The Pain That Wasn't Mine
El dolor que no era mío
A reflection on how the boundaries of personal experience may not align with the boundaries of the body, and what this means for the notion of a private, separate self.
The Pain That Wasn't Mine
A reflection on how the boundaries of personal experience may not align with the boundaries of the body, and what this means for the notion of a private, separate self.
We talk about people as separate persons in the sense of body and mind: me, you. The thoughts I experience, the feelings I feel. But I have encountered a great deal of evidence that they are not always originating in this body-mind. In fact, they are sometimes originating in, or known by, a different body-mind.
A formative experience
I will give an example, because this is the one that really shook me. I was very much a scientific materialist from a very young age, deeply skeptical of anything religious or spiritual. I was around thirteen or fourteen years old and going through a lot of things, which, looking back, were related to this, whatever this is.
I was going to school one morning, having woken up feeling out of it and somewhat anguished, which was not unusual. I was wearing a hoodie pulled over my face. I was an introvert, unhappy, probably depressed. I would ride a train for two or three stations to get to school. In Buenos Aires, the trains would get incredibly packed during rush hour. People would actually push from the outside to compress more passengers onto the train, to a point where I could lift my feet off the ground and remain standing because I was so compressed between bodies. It was a wild experience.
A wave of unbearable pain
On one of these mornings, I started to feel a profound pain and anguish that I rarely felt so intensely. It was growing and growing, becoming overwhelming. At one point I became desperate and started asking myself, "What is this? What is this?" And I had this knowing. I do not remember if it was an actual voice, but it was simply a knowing: "It's not you. It's not yours." I was completely thrown off by that, and I ignored it. I hunched down and tried to be okay with it. I could not move. I could not get off the train. It was becoming truly unbearable, to the point where I felt I was going to pass out.
Seeing the source
In that moment, I asked again: if it is not me, who is it? I looked around, and three or four people away from me, I saw the face of a woman. There was this knowing: "It's her. This is hers. I am feeling her." And again, I was deeply in my own head, thinking these were completely crazy thoughts, dismissing them.
Five seconds later, she collapsed. The train was so packed that people had to press together to make some space. The train stopped. People got out, lifted her, and laid her on the platform floor. The doors closed. And the instant she collapsed, all the pain disappeared. The moment she went down, it all just went away. Then the train took off. I was completely stunned. It took me a long time to even process the idea that I could feel something originating beyond my own physical space.
No knowable origin
After that, I had similar experiences around thoughts, something like telepathy. So the evidence accumulated: anything I am feeling, experiencing, or thinking is not enough to determine its origin. There is no reliable sense of an origin that is separate and personal.
Today I would say that I know with certainty, though it is hard to describe in language, that there is no origin that is "I" of anything I experience. There is no origin point located in a self.
Nothing truly private
In that sense, there is nothing truly private. Perhaps the more useful way to say it is this: in contrast to the common belief that there are things that are private, that belief does not hold up. I would not frame it as a statement of absolute reality, because "nothing is private" can itself become another belief. But if there is a deeply held sense that something is truly private, that sense can be questioned. Nothing is truly private. You see, it is language that struggles here.