Conscious awareness can outlast the ego, yielding calm relief

Evidence

The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing. And yet something had succeeded it: this bare, disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the scene of the self’s dissolution with benign indifference. I was present to reality but as something other than my usual self. And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, and that was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 480

Categorization

• XREF: The line ‘there was life after the death of the ego’ is the phenomenological counter-evidence Odell marshals against the bounded-self fallacy — useful for the reader’s defense of ‘manifest dismantling.’