[driggs]

Pardon my inability to express accurately with words, but I most certainly did not experience oblivion. I am using the word "oblivion" to describe the state of absolutely no experience whatsoever. It was practically religious/mystical/psychedelic in that it truly felt that I had not existed at all during that time.

(And, no offense, I get the George Harrison reference, but saying that consciousness "is everything" begs the very question of evaluating panpsychism critically. I'm posting this because it is counter to my own longheld beliefs that consciousness is inherent to being.)

[acruns]

No offense taken. But isn't nothingness or no experience an experience? It seems you did experience something, that something might equate to nothingness or the void or oblivion but there was an experience? It sounds similar to "experiencing" a thought. It happens and we can all agree they do, but what is it to experience a thought? Can you smell, touch, feel a thought?

[driggs]

I didn't "experience nothingness"; I did not experience, full stop.

My consciousness did not exist. I had no awareness of the passage of time. There was no observer. No dreams. From my perspective, I teleported from a chair to another room, with an existential discontinuity in between. The only "experiencing" was after my consciousness was brought back online.

I cannot describe it to you sufficiently with words, and you likely cannot understand it sufficiently without ceasing to exist for yourself. Are the dead aware that they are dead? It seems, from my perspective, that for those 45 minutes, my consciousness was extinguished, not unlike that of someone fully dead.

(Not that I have first-hand experience being fully dead, of course! And, in a conversation about panpsychism, I suppose the experience of being a dead body isn't something to discredit as "nothing"!)

[_y5hn]

Separate the blank stage, from the actors and scenery. For something to fill and empty, you know there's a vessel. It is integral and unseparable. Feelings, thought, emotion, drama, will always change and are tools for seeking.