Why is it that in the stage of heavy sleeping trance a hypnotic subject's nervous system fails to make the usual reactions to a burning match applied to the hand or a pointed pin stuck into the flesh? Why does the usual sensitivity to pain vanish so largely, often completely? If consciousness really lay in the nerves themselves it could never really be divorced from them. It is because consciousness does not arise out of the material body, but out of the deeper principle of the immaterial, that it can function or fail to function as the bodily thought-series. Hence when the consciousness is turned away from the body, when it is induced to cease holding the nerve system in its embrace, it will naturally cease holding the pleasurable or painful changes within that system too.
-- Notebooks Category 10: Healing of the Self > Chapter 3 : The Origins of Illness > # 85
