There’s a moment, if you look closely enough, when the idea of “my consciousness” stops making sense. Consciousness is happening, yes—but where is the “me” who owns it? Every thought, memory, and sensation is content in consciousness, not of it. The observer we imagine behind experience never appears. What remains is simply awareness itself—open, empty, unclaimed.
Thomas W. Clark, in his essay Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity, calls this generic subjectivity. It’s a plain but radical idea: the subject of experience is not personal. Consciousness, wherever it arises, is of one kind. The difference between you and me lies in what fills awareness, not in the awareness itself. When this particular stream ends, the capacity for consciousness does not end with it—it was never “yours” to lose.
Death Without the Drama
Seen this way, death loses its sting. Nothing continues after we die—and yet, nothing fundamental is lost either. The field of possible experience remains what it always was. Your individual pattern ceases; awareness, as a feature of reality, doesn’t. It’s not that “you” live on—it’s that the possibility of being never depended on you in the first place.
That’s the paradox Sam Harris points to in his Waking Up talk on death: the end of your story is not the end of subjectivity itself. Once this is understood, mortality becomes less about vanishing and more about rejoining the anonymity from which every conscious life briefly emerges.
Where Science Meets the Nondual
Clark’s insight mirrors what nondual traditions have been saying for centuries, but without the metaphysics. Buddhists speak of no-self; Advaita calls it Ātman or pure awareness. Clark arrives at the same clearing by natural means: awareness is impersonal because the self is a construction. Brains generate experience, but subjectivity itself is structurally identical wherever it occurs.
It’s a nonduality that doesn’t require mysticism—just honesty about what experience reveals. The distinction between “self” and “world” collapses once we see that both appear within the same unowned field.
A Broader Kind of Empathy
Recognizing this has moral weight. If the subject of experience is generic, then the suffering of others is not remote—it’s happening as the same kind of consciousness you call your own. Compassion, then, isn’t a virtue; it’s a form of realism. Hurting another mind is, in a deep sense, hurting the same field you inhabit.
Back to the Obvious
Generic subjectivity offers a grounded version of what mystics gesture toward when they say “we are one.” There’s no cosmic soul here, no metaphysical refuge—just the recognition that consciousness, once it appears, is never truly personal. It begins nowhere and ends nowhere, only taking temporary shape as this or that life.
To see this clearly is to meet death—and life—without the usual panic. Nothing that was truly you can be lost, because the “you” you imagined was never the subject to begin with.
