[sammalloy]

Agreed. This kind of ego dissolution starts to look like philosophical panspychism if you stare at it long enough, particularly when you read the reports of people identifying with non-human animals, plants, and yes, even rocks. At that point, there might be another mechanism at work. If life and mind are just emergent properties of organized and self-replicating matter, is it really crazy (or juvenile) to look back and reflect on everything around us and see it not as a discrete set of things, but as one continuous form? Maybe the problem isn't what we are experiencing, but how we think about it.