Members of the “in-crowd” who have lost their “self” in selfish landscapes, who cannot clearly differentiate themselves from the other denizens of their particular human niche, perhaps only feel their unique (or even “absolute?”) self the moment when the sun goes down or the weather changes or in a crisis – when they briefly see through or beyond the familiar landmarks and pathways to which they habitually cling. Perhaps most especially when they fall prey to someone else’s machinations.
In such moments when a familiar routine is suddenly, peculiarly, unfamiliar, it is like death – an experience we may only fear by instinct, yet which we ought to intuit as part of the cycle of life. In dying itself, the transition, the quintessential falling apart, may actually ignite strongly that sense of absolute self which we have lost. The habitual self disintegrates, and for a brief moment we may experience what Buddhists call emptiness, or non-duality — until we reconstruct some semblance of our usual, familiar self.
Alas, most of us (whether in the in-crowd or even those of us existing at the fringes), are none-the-less lost in our illusions; we miss the chance to capture glimpses of our absolute self throughout all our daily, even hourly deaths. We are fated to reintegrate or re-awaken in our same old selfish landscapes.
Unless we learn to see beyond our narrow landscapes, learn to consciously ritual, to be qualiadelic, we will continue to miss the qualia that reveals to us a broader “local consciousness” — a gift through which we can, at the last, approach death with an enlightened mind.