The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 5 of 254
A sudden disappearance of the personal self
‘In one moment, everything that I had ever taken to be my personal self completely disappeared,’ she later recalled. ‘It was just gone. As I waited for the bus to approach, something in consciousness was loosening somehow. And when it got there … this reference point of an “I”, a someone that everything was about and that everything that occurred in life was structured around, was gone. It was like a switch had been turned off. And it was never to turn on again.’ She had experienced a blinding, shattering realisation: ‘There was no personal self.’ Yet ‘nothing stopped; the functions continued to function just as before. In fact, better than before.