In Buddhism you are trained to lose the self. Does anyone have an actual experience of this that can relate? Is it a positive or negative thing?

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Loss of the self is an experience you can have that illustrates a basic fact about the world. The training is intended to prepare the mind for the experience. The actual experience involves a sudden distancing of you from, well, yourself. You see yourself as another person might see a running computer program. There are other ways to have this experience, and in fact you need to experience a lot of different loss-of-self events in order to gain a full picture of just what it is you don’t actually have.

When I was younger, I read a lot of David Hawkins. At the time I had this experience, I was specifically reading about the higher states, one of them is called The Void. When consciousness is in this state, you have a literal experience of no-mind.

A friend of mine had come into town, he had some reason to drive up. I had been conversing with him for around a year, he was a fellow spiritual adventurer. One of our meetings was at a coffee shop. As we sat on the deck, I suddenly dropped into The Void, the strongest and most clear experience of the Void as I’ve ever had.

I literally could not finish sentences. He would say something, and I would think of something to say in response, and the sentence would die in my mouth. Awareness was present, and after a few minutes I regained some ability to think and process, but for the duration of the interaction I had with him, I was unable to do much communication.

I’d had just enough brain energy to look and see things, but not enough to have an actual conversation about anything significant. We ended up having to cut the session short. The Void left me soon after and the next day we were able to have a lively conversation about what had happened.

It’s not something you want happening all the time.