This raises an interesting question: if you can remember someone else’s memories, who are you? For me, the feeling was one of relief. I could see THERE, there is where it started. And that memory was clearly part of me. His experience became the experience of my parent, and thus my own. We all live in long lines stretching across unfathomably large expanses of time. And yet all of that is still here, now. I exist the way I do because of a decision someone made a million years ago.
As I recall (and I recall mistakenly sometimes) Nietszche considered “the Asian religions” (in roughly that broad stroke, although I’m sure he would have known some Sanskritists and Sinologists) to be pessimistic because they viewed life as drudgery, and the task to escape it, to escape Samsara. Now, he was an atheist, so this life is all he got, so logically he HAD to make the best of it, which is how he came up with living the same life over and over and being OK with it. (One wonders: is he doing this in some otherworldly sphere now? It’s an interesting thought).
But if we drop the materialism, what we get is the possibility of experiential EXPANSION. When you lose your “self”, you are not shrinking. You are not dying. That is what your brain tells you, since its job is to differentiate things, to make sure you know this is this and that is that, and the two are not the same.
But experientially, in the same way perhaps you are overcome with emotions when going into a splendid and beautiful new room for the first time, or hearing music that just transports you somewhere else, growing into a larger self is a pleasurable, exciting process. You are not losing: you are gaining. You are becoming larger. Your perceptual power is increasing. Your flexibility of motion is increasing. The best positive emotions you have access to are being refined in quality and intensity.