see or the sounds that they hear are increased, diminished and distorted. Sometimes there is a concentration of scenes and accounts that are memorised and the patient, in glimpses, recapitulated all his existence. This is called a “panoramic view” of life.

The accounts described would not surprise a neurologist
 who is used to seeing epileptic sufferers

We have had, amongst other cases, the case of a 9 year old girl who consulted us due to manifestations common to epilepsy.

She reported that during some occasions, while being totally awake, she felt herself getting out of her body in complete lucidity. In one of these last crises she was sitting on a sofa, watching a TV program when, suddenly, she saw herself, beside her physical body. I questioned her as to her fears during this episode and what her attitude was on seeing herself in this duplication. She answered simply that, scared, she tried to direct herself near to the TV to see if her body that was sitting on the sofa would follow her.

The accounts we have described would not surprise any neurologist who is used to seeing epilepsy cases. Surely they are attributed to the presence of disturbances of neuronal activity, especially of the temporal lobe, and the majority of them will get rid of crises of these kinds with medication available to act specifically on dysrythmias of these regions.

It is curious that in these descriptions, the accounts of how these patients experience or “codify” the notion of sense of time, of apprehension of reality, of space-time relationship in object displacement, of synthesis and projection of thought, allow us to suspect, without presumption a series of similarities with certain non academic descriptions within spiritualist literature.

The texts that are specialised in describing techniques of meditation for example; reveal that the “great masters” and “mystics” who reach the most profound depths of interiorisation of consciousness make interesting descriptions in relation to meaning of time, to space occupied by matter, to the speed of particles of matter/energy that are attuned and as well as the swirling flow of thought, descriptions that in my opinion, are very connected to the ones related here by the epilepsy sufferers.

For us, spiritists, the concepts of time in the spiritual world, of space in the extra-physical dimension, of thought projection, of spiritual body displacement can be easily recognised in this series of accounts registered here. The objective lesions evidence by the cerebral mass in these accounts are, to me, nothing more that doors of intercessions between the two realms, physical expression of a reality that our body allows to palpate and the spiritual perception that we experience without perception of our senses.
 
 
 
Nubor Orlando Facure is a neurosurgeon and director of Instituto do Cérebro de Campinas-SP(Campinas Brain Institute- in Sao Paulo state). He is a former chair professor of Neurosurgery of UNICAMP (University of Campinas). He is also a writer and spiritist lecturer.