Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's what people are scared about.
Maybe consciousness has to manifest physically, in which case when you die, your consciousness sort of ends and that's a bad thing, right?
What's really ending there is not...
your biological makeup it's not the fact that your your leg and your arm start disintegrating it's the fact that your experience your unified sense of self has come to an end and one slightly naive approach this might be to say that like i'm not convinced that the self exists not just because of the sort of weird esoteric you know indian philosophy and stuff but also because of the split brain stuff
I think all of this kind of stuff points to the idea that the idea of the self, as we commonly understand it, is a bit of an illusion.
And it is interesting to me that this is the same kind of truth that is discovered by ancient authors of the Upanishads and like
a modern teenager who's never read a word of Sanskrit who takes LSD.
And they sort of have these similar... I think that might have something to do with the usage of psychedelics in the formulation of the Vedas.
That's a whole other subject.
With soma, you know, the mysterious substance that brings all of these profound spiritual truths that are uncannily similar to the profound spiritual truths that people find today when they take psychedelic drugs.
But one of the foundational things that people discover in this regard is that the self is an illusion.
The self does not exist.
Even Sam Harris, the new atheist, doesn't believe in the self.
And so if death is not just about biological function, it's the cessation of the self, there's something about the fact that I don't think the self exists even now that gives me some consolation.
If the fear is what happens when the self comes to an end, the self never came to a beginning.
So I don't even know how to answer that question.
But I don't say that.
That's not going to help people.
I was asked about this recently at one of these schools I was talking about as well.
This kid sort of asked me, and I can always tell sometimes when people ask certain questions, they mean different things.
Showing 1101–1120 of 2,073 · page 56 of 104
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