first-person pronoun. For what was observing the scene was a vantage
and mode of awareness entirely distinct from my accustomed self; in fact
I hesitate to use the “I” to denote the presiding awareness, it was so
different from my usual first person. Where that self had always been a
subject encapsulated in this body, this one seemed unbounded by any
body, even though I now had access to its perspective. That perspective
was supremely indifferent, neutral on all questions of interpretation, and
unperturbed even in the face of what should by all rights have been an
unmitigated personal disaster. Yet the “personal” had been obliterated.
Everything I once was and called me, this self six decades in the making,
had been liquefied and dispersed over the scene. What had always been a
thinking, feeling, perceiving subject based in here was now an object out
there. I was paint!
The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-
looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more,
and there was no one left to mourn its passing. Yet something had
succeeded it: this bare disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the
scene of the self’s dissolution with benign indifference. I was present to
reality but as something other than my self. And although there was no
self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, which was calm,
unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego. This was
big news.
When I think back on this part of the experience, I’ve occasionally
wondered if this enduring awareness might have been the “Mind at
Large” that Aldous Huxley described during his mescaline trip in 1953.
Huxley never quite defined what he meant by the term—except to speak
of “the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large”—but he
seems to be describing a universal, shareable form of consciousness
unbounded by any single brain. Others have called it cosmic
consciousness, the Oversoul, or Universal Mind. This is supposed to exist
outside our brains—as a property of the universe, like light or gravity, and
just as pervasive. Constitutive too. Certain individuals at certain times
gain access to this awareness, allowing them to perceive reality in its
perfected light, at least for a time.
Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of
consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and
surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just
frankie
(Frankie)
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