The personal self temporarily ceased or was revealed as illusory
The felt sense that the personal self, the one with a name, a history and a boundary, temporarily ceased, dissolved, or was revealed as illusory. This is the experience type most often described explicitly and in detail; it leads all categories on the strict count.
The higher number includes anyone whose account implied a loss of the sense of self; the lower number counts those who directly described the dissolution or absence of a personal 'I' in their own words.
I made a choice to allow myself to dissolve or disappear... and then it was like intimacy fails to really capture it, but it's just no filter, no distance.
I woke up one morning and I was just pure awareness, the person had totally disappeared... I looked at my clothes on the rack and I was like, whose clothes? No one could be found.
My mind went completely vast and clear. No thoughts, no Self, no person thinking. It happened from the inside out. That became a kind of base camp — always present — that sometimes unexpectedly comes very much into the foreground.
I took a very small deep breath in and then I disappeared — basically I was gone, I was completely gone. There is no body, there is no person, there is no consciousness, there is nothing at all.
First-hand accounts from people who described this experience, drawn from the interviews in this collection:
Natalie Gray spent 25 years searching for meaning through various spiritual teachers, self-help seminars, and practices before a sudden shif…
Watch interview →Maggie Gillovich was a sociologist and self-described materialist who had a spontaneous first awakening — a direct seeing into the nature of…
Watch interview →Olivia, a woman with a background in transpersonal psychology, underwent a second iboga plant medicine ceremony after a disappointing first …
Watch interview →Feliz Biste Martina was a Montessori school educator and long-time spiritual seeker when, in 2015, she was struck by a large pickup truck wh…
Watch interview →Jurgen C is a commercial artist and author who began having spontaneous out-of-body experiences early in his adult life, initially without a…
Watch interview →Savvita Vera was an Australian woman with no spiritual background who was living an ordinary contracted life when the sudden death of a clos…
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