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As I traveled and
watched people go about their business
in small towns, speaking a language I did not understand and being
engrossed in
familiar activities I did not understand, a sadness came over me. It
dawned on
me that no matter who these people were and how well I knew them I
would never
understand, what it is like to be them. I could never share their
experience
(or “understand” in the nonconceptual sense) their world and their
lives. This
was not a matter of lacking information, it was rather a matter of not
being
able to become first-person acquainted with their private experience,
of not
understanding “what it is like” to be them.
But then something
happened that made me see that it might
be possible, at least briefly, for the fog that surrounds our
subjective self
to lift allowing one to see through what seemed to me a tragically
impenetrable
barrier that separates what it’s like to be me from what it’s like to
be
someone else – that to some extent it might be possible to share this
first-person experience with another unique individual. My instrument
for this
was LSD but many others have achieved it through meditation, or
sometimes
through a hardship such as fasting,. Many of these have been documented
by
Richard Bucke in his book Cosmic
Consciousness in which he chronicles such experiences among many
historical
figures, including his friend Walt Whitman as well as Buddha, Christ,
Saint
Paul, Mohammed, Dante, Blake and others. It made me feel that maybe we
are not
completely and irrevocably alone in our inner world.
Zenon Pylyshyn