Observations placeholder
Michaux, Henri - Passages - The amoeba state
Identifier
004041
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The expansion of the self experienced by Michaux here is not unusual, but takes on different forms. In essence the person loses their body template.
A description of the experience
from Passages
The night leaves me cadaverous. The corpse has to be revived.
However I don't have the impression of being a dead body in the morning. If someone could see me at that time in accordance with my impressions, I would appear as a sea of clouds, a globulous sea of masses of flakes, a huge object that no doubt borders on the stratosphere.
Cloud though I may be, I am well aware that the state has its enemies, that I will soon have to become active again, definite, reduced in size... and that it would be wise to start moving in that direction. I get busy immediately. To manage that, to manage to reach the shape that I sense must be most favourable for me. I gropingly aim at becoming a shape with feet or legs or pseudopods.
With many legs, I hope to find the floor more rapidly, I seem to be dangerously far away from it. But I can't begin that way. The gaseous planet or the immediately gigantic chloroformed amoeba, that I have become, won't allow it yet.
Courage! In this mass a will remains.