A nine-year old confronts the abyss

"My own most vivid encounter with nothingness occurred not while dividing up my kingdom or while contemplating the absence of three-dimensional space in quantum physics, but in a remarkable experience I had as a nine-year-old child. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was standing alone in a bedroom of my home in Memphis, Tennessee, gazing out the window at the empty street, listening to the faint sound of a train passing a great distance away, and suddenly I felt that I was looking at myself from outside my body. For a brief few moments, I had the sensation of seeing my entire life, and indeed the life of the entire planet, as a brief flicker in a vast chasm of time, with an infinite span of time before my existence and an infinite span of time afterward. My fleeting sensation included infinite space. Without body or mind, I was somehow floating in the gargantuan stretch of space, far beyond the solar system and even the galaxy, space that stretched on and on and on. I felt myself to be a tiny speck, insignificant. A speck in a huge universe that cared nothing about me or any living beings and their little dots of existence. A universe that simply was. And I felt that everything I had experienced in my young life, the joy and the sadness, and everything that I would later experience, meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. It was a realization both liberating and terrifying at once. Then the moment was over, and I was back in my body. The strange hallucination lasted only a minute or so. I have never experienced it since. Although nothingness would seem to exclude awareness along with everything else, awareness was part of that childhood experience, but not the usual awareness I would locate within the three pounds of gray matter in my head. It was a different kind of awareness. I am not religious, and I do not believe in the supernatural. I do not think for a minute that my mind actually left my body. But for a few moments I did experience a profound absence of the familiar surroundings and thoughts we create to anchor our lives. It was a kind of nothingness. Perhaps not Pascal’s nothingness, but a personally experienced nothingness."

"Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings" by Alan Lightman: https://a.co/h5kXmRg