Is not a union of two people, a partnership, something that can easily be perceived as greater than oneself? A person married with children can and often does consider the family as a whole to be more important than herself. Even one engaged in a loving relationship with another may come to express sentiments that reveal a sense of self-transcendence; it’s easy to recall at least one time in which a character in a romantic film gushingly stated, “My life would be meaningless without you,” to his or her lover. What about the quintessential loner, the intellectual type who is stimulated more by the ideas of poets and philosophers than the daily comings and goings of the people around him? He too experiences a sense of belonging to something greater, which includes not only the ideas but also the great thinkers who put them forth, as well as all of the people who have come to appreciate them.
Even if we have great difficulty in identifying with anyone in our midst, we can always imagine an ideal person to identify with and engage with while frequenting the coffee shops and bedrooms of our mind. Even the most cynical desire to connect with others. The individual human being’s mind, being an open system, is a product of and always remains connected to a global network of human minds. This global mind stretches not just across the planet, but across the whole timeline of biological history.
Scanning the spectrum of human experience usually results in a bombardment of noise, but when we engage in fine-tuning, rotating the dials in increasingly smaller increments, we come to detect coherent signals. We listen more carefully, and sometimes we lose ourselves.
And, when it becomes too much, we turn down the volume and come back to individuality.
