How to Change Your Mind

Could this be it?” That was the thought, though there was no longer a
thinker to have it.
Here words fail. In truth, there were no flames, no blast, no
thermonuclear storm; I’m grasping at metaphor in the hope of forming
some stable and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind. In
the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible
sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this was what the mystics call
the mysterium tremendum—the blinding unendurable mystery (whether
of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans
tremble in awe. Huxley described it as the fear “of being overwhelmed, of
disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind,
accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could
possibly bear.”
Oh, to be back in the cozy world of symbols!
After the fact I kept returning to one of two metaphors, and while they
inevitably deform the experience,* as any words or metaphors or symbols
must, they at least allow me to grasp hold of a shadow of it and, perhaps,
share it. The first is the image of being on the outside of a rocket after
launch. I’m holding on with both hands, legs clenched around it, while
the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my flesh, pulling my face down
into a taut grimace, as the great cylinder rises through successive layers of
clouds, exponentially gaining speed and altitude, the fuselage shuddering
on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from Earth’s
grip, while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air
issues in a deafening roar.
It was a little like that.
The other metaphor was the big bang, but the big bang run in reverse,
from our familiar world all the way back to a point before there was
anything, no time or space or matter, only the pure unbounded energy
that was all there was then, before an imperfection, a ripple in its
waveform, caused the universe of energy to fall into time, space, and
matter. Rushing backward through fourteen billion years, I watched the
dimensions of reality collapse one by one until there was nothing left, not
even being. Only the all-consuming roar.
It was just horrible.
And then suddenly the devolution of everything into the nothingness
of pure force reverses course. One by one, the elements of our universe