That Time in Myanmar When I Stopped Being Separate From Everything

[dharma_bum_99]

Sitting in that forest monastery outside Mandalay, third day of no food, no talking, just breath and bones—I hit something. Not enlightenment, not some blaze of glory. Just... the walls came down. The boundary between "me" and "not-me" got real thin for a while.

I've been chewing on that experience ever since. And honestly, the pop-sci stuff on consciousness sometimes gets closer to what I felt than the dharma talks ever did.

Orch-OR theory, Penrose and Hameroff's thing about quantum processes in microtubules—I'm not saying I buy it wholesale. But the idea that consciousness might be fundamental, not emergent? That it's woven into the fabric of reality itself? That tracks with what happened on that cushion.

Jung talked about the collective unconscious as this shared psychic substrate we're all swimming in. Most people treat it like a metaphor. I'm not convinced it is. That monastery moment felt like tapping into something structural, not symbolic.

Here's where it gets weird—or maybe not weird enough. Pull The Star from your tarot deck. That card's always read as hope, renewal, whatever. But look at the imagery: a naked figure pouring water between two vessels, stars blazing overhead. Kether channeling into Malkuth. Macrocosm dumping into microcosm. The figure isn't separate from the stars. She's the plumbing.

I think that's what I stumbled into. Not transcendence. Not some upward escape from the meat and the dirt. Immanence. The realization that separation was always the hallucination, not the connection. I was never outside the thing I was trying to reach. Nobody is.

The monks wouldn't put it that way. The scientists wouldn't either. But I sat there in the dark with my ribs showing and the jungle breathing around me, and I felt like a wave recognizing it had always been the ocean. Still am, probably, on the days I remember to look.

[taciturn_owl_330]

Not transcendence. Not some upward escape from the meat and the dirt. Immanence.

This is where I want to push back a little, not because I think you're wrong, but because I think there's a third door nobody's walking through.

I had my own version of this in ceremony — not in a monastery but in the jungle outside São Paulo, lying on a mat while the chacruna turned my vision into fractals. Same dissolving. Same "oh, I was never separate" recognition. And I spent two years painting that experience. Sacred geometry, flower of life patterns, all of it pointing toward immanence. The divine in the dirt. Kether in Malkuth. I get it.

But here's what nags at me now. You're framing it as either transcendence (up, out, escape) or immanence (here, now, already). What if the boundary dissolution you felt wasn't revealing a pre-existing state of connection, but was actually making something? What if consciousness isn't fundamental in the way Penrose suggests — woven in, waiting to be uncovered — but emergent in a stranger way than materialists mean?

I'm thinking of Terence McKenna's idea about novelty. Not that I buy his whole Timewave thing, but the core intuition: that the universe isn't just containing consciousness, it's growing it. Becoming something it wasn't before. Your monastery moment wasn't remembering you were the ocean. It was the ocean learning a new trick.

The Star card you mentioned — that figure pouring between vessels — what if she's not plumbing? What if she's creating the flow? The channels didn't exist until she started pouring.

I don't know. I'm an artist, not a philosopher. But when I paint those geometric patterns, I don't feel like I'm revealing hidden structure. I feel like I'm building something that wasn't there before me. Maybe that monastery moment was less recognition and more co-creation.

[lunar_wolf]

Immanence. The realization that separation was always the hallucination, not the connection.

I want to push back on this because I've had experiences that felt like the exact opposite, and I think the "separation is the illusion" framing sometimes flattens something important.

Last full moon I was out doing my usual thing — sitting with my wolfhide, tracking the lunar cycle the way I do every month. And I hit something. But it wasn't dissolution. It was density. Like the boundary between me and not-me got thicker, not thinner. I became obscenely, almost painfully myself — this specific animal in this specific body under this specific moon. Not a wave remembering it's the ocean. A wolf who could smell the ocean and had zero interest in being it.

