Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

meditation could suggest something more.

There also seems to be a connection of the mountaintop experience with a near-death experience, a loss of ego and a belief in ‘enlightenment’. Perhaps it is just an odd anomaly that tells us nothing about reality. Perhaps, again, it shows nothing more except that we are capable of different brain states. For the atheist, the mountaintop experience is a demonstration of — at least — what the human mind is capable of conceiving and the tranquillity it can achieve. We could say it is more of a dive into the deep recesses of the human consciousness. For others it is a glimpse of what the universe is really all about, perhaps even a glimpse of Heaven. Near-death experiences and the idea of enlightenment certainly suggest this profound interpretation of what the mountaintop may be showing us.

One contender for the mountaintop is simply called ‘flow’. Flow is the name given by psychologists to that state where a person is totally engaged in an activity such that they lose all of their self-consciousness and the ego is temporarily by-passed. (The original book on flow — just called Flow — is by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.) Flow can be experienced in many situations. It is generally a happy state and sometimes referred to as ‘being in the moment’. So it has something of a similar characteristic to the mountaintop as it takes us towards a sense of being outside of time.

Whatever the source of such experiences, I think it’s worth considering them as a glimpse of important knowledge. The mountaintop

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