On daily walks, I often put on a Lex Fridman podcast or Sam Harris’s Making Sense. Both of these are long-form interviews, taking deep dives into the nature of human experience. But my guilty pleasure is a YouTube channel called Coming Home. These are stories from a wide range of people who recount their near-death experiences (NDEs). The first thing I noticed about all of these extraordinary stories, is how strikingly similar they are, regardless of the person’s religious beliefs, education or cultural background. A skeptic might say that is because they’re all similar hallucinations produced by a dying brain, and in this flood of chemicals, we feel comforted, accepting and surrender to our fate.
This seems plausible, but doesn’t account for how these people are able to recall in such remarkable detail, even decades later, what they experienced. These are unlike hallucinations, which we soon forget. Rarely does an imagined experience change us forever. Even after waking from a lucid dream, we go about our life as usual. Yet people coming back from NDEs are all profoundly changed by them. Each reports an overwhelming sense of unconditional love from a compassionate divine presence. They witness the unbounded vastness of the universe itself from an omnipresent viewpoint. All of them return renewed in the belief that they are beloved, forgiven and inspired by a divine grace to serve humanity as best they can.
I find these stories especially compelling, because they mirror certain psychedelic experiences. As noted in the scientific journal Nature, “Indeed, “ego dissolution” is an extreme condition associated with high doses of psychedelics leading to a loss of segregation between oneself and one’s surroundings and typically accompanied by a feeling of unity with the universe”. Like NDEs, strong psychedelic experiences cause a durable change to the perception of self, both in the sense that we are not our bodies or minds, and that we are connected to a higher consciousness that permeates everything.
Segregation is the circuit breaker role of our ego; an inbuilt severance function that defines the rational partitioning of “me” and everything that is “not me”. It allows us to play an infinite forgetting game. — Chris Barclay
So, what is the common link between the transformative experience of NDEs and high doses of psychedelics? Both are the result of the mind’s rational control mechanisms shutting down, allowing temporary ego death, whereby the unseen world reveals itself. Without an “I” to judge, analyze and resolve, we experience the Mind at Large directly, not as something separate from It. Because of the unfathomable vastness of this mind, our ego acts as a partition, allowing us to reference our local version of it. With the ego removed, there’s no longer any personal boundary, no local reference point, and we become everything at once.
Of course, like our personality, our ego is a construct; a protective insular mechanism that keeps us in the game of life. We can’t play hide and seek alone, we need others to play along. Pretending to be somebody is all part of this game and there’s no point to stop pretending. As Alan Watts famously said, “The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.”
I believe life is a forgetting game. At the moment we are born, we forget what we are and where we come from. Throughout life, this forgetting is reinforced by our developing sense of self; who we believe we are and what we know. It’s only at the end of life do we remember, “Oh, right. All of this is me.”
Psychedelics offer only a momentary glimpse into the unseen world. While these mystical experiences may feel like dying, they’re only a temporary death of the ego. When we lose this practical function, we become disassociated, unable to integrate dissonant perceptions into worldly life. How can we reconcile “I am both me and everything that is not me?” Try resolving this puzzle over a quarterly financial results meeting or charity golf tournament. It’s like, 2+2 = fish.
Forgetting allows us to make life an infinite game, because we’re forever trying to remember how to navigate and keep the game in play. Without challenge, without stress, this life holds little interest. We would be as a jellyfish, adrift and waiting for a mate or a meal to float along and present itself. We intuitively create a life of meaningful adversity, which we must find new creative ways to overcome.
The once and future you lives to play this game. It occurs in discrete sequential pieces, only revealing itself as an integrated picture at the end. I believe our life was already designed but in forgetting it, we act as if free to put all the pieces back together. This is the art of forgetting; a memento of our amnesiac journey, to which we awaken as if for the first time.