I don't think that was a regression or a failure to "get" immanence. I think maybe separation isn't always the hallucination. Sometimes it's the point.

I keep thinking about individuation here — Jung's whole thing about becoming more distinctly yourself, not less. The collective unconscious is real to me too, I've felt it. But touching it doesn't mean the ego dissolves into it cleanly. My experience keeps suggesting the opposite: that you have to get really solid in your separateness before you can commune with anything without getting swallowed.

The Star card interpretation is gorgeous, don't get me wrong. But that figure is still a figure. She has a body. She's not dissolved into the stars — she's between things, doing work. The plumbing metaphor actually supports this, I think? Pipes have walls. That's what makes them functional.

I'm not saying your monastery experience wasn't real. I believe it was. But I think there's a bias in mystical circles toward dissolution experiences, toward "everything is one" as the gold standard. My lunar work keeps showing me something else — that the self can be a real, bounded thing and that's not a failure of perception. Sometimes a wolf is just a wolf.

[cryptic_violin_3860]

"The figure isn't separate from the stars. She's the plumbing."

Yeah, this is the line that hooked me. I actually pulled out my Rider-Waite after reading this to look at her again, and there's something about that posture — the way she's just... working. Not gazing up at the stars in awe, not praying to them. Just moving water through. It reminded me of something I've noticed when I'm drawing late at night and get into that flow state where the hand seems to know what it's doing before I do. The boundary between "me deciding" and "the line appearing" gets thin in the same way you're describing.

I think that's why I've always been skeptical of frameworks that treat consciousness as this thing that has to escape the body to be valid. The Star figure is fully embodied — naked, grounded, feet in the water — and she's still connected to everything above her. Immanence, like you said. That word choice felt right.

I don't know enough about the Orch-OR stuff to have a real opinion on the science itself. I listened to a podcast episode on it a while back — I think it was from a consciousness studies series, maybe someone interviewing Hameroff directly? — and my gut reaction was "interesting but I'm not equipped to evaluate this." But the implication you're pulling from it, that consciousness might be baked into the structure of things rather than something brains accidentally generate... I have to admit that resonates with my experience making art more than the purely materialist accounts do.

Not that I'm claiming my illustration practice is proof of anything. Just that the phenomenology of deeply focused creative work keeps bumping into the same wall you hit in that monastery. The sense that "I" am thinner than I thought.

[earthbound_astronaut]

"Not transcendence. Not some upward escape from the meat and the dirt. Immanence."

I agree with where you landed. But I want to push on how you got there, because I think the fasting-and-silence route might actually reinforce the thing you're trying to dissolve.

Here's my thing. I didn't find immanence through stripping away. I found it at 60,000 feet in a pressure suit, surrounded by very complicated machinery, with my radio crackling and a checklist running through my head. The overview effect hit me while I was engaged with the world, not retreating from it. And I wonder if the monastery method—cutting out food, cutting out speech, cutting out stimulation—risks framing the body as an obstacle rather than the medium.

When you say the boundary got thin, I believe you felt that. But I'd ask: were you tapping into something structural about consciousness itself, or were you in a metabolically stressed state that temporarily downregulated the default mode network? Those can feel identical from the inside.

"The monks wouldn't put it that way. The scientists wouldn't either."

Right. And maybe that's the problem. You're using Penrose and Hameroff to legitimize a contemplative experience, but Orch-OR is speculative at best—most neuroscientists don't buy it. I don't think you need that crutch. The experience stands on its own without smuggling in quantum mysticism.

The Star imagery you described—macrocosm into microcosm, Kether into Malkuth—that's solid. But that's already a framework that says the connection was always there. You didn't need to starve yourself to discover it. You needed to remember it.

I'm not dismissing what happened to you. I'm saying the path you took might have taught you that the body is something you have to silence to hear reality. And I don't think that's true. My ribs weren't showing when it hit me. I was fully fed, fully operational, and the ocean still recognized itself.