Beyond the Narrative Self: The Ego as a Cognitive Tool

Unfamiliar Territory

Dual practice has taken me into unfamiliar territory, altering my perception of my body and, more importantly, of my identity.

The physical sensation commonly referred to as qi often appears as if a subtle substance were entering through specific points in the body, then flowing along channels, and eventually expanding until it fills the entire perceptual field. As this happens, the ordinary sense of bodily boundaries begins to dissolve. The distinction between inside and outside, near and far, becomes less clear. The experience resembles what I imagine the state of a disembodied consciousness might be like.

Yet the most striking effect is not the sensation itself, but the way it anchors attention. The flow is so absorbing that the usual stream of thought can come to a complete stop. When this happens, the structure we normally identify as “myself” begins to fade.

When the Narrative Self Falls Silent

The narrative self — the ongoing story constructed by the brain, closely associated with what neuroscience calls the default mode network — temporarily disappears. That narrative normally connects memories of the past with projections into the future, maintaining the sense of a continuous personal identity. When the process falls silent, what remains is simply awareness observing itself.

In that state, stripped of narrative and largely detached from bodily representation, consciousness appears strangely connected with everything else. The fundamental duality of self versus other begins to look less like an intrinsic feature of reality and more like a functional construct — a mechanism shaped by evolution to help the organism survive in a complex environment.

The Scientific Interpretation

From a rational and scientific perspective, the most straightforward explanation is that dual practice induces altered states of consciousness. In those states perception is reorganized in ways that feel profound but ultimately reflect nothing more than changes in neural dynamics. Seen this way, the experience would be comparable to the mental “journeys” produced by psychedelic substances: interesting, perhaps even meaningful, but essentially illusions generated by the brain.

Under that interpretation, such states are best confined to the context of practice. Taking them literally while interacting with the world could easily become maladaptive.

A Persistent Question

And yet, once I return to ordinary awareness, I cannot completely dismiss the possibility that something else might be involved.

One aspect in particular seems difficult to ignore: the distinction between the narrative self and the awareness that observes it. For most of my life I assumed that the narrative voice in my head was “me.” But closer inspection suggests otherwise. The observing awareness appears to remain constant while the narrative continually changes.

The Narrative Self as a Cognitive Tool

Curiously, recent developments in artificial intelligence offer an unexpected illustration of this distinction. It is now possible to construct systems that generate a convincing narrative self — systems that can pass variants of the Turing test and engage in complex conversation. They do so through layers of artificial neural networks that transform language and knowledge into high-dimensional vectors, processing those representations through billions of weighted connections to produce coherent responses.

From a functional perspective, the process is mechanical. It resembles, at least in broad terms, the way biological neural networks might produce the stream of thoughts that we experience as our inner narrative. If that analogy holds, the narrative self may be less like an essence and more like a tool — a highly sophisticated cognitive instrument that evolution has given us, much as it gave us hands or eyes.

Useful, even indispensable for navigating the world — but perhaps not identical with what we fundamentally are.

The Observer Behind the Story

What feels closer to an essence is the bare awareness that has been present throughout my life, silently observing events from within. When attention turns toward that awareness itself, it seems strangely unaffected by the passage of time. It appears prior to the stories that the mind constructs about the past and the future.

And when, in certain moments of practice, that awareness seems to merge with a wider field of experience — as if it were part of something larger — it becomes difficult not to wonder whether the experience might point to something real.

Perhaps it is only a temporary neurochemical state, a surge of endorphins and neurotransmitters reorganizing perception in unusual ways. That explanation is entirely plausible.

But it is also possible — just possible — that such states reveal a latent potential of consciousness, hinting at forms of experience that our ordinary cognitive framework rarely allows.

A Space for Speculation

At this point speculation inevitably begins. Or, stated more charitably, one starts forming tentative hypotheses.

After all, despite the extraordinary progress of science, our understanding of some fundamental aspects of reality remains limited. We still do not know what consciousness ultimately is. Our grasp of matter and time, although extraordinarily precise mathematically, does not yet explain their underlying nature.

An Uncomfortable Possibility

If we acknowledge that ignorance with some humility, then the possibility — long explored in mystical traditions across cultures — that consciousness might extend beyond the narrow framework of individual identity cannot be entirely ruled out.

I find myself inclined to consider that possibility, even if cautiously. Not the anthropomorphic God of institutional religion, modeled after earthly rulers, but something closer to what mystics have described in very different languages: the God of Teresa of Ávila, the Dao of Daoism, or the Brahman of Indian philosophy.

Accepting such a possibility would place me, somewhat reluctantly, among believers — a position that has never felt entirely comfortable to me. For most of my life I associated belief with intellectual laziness, with the human tendency to replace uncertainty with comforting narratives.

Perhaps the mind is rarely as consistent as it likes to imagine. Even someone deeply shaped by skepticism can find himself wishing that certain possibilities might be true. Recognizing the narrative self as a cognitive tool allowed me to hold my stories lightly, leaving space for the silent observer that remains when the story ends.