There are moments people struggle to describe. Standing before the sea, or in the middle of a prayer, or just on an ordinary morning, and suddenly something opens. The sense that everything is connected, that there’s no real boundary between who you are and what’s around you, that for a moment you understood something large that has no words. It passes, and a strong impression remains that doesn’t fade for years.
What’s intriguing isn’t only that people experience this. It’s that they describe it so similarly, everywhere and in every age. The same sense of unity, the same quality of “more real than ordinary.” And that poses a sharp question: does this moment reveal something real about the world, or only something about the brain experiencing it?
What can honestly be said, and where to be careful
Start with the solid part. These experiences are real, documented, and some of them can even be brought on in a controlled way, through prolonged meditation, through extreme states, and sometimes through stimulating certain areas of the brain. Alter brain activity, and you can produce the sense of unity. That’s an important finding.
But here is exactly where the trap lies, and it’s subtle. The fact that an experience can be brought on from the brain doesn’t mean it’s “only” a fabrication of the brain. Seeing a real tree also runs through brain activity, and no one concludes from that that the tree doesn’t exist. A mechanism is no proof of forgery. But the reverse is just as true: the intensity of the experience, the sense that it’s more real than anything, is no evidence that what was experienced in it is real. A sense of certainty is a feeling, not testimony. Between these two traps you have to walk carefully.
Where it leaps into philosophy
Suppose someone experiences a total unity of all things. What may they conclude? “I felt that everything is one” is excellent testimony about what they felt. It is not testimony that everything really is one. The leap from “this is how I experienced it” to “this is how the world is” is exactly where you leave solid ground.
What can be said is at once modest and interesting. Experiences of this kind are a fact about human consciousness, and an impressive one. They show that the brain is capable of states in which the ordinary boundary between “I” and “world” softens. What that says about the world itself is already interpretation, not a finding. And that difference is worth keeping even when the experience is very convincing.
What tradition offers
The intuition that there are states in which something deep beneath the everyday is revealed is ancient and shared by nearly every spiritual tradition. Christian, Sufi, Indian and Jewish mysticism each describe, in their own language, moments of the boundary dissolving and of nearness to something large. In the Jewish phrasing, Kabbalah speaks of “devekut” and of the self being nullified before the Infinite, and is very careful to frame these moments, to warn against them, and not to promise they reveal truth. Not a scientific statement, and obviously not evidence about the structure of the universe. It’s an entirely different language that maybe feels out the same place we stood before: that the boundary between inside and outside isn’t as sealed as it usually feels. We point at the resemblance between the descriptions and leave it to you to decide whether it hints at something real, or only at a shared structure of the human mind.
To close
Go back to that moment before the sea, or in the middle of the prayer, when for an instant everything looked like one. The impression it leaves is real. Whether it’s a touch of something or a property of your brain stays open, and even the one who experiences it most strongly can’t settle it on the strength of its intensity alone.
So, to close, a question: if you can’t tell from the inside between an experience that reveals truth and one that only feels that way, what would you need in order to know the difference, and where could that even come from?