Ego Dissolution: Melting into the Phenomenal Field

Abstract

It was as if my body / my being was pixelated and dissolved into the rest of the pixels that make up the entirety of every thing else.[#3086] There are countless ways in which the experience of pure awareness can shift from background to foreground.The phenomenology of translucency is one way: "It's like real ity shining through when all ideas, concepts . . .step aside for a moment" (#2528; see chapter 28).Another common phenomenological transition leads into a new model of real ity in which the conscious experience of perceiving and knowing is no longer structured by a localized and "knowing" self, depicted by the brain as intentionally directed at distinct, external objects of knowledge.In such cases, the experience of egoic knowing turns into the experience of nondual knowing.As the original egoic selfmodel expands and sometimes even dissolves, some of the phenomenological effects described in chapter 24 may occur-like a dissolution of body bound aries, a sense of weightlessness, bodiless body-experience, groundless groundedness, timelessness, or the disappearance of the original spatial frame of reference.In the second half of that chapter, I offered the new conceptual instrument of a "phenomenal unit of identification," which simply means any content of conscious experience to which we may refer by saying "I am this!" or "I was this!" Using this new tool, we can now point out that in some cases, the nondual quality of knowing can apparently become the new unit of identification because it can be "bodilessly embodied."In other cases, it will be more accurate to describe nondual knowing as a state lacking any identification whatsoever.Nondual knowing sometimes may then lead to states later described as full ego dissolution, pure being, wholeness, or simply a feeling of oneness with the nonconceptual essence of conscious experience per se.At the risk of repeating myself, one of the many surprising results of our study was how frequently meditators, when asked to describe their own phenomenal experiences during episodes of pure awareness, actually report 25 Ego Dissolution: Melting into the Phenomenal Field