Identity alteration: Difference between revisions

The experience itself is often described as a loss of perceived boundaries between a person’s identity and the entirety of their sensory input or their currently perceivable external environment. It creates the sensation that a person has “become one with their surroundings.” This is felt to be the result of a person’s central sense of self becoming attributed to not just the internal narrative of the ego, but in equal measure to the body itself and everything around it with which it is physically connected to through the senses. Once this sensation is in place, it creates the undeniable perspective that one is the external environment experiencing itself through the specific point within it that this body’s physical sensory perception happens to currently reside in.

It is at this point that a key component of the high-level identity alteration experience becomes an extremely noticeable factor. Once a person's sense of self has become attributed to the entirety of their surroundings, this new perspective completely changes how it feels to physically interact with what was previously felt to be an external environment. For example, when one is not in this state and are interacting with a physical object, it typically feels as though they are a central agent organizing the separate world around themselves.  

However, whilst undergoing a state of unity with the currently perceivable environment, interacting with an external object consistently feels as if the system as a whole is autonomously organizing itself and that one is no longer a central agent operating the process of interaction. Instead, the process suddenly feels as if it has become completely decentralized and mutual across itself as the environment begins to autonomously, and harmoniously respond to itself to perform the predetermined function of the particular interaction.