What Oneness Actually Feels Like, and Whether a Brain Can Hold It

I was washing a cup. That is the whole setting, and I want to keep it, because everything that happened next has been described a thousand times in language so vast and gold-leafed that nobody can find their way back to the kitchen. There was a cup, and hot water, and the small ordinary irritation of a morning. And then, without any warning and without anything moving, the line went.

I need to be precise about what went, because it was not the cup. The cup was still there. The water was still hot, and the steam still climbed, and the light through the window over the sink was still the ordinary grey of an ordinary day—more so, actually, more vivid, almost unbearably specific. Nothing disappeared. What disappeared was the seam. The faint, constant, unnoticed sensation that there was someone standing slightly behind my eyes, at a particular address, receiving all this from a small distance. That someone did not leave the room. That someone turned out never to have been in the room. And the room, without him, did not become empty. It became the only thing there was, and it was doing the washing.

Vedanta has a technical claim underneath all its poetry, and it is this: the boundary between you and everything else is not a discovery, it is a drawing. You are not finding a line that is out there. You are making one, continuously, at enormous metabolic expense, and you have been doing it so constantly and so long that you have mistaken the drawing for the world. The tradition does not ask you to believe that the line is false. It asks you to catch yourself in the act of drawing it. What follows is my attempt to report what it was like when, for a few minutes at a sink, the hand drawing it got tired.

The Terror Comes First

Nobody warns you about this part, and the omission is close to a scandal. The literature is full of bliss. Ananda, they say. Peace beyond understanding. But the first thing is not peace. The first thing is panic—a pure, animal, full-body alarm of a kind I have never felt before or since, and the reason is embarrassingly simple. The thing that would ordinarily be afraid is the thing that is going. It is not that something frightening is happening to you. It is that the ‘you’ that things happen to is thinning out, and the last thing it does on the way is scream. From the inside there is no way to distinguish this from dying. None. It is not similar to dying. It is procedurally identical: the exact machinery you use to remain someone is being switched off, in order, while you watch.

So of course I clutched. Everyone clutches. And the clutching is itself the most interesting fact in the whole episode, because it is the drawing hand—caught, finally, in the act. You cannot grab your way into this. The grabbing is precisely the thing that was making the line. You only get through the door by noticing that the one trying to get through is the door.

Then the Categories Go

What I was not prepared for was that it does not stop at the skin. I had imagined—to whatever extent I had imagined anything—that the merger would be between me and the world: a fusion of two known parties. That is not what occurs. What occurs is that the whole filing system goes down, and the folders were never labelled ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ only.

Living and non-living was the first to go, and it went easily, which shocked me. The cup was exactly as alive as the hand holding it. Not in the sentimental sense that everything has a spirit—nothing so decorative. It was more that ‘alive’ turned out never to have been a property sitting inside certain objects. It was a story I had been telling about some of them, a sorting I performed so early and so fast that I had never once caught it happening. The steel, the water, the light, the hands: all of it had precisely the same status, which was that it was appearing. That was the only category left. Not alive, not dead, not mine, not other. Appearing.

Then the abstract went, which is the part I still cannot make anyone believe. The number seven was there in the same way the cup was there. Not as an idea about a thing—as a thing, with the same weight and the same ontological rent. My mother, three hundred miles away and unthought-of for a week, was present in exactly the manner of the tap. The manifest and the unmanifest, the actual and the merely possible, the remembered and the imagined: all of them were doing the identical thing, which was arising in one awareness that had no inside and no outside and, crucially, no owner. And then the last and strangest one: the future and the past stopped being places I was travelling between. There was only now—and ‘now’ was not a thin moving slot, the way it is when you are in it. It was the whole. It was capacious. You could have put a century in it.

Nothing disappeared. Only the lines I had drawn—and had forgotten I was the one drawing them.

Can a Brain Hold This?

Now the honest question, and the reason I am not content to leave this in the incense. A brain is a difference engine. That is not a metaphor; it is the job description. Nearly everything a nervous system does is the making of distinctions—figure from ground, self from world, mine from yours, threat from food. Boundary-drawing is not a bug the mystics have found. It is the entire evolutionary point of the organ. So what on earth is happening when it stops?

We have, for the first time in history, some actual instruments pointed at this, and the findings are suggestive rather than settled. There is a network in the brain—the default mode network, the machinery most active when you are doing nothing in particular and quietly narrating yourself to yourself—that appears to be the self-model’s home office. Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College found that psilocybin disorganises that network, and that the degree of disorganisation tracks how completely volunteers report their ego dissolving. Judson Brewer’s group found long-term meditators quieting the same hubs. And Andrew Newberg, imaging Tibetan practitioners and Franciscan nuns at the peak of practice, reported reduced activity in the parietal region that builds your sense of where the body ends—with the obvious and vertiginous implication that when the boundary-drawing area stops drawing, the mind reports, accurately, that there is no boundary. (His samples were small and the interpretation is contested; hold it lightly.)

