How to Change Your Mind

vocabularies—whether spiritual, humanistic, psychoanalytic, or
neurological—it is finally the loss of ego or self (what Jung called “psychic
death”) they’re suggesting is the key psychological driver of the
experience. It is this that gives us the mystical experience, the death
rehearsal process, the overview effect, the notion of a mental reboot, the
making of new meanings, and the experience of awe.
Consider the case of the mystical experience: the sense of
transcendence, sacredness, unitive consciousness, infinitude, and
blissfulness people report can all be explained as what it can feel like to a
mind when its sense of being, or having, a separate self is suddenly no
more.
Is it any wonder we would feel one with the universe when the
boundaries between self and world that the ego patrols suddenly fall
away? Because we are meaning-making creatures, our minds strive to
come up with new stories to explain what is happening to them during
the experience. Some of these stories are bound to be supernatural or
“spiritual,” if only because the phenomena are so extraordinary they can’t
be easily explained in terms of our usual conceptual categories. The
predictive brain is getting so many error signals that it is forced to
develop extravagant new interpretations of an experience that transcends
its capacity for understanding.
Whether the most magnificent of these stories represent a regression
to magical thinking, as Freud believed, or access to transpersonal realms
such as the “Mind at Large,” as Huxley believed, is itself a matter of
interpretation. Who can say for certain? Yet it seems to me very likely
that losing or shrinking the self would make anyone feel more “spiritual,”
however you choose to define the word, and that this is apt to make one
feel better.
The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least
is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with
spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to
think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual”
might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a
spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have
meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so
does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest.
What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and