It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

Haidt is pointing to a common feature of human consciousness: the sense of a bounded, narrating “self” is not constant. In certain states—deep absorption (“flow”), awe, collective ritual, meditation, intense love, or peak aesthetic experience—self-focused rumination can drop away and attention becomes fully taken up by the activity or the larger whole. The line also fits Haidt’s broader interest in how moral and spiritual experiences bind people into groups and can feel subjectively like transcendence. Read this way, the quote challenges the assumption that the self is a fixed entity, suggesting instead that it is a fluctuating construction that can temporarily dissolve under particular psychological conditions.