I thought your "layer zero" analogy was an interesting avenue to reason about but you lost me with:

> My currently belief is that consciousness is some kind of field or property of the universe (i.e. a universal consciousness field) that "binds" to whatever information processing happens in our wet ware.

First, because it requires a huge leap into fundamental and universal physical mechanics for which there is currently zero objective evidence. Second, it's based entirely on individual interpretation of internal subjective experience. While some others (but not all) report similar interpretations or intuitions during some induced altered states, I think the much simpler explanation is that the internal 'sense of self' we normally experience is only one property of our mental processes and the sense of unbinding you temporarily experienced was a muting or disconnection of that component while keeping the rest of your 'internal experience machine' running.

In your layer analogy, our sense of self may be akin to an interpreter running as a meta-process downstream of our input parser. Thus what you subjectively experienced while that interpreter was disconnected can seem alien and even profound. Neuroscientists have traced where in the brain the subjective sense of self emerges, so it's plausible it's a trait which can be selectively suppressed. Additionally, it's been demonstrated experimentally that subjectively profound experiences of universal connectedness sometimes described as spiritual, religious or metaphysical can be induced in a variety of ways.