I’ll do my best to convey what I felt, though I proceed with some reluctance, for you may see my epiphany as the desperation of a condemned man. And while the notion is less clear to me than it was that day on the beach, it still offers comfort. Of course the idea remains plausible, but it’s as though the body wishes me to forget, the way it sweeps away dreams, leaving only crumbs.

What I experienced was the awareness of a deeper presence, like a soul⁠—but different in that it was not another self, but something beyond identity and outside of feeling, like an un-self that was not limited by physical or temporal boundaries, a fragment of some larger whole that was neither living nor dead. It simply was the way the universe is.

To put it another way, I understood with certainty that everything I was going through was actually happening to Max. And up until that moment on the sand I had identified solely as Max, believing everything he felt to be things I was feeling; everything he was afraid of, things that were actually frightening and not merely elements of our world beyond Max’s control.

Standing there, a lone figure in the rain, I was released from a kind of spiritual paralysis, and as a result, felt compassion for what Max was going through. He would need my help to get through this experience he had been told was “death.” I must forgive him for being afraid and help him understand that Max was really little more than one of Plato’s shadows, mistaken by all for the thing itself.

I knew that to permanently negate the incumbent, Max, was not sustainable. How could I convince Hadley that she was not really who she thought she was? That none of us are, and it’s this fierce attachment to a made-up self that causes us to suffer?

Alas, over the next day or so I became Max again, albeit with the knowledge that in times of anguish I could spiritually detach and (referring to myself in the third person) observe with benign indifference the pain endured by all living things to enable permanence.

13.

When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel⁠—but a presence beyond desire of any sort. Intense emotions that have held us prisoner all our lives suddenly lose power, are uncloaked as tricks of memory, exposed as tireless, groping sensations whose function is to keep us distracted by the body’s appetites until the body is no more.