Mystical Experiencer: Female in mid-eighties
Submission date: October 7, 2021
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 4
At the age of four, I’d been spending a lot of time thinking about what “me” and “self” actually meant. I could see that “me-ness” and “selfhood” seemed at once both real and unreal. I held my hand in front of my face, and moved my fingers, noticing that my mind was able to control the movement of what appeared to be an external object.
One day I was on the stairs in my parents’ house and doing this, when I began to feel both happy and also frightened, as if I might be in danger of losing my “self.” It was frightening enough that I thought I might need to pull myself back from it.
Then I looked up and saw that everything within my view—the stairs, the wallpaper, the inside of the house, and, by extension everything—everything—was all the same, that distinctions between one thing and another weren’t real, as it was actually all the same stuff. I was having an immediate, visceral, certain experience of unity. And that somehow made it clear that everything is always perfectly okay. No danger, no fear.
The effect was gone in a few minutes, but it was an absolutely undeniable certainty.