Does Ordinary Life Ever Have a Conscious Moment without the ‘I’?

Abstract

As long as we are awake and even while dreaming, a sense of “I am seeing, hearing, or doing, etc.” seems to be an inevitable content of any conscious experience. One may wonder whether it is ever possible in our ordinary lives to have an experience where the “I” is not present, or briefly, have a self-transcendent experience.  I describe below a few of my experiences of short duration that are quite ordinary with nothing mysterious about them and argue that they are all self-transcendent.  To explain how the self (ego) is present or not in an experience, I describe some properties characteristic of the self such as its sense of personal identity and ownership of action.  Manifestation of these properties in an experience indicates the presence of the self and absence of these properties indicates its absence.  In an act of observation, full attention paid to what is being observed seems to push every thought, including the self, out of the conscious mind and keep it fully occupied with the act of observation.  A characteristic property of the self-transcendent state seems to be that one can only recognize such a state as being free from the self, but one cannot prove that it is so because the outward effect of the state may be the same as that of an alternative state where the self is present.