And then there is the case that should be famous in philosophy departments and somehow is not. In 1996 a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist named Jill Bolte Taylor had a haemorrhagic stroke in her left hemisphere and, being exactly the one person on earth equipped to narrate it, narrated it. As the left-hemisphere machinery went offline she could no longer locate where her arm stopped and the wall began. She described herself as fluid, as enormous, as merged with everything around her—and, notably, as euphoric. She was not a mystic. She was a scientist watching her own boundary-generator fail, and the failure did not produce chaos or terror or nothing. It produced precisely what the Upanishads say is underneath.

“Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.”—Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter

So: can the brain hold it? Briefly, plainly, yes—it demonstrably does. Permanently is the better question, and here I think the tradition is more careful than its Western admirers. A nervous system that genuinely stopped distinguishing self from world would be a nervous system that could not keep its body alive; you must know where your hand ends in order not to leave it in the fire. And the sages, conspicuously, do not leave their hands in fires. They step out of the way of buses. They eat when hungry. The resolution, I think, is that they do not lose the distinction. They lose the belief in it. The line stays—as a tool, a convenience, a working fiction the body needs—and what goes is the conviction that the line was found rather than drawn. The natural state, sahaja, is not described as a permanent flood. It is described as functioning perfectly well while no longer being fooled.

The Fork That Cannot Be Closed

Here is the part that intellectual honesty requires and that both camps hate. You can induce this. Psilocybin will do it. A stroke will do it. So will a temporal lobe seizure, oxygen starvation, extreme fasting, sensory deprivation, and, apparently, a sufficiently boring cup. Which licenses exactly two readings, and the data cannot choose between them. The first: it is ‘just’ neurology—a boundary-generator misfiring in a way that happens to feel like revelation, and the sense of cosmic significance is simply another thing the brain manufactures, no more probative than the significance you feel in a dream. The second, which Huxley put into English and Bergson into philosophy before him: the brain is a reducing valve. It does not produce consciousness; it filters an enormous one down to the trickle a primate needs to find lunch. On this reading the drug and the lesion do not create the vision. They stop the filtering.

Notice that both readings predict the same scan. Both predict that damaging or dosing the boundary machinery yields boundarylessness. The imaging cannot adjudicate, because the two theories disagree about what the machinery is for, not about what it does. Anyone who tells you the fMRI settles it—in either direction—is reading their own prior back out of the picture. I have watched clever people do this in both robes and lab coats, and it is the same move.

And there is a cruelty in the geometry of it. From the inside, it does not feel like a malfunction. It feels like the lens coming off—like every previous moment of your life was the compromised one, and this is simply what was there when the compression stopped. That is precisely what an unusually good malfunction would feel like. The experience cannot testify on its own behalf, which is exactly where the argument runs out and where the tradition, not unreasonably, stops arguing and says: then go and look, and report back.

The Return, and the Dishes

It closes. That is the thing nobody mentions either. It closes the way a word you could not remember comes back an hour later—with no ceremony, no fading chord, no farewell. The seam simply resumes, and there you are again, at a particular address behind your eyes, with a cup in your hand and about four minutes gone. And you are not enlightened. Let me be extremely clear about that, because the internet is full of people who took the tourist photograph and now sell the country. You come back with nothing you can bank. No powers. No certainty. Not even, if you are honest, a belief—because a belief is a thing held by someone, and the whole content of the episode was that there is no one to hold it.

What you come back with is smaller and more permanent than that: you can no longer entirely believe the old thing. Not disbelieve—that would be another position, another line. Just: the total, seamless obviousness of being a separate someone has a hairline crack in it now, and light comes under the door at odd hours. It is not a conviction. It is a rumour you cannot unhear. And it is, I think, all the tradition ever actually promised; the rest is marketing.

So the water was still running. The cup was clean. The light over the sink was, once more, ordinary, and my knees hurt, and there was a whole day waiting with its ordinary indignities. Everything exactly as it had been, and nothing. That is the joke sitting in the middle of all of this—the one the masters keep telling with a straight face and nobody laughs at until much later. The dishes still need doing. There is no one doing them. It is the same sink either way. The only difference, and it is not nothing, is that for the rest of your life you will occasionally catch yourself at the edge of something ordinary—a cup, a window, the grey light of a Tuesday—and feel the hand pause, very slightly, before it draws the line.