A Moment of This-ness
In 1964 I was living in Bangkok, riding to work each day on the bus. I was twenty-two. Word came that my eighteen-year-old younger brother had died. What I felt, more than anything, was an unrelenting profound curiosity. I felt the utter black-and-white starkness of life on one side and an unknown on the other, with no bridge between them. I spent months turning the question over: “What were life and death truly?”
Then riding the bus home from work one day, something popped into my consciousness. Life and death were not separate and opposite, but actually, mysteriously connected. Two sides of the same coin, but with the emphasis on the sameness. This insight arrived, the way I assume genuine insight always does, before thought could catch up to it. Then, within no time at all, it was gone.
I’ve spent decades since trying to find language for what happened on that bus. The religious traditions got closest, the Tao that can’t be named, the Zen flash of “kensho”, but they explained the experience by pointing at it, not through it. What I lacked was a model. A way of saying: here is why this kind of perception is possible, and here is why it almost never happens. Then I read a short piece by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, and something clicked.
Hoffman was writing about quantum superposition: the strange fact that a particle exists in all its possible states simultaneously until the moment it’s observed. Observation forces it to choose. Before that, it’s genuinely both. His observation was this: our sensory representations, which carve the world into discrete objects, are an inadequate description of reality. And on entanglement, the phenomenon where two particles separated by billions of light-years remain instantly linked, the very act of separating the world into discrete objects is itself the inadequacy.
I’m not a physicist, and I’m not claiming quantum mechanics causes mystical experience. But Hoffman’s framing gave me the first tangible model for what I had touched on that bus: a momentary release of the mind’s compulsion to separate everything into this and that, alive and dead, self and other. I saw both states at once, entangled.
Is this not what the Taoists call wei wu wei, doing without doing? And perhaps what athletes and musicians call flow? There may even be something to beginner’s luck here: the novice who hasn’t yet learned to observe themselves performing, who hasn’t yet installed the inner critic, sometimes operates from exactly this unobserved state, and surprises everyone, including themselves. The moment they start watching, the superposition collapses.
Why Is This State So Rare for Humans?
The evolutionary answer is uncomfortable but probably right: perceiving discrete objects keeps you alive. Noticing that the thing moving in the grass is a predator, separate from you and dangerous, is exactly the kind of perception natural selection rewards. In fact, a deep awareness of “this-ness,” where boundaries dissolve and everything flows into everything else, would be anti-life, not just for humans but for all living things. Every organism depends on distinguishing self from not-self, food from threat, here from there. The boundary machine is not a human invention. It is biology’s oldest tool.
But the human mind has gone an extra mile. We didn’t stop at perceiving difference; we named it. Froze it. Built elaborate, interlocking systems of rigid labels that harden the fluid into the fixed. A dog following a scent, a bird riding a thermal, a school of fish turning as one: their awareness appears largely embedded in the moment, not standing apart from it as an observer. They perceive difference, as all life must. But they don’t then nail a label to it and build a cathedral of certainty around the nail.
Language does that. The moment we name something, we have already cut it from its ground and declared it finished. The word death is not death: it’s a box we place around an event so we can think about it, file it, and stop having to feel its strangeness. The Zen koan is a deliberate attack on this: hold a contradiction the mind cannot label, and occasionally the labeling mechanism stalls. Something else briefly operates.
So What Do We Do with This?
Nothing, and that’s the point. You cannot choose to enter this state. Trying to observe it destroys it, like opening Schrödinger’s box. And you cannot simply decide to stop trying. The will to control doesn’t relinquish itself on command; we have no free will in the matter. Our human cognition engine runs whether we want it to or not.
The most we can do is recognize this, to see, as clearly and as currently as possible, that the forcing, the controlling, the insistence on certainty, is itself just another wave on the surface. That recognition doesn’t stop the process. But it does take some of the emotional steam out of it, and in that slight loosening, something shifts.
Not flow, exactly. It is subtler than that. What changes is the degree of trust one places in how things appear. Every moment of waking life becomes touched by an awareness of the fuzzy, indeterminate, constantly changing nature of reality. The biology stays the same. The organism is still doing what organisms do. But the deep certainty, the bedrock conviction that what you see is what is, begins to crack.
And that cracking is profound. If you can’t fully trust the surface, what does the mind do? Perhaps it becomes more curious. More flexible. Less committed to any single reading of what’s going on. The fracturing of certainty is not comfortable, but it is the most honest response to what reality actually is. And in the end, honesty offers the most comfort of all.
What the Bangkok Bus Left Behind
That, as best I can describe it, is what the Bangkok bus left behind, though describing it inevitably misses the point. What it actually left behind was more practical and unexpected. The insight into life and death as one gave me, over the decades that followed, a reflexive tendency to perceive both sides of every issue at once, to hold contradictions open rather than resolve them prematurely. It made me an unrelenting devil’s advocate, to a fault. Old age has tempered that social liability somewhat. But the underlying habit of mind, the reluctance to fully close Schrödinger’s box, has never quite left.
Note: Quantum superposition means a particle genuinely exists in all possible states until measured; quantum entanglement links particles so that measuring one instantly determines the other, regardless of distance. These are established physics. Whether they bear any direct relationship to consciousness remains open and contested. I only use them here as a model, not a mechanism. I am not claiming that superposition causes mystical experience, or that the brain operates as a quantum computer, or that entanglement applies directly to human consciousness. That question remains genuinely open.
Even so, if the quantum framing strikes you as a stretch even as a model, set it aside. The underlying claim stands on its own: ordinary perception works by collapsing possibility into fixed categories. The mind identifies, labels, and separates. Occasionally — through fatigue, through a brother’s death, through meditative absorption, or through circumstances as arbitrary as a bus ride — the labeling mechanism briefly stalls, and what presents itself is not two things but one undivided thing that merely appears as two from inside the categorical mind. That claim does not require quantum physics. It requires only honest attention to experience.
The quantum model earns its place here not because it proves the experience, but because it offers the first structural reason I have encountered for why such perception is possible at all, and why it is so rare. Whether a better model exists, I do not know. I offer this one as a pointer, with its limits stated plainly.