Last week I gave a talk on “Is there a real you?” The answer isn’t simple. In line with David Hume, most contemporary western philosophers, Buddhists, and the vast majority of psychologists and neuroscientists, I argue that there is no permanent, unchanging indivisible self. However, I don’t go so far as many others and say that the self is therefore an illusion. There is no permanent, unchanging, indivisible Amazon river but it’s very real, as you’d find out if you jumped in it.
During the break, a woman who had come along told me what the lack of such a pure self means to her. Many years ago she had a spontaneous spiritual experience which lasted for nearly two hours. She said she has not been the same since. As she was speaking she used the pronoun “I” a lot but at several points hesitated, saying that she struggled to express herself clearly as she really didn’t feel the reality of this “I” anymore.
I’ve come across many people like this, directly and indirectly. Some, like her, had their awakening out of nowhere, others had it taking psychedelic drugs, oddly few had experienced it through traditional spiritual practices. This seems rather unfair to me: people spend their whole lives trying to dissolve their egos while others just do it by chance or on a narcotic trip. They all say that they became aware of the lack of a self and instead experienced a kind of oneness with everything. They report that this removes their fear of death, makes them less anxious and gives them a confidence that something will endure after their death – not their “self” but something deeper.
It cannot be denied that people have such experiences and that they can be profound and live-changing. The question is: are they veridical? Do they reveal deep truths about the universe or are the “truths” revealed no more real than the pink elephants on parade that the drunk Dumbo hallucinated?
The sober philosophical answer is simple. There is nothing about the power or intensity of an experience that guarantees it is revealing truths. Different people have seen Jesus appear to them and tell them contradictory things. Many people remember being abducted by aliens. No matter how powerfully real an experience is, to be taken as veridical we need some independent reason to take it as such.
When people report losing a self of self, however, we do have reasons to think there is something to their experience. The feeling of a lack of ego corresponds pretty well to the well-established belief that there is no single, unitary, indivisible self. Arguably, feeling this experientially is more veridical than our normal mode of awareness in which we fail to notice how disjointed and multifaceted experience is, thinking it to be neatly focused around a single “I”. So although it would be wrong to think the power of the experience is enough to prove its veracity, it just so happens that in this case, reality and our unusually heightened experience of it do match up to a remarkable degree.
However, it’s even more complicated than this. People don’t just have experiences: they interpret what they mean, often without noticing that they are indeed interpreting. The woman I talked to, for example, was convinced that in a very real sense she didn’t exist. But there was a good reason why she found it very hard not to say “I”: she remains a locus of experience and action. She goes to talks, have friends and has dedicated her life to researching the self. There is very clearly a person doing this, namely her. Insisting that this person is no really an “I” begs the question of what a real “I” is. I wonder whether the experience is not so much a dissolution of ego but a lessening of a sense of attachment to it, a dismissing of its importance.
Oddly, I have found many people who claim to have no sense of “I” to be remarkably egocentric. They often talk at you for long periods, showing little or no interest in what you think. They take their personal experience to be authoritative, above that of the collective experience of scientists and philosophers. They are also very clear that their experience has made them much happier and calmer.
Should such people be more willing to question what their experience seems to make obvious? It wouldn’t be impossible. A.J. Ayer had a near-death experience which he said “slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me,” but was quickly able to explain it away as the illusions of a brain shutting down. He didn’t think that the experience was so vivid that it must have revealed a deep truth.
When people use appeals to experience to justify abhorrent beliefs, it is worth challenging them. And because I don’t think we should legitimise personal experience as the final arbiter of truth it’s also worth gently questioning what it means to experience ego dissolution. In practice however, asking people to do this is a tall order. It takes a lot of effort to be so objective in one’s thinking that one can put cool reason above a deeply powerful experience. Nor would I want to push too far. If someone’s loss of attachment to self makes them more aware of the self’s genuine lack of permanence, makes them calmer, less anxious about death, I’m not going to press them too hard for a more rigorous account of what’s happened to them. That is, unless they corner me for too long trying to persuade me that they have seen the light.
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