#PsychedelicExperiences #SpiritualAwakening #ConsciousnessExpansion
Have you ever heard of the term “ego death”? 🤔 It’s a concept that often pops up in discussions about psychedelic experiences and spiritual awakenings. But what exactly does it mean?
### Understanding Ego Death 🌌
Ego death is the loss of the sense of self or identity. It’s the surrender of the ego, the part of us that manages our thoughts, emotions, and desires. During ego death, individuals experience a profound shift in consciousness where they feel connected to something greater than themselves. This can lead to feelings of oneness with the universe or a sense of unity with all living beings.
### Real-Life Examples 🌿
Imagine you’re hiking in the mountains 🏞️ and you come across a beautiful waterfall. As you stand in awe of its power and beauty, you may feel a sense of ego death. In that moment, you are no longer separate from nature but a part of it, experiencing a deeper connection to the world around you.
### Embracing Vulnerability 🌱
Ego death allows us to let go of our preconceived ideas and beliefs, opening us up to new perspectives and possibilities. It can be a scary and uncomfortable experience, as it requires us to confront our fears and insecurities. However, by embracing vulnerability, we can cultivate a greater sense of empathy, compassion, and understanding for ourselves and others.
### Keywords to Know 🔍
If you’re interested in exploring ego death further, here are some keywords to keep in mind:
– Consciousness Expansion
– Psychedelic Therapy
– Mindfulness Practices
In conclusion, ego death is a profound concept that challenges our sense of self and invites us to expand our consciousness. It can be a transformative experience that leads to personal growth and spiritual awakening. So the next time you find yourself questioning the nature of reality, remember that ego death may just be a stepping stone on your journey towards greater self-awareness and connection.
Remember to embrace the unknown, let go of expectations, and trust in the process. Who knows what wonders await on the other side of ego death? 🌌
If by exactly you mean on a neurological level then no one knows. But generally ego death is a term that describes a subjective experience with some common qualities across examples. Qualities include a feeling of dying, a feeling of loosing the sense of self. The boundary between self and the outside world dissolves. This may induce a feeling of unity with everything, specifically everything alive, maybe because there are no individuals only life or consciousnesses in general. It may also induce a feeling of loneliness maybe because it is lonely to exist in a world without any individuals.
https://youtu.be/U3lWVLuc6CE?si=t6NpxQOUbcn2YX45 this guy took a drug while wearing an EEG helmet (or similar) and found relatively long term reduced activity in brain regions associated with the ego after ingestion.
i know they don’t mean it this way but if they had any sense, it could only mean being unconscious, but that’s not what they mean by it so it is a pretentious fake word that actually means nothing except for imagined things
Personal experience –
What makes you different from other people? You likes, dislikes, tastes, feelings. Essentially this “self” this “identity” dies.
It’s hard to put into words but you realize that those things are just experiences. When you have ego death all these things melt away.
It is a term used to describe the state of mind brought about by many psychedelic drugs and advanced forms of meditation. Your ego is the part of your psyche that tells you who you are. Your name, likes and dislikes, relationships, everything that makes you, you. These transformative states of mind can switch that off leaving only the rest of you to experience. You forget who you are. The typical feeling is that you are experiencing completely on a spiritual level.
Ego death, in terms of psychedelic drugs, happens when you take a large dose.
From a scientific perspective, it is a reduction of brain activity in the parts of the brain associated with your ego/self. But I think that’s not the explanation you are looking for.
From a personal perspective, ego death means temporarily losing your sense of self. You don’t necessarily forget who you are, but it becomes unimportant. Your normal thought patterns, biases, and things you couldn’t get off your mind before all seem to fade away. You think differently, as if you are a new person or a blank slate. You just observe things around you and feel free to make new conclusions. You might think of things you could never think of with your ego in the way.
For me, I learned to appreciate that everyone shares the same physical world, but we all have our own mental interpretation of it. And I can coexist and even be good friends with people who have a very different understanding of the world and how it works. I no longer need people to hold beliefs similar to mine in order to feel close to them. That’s one just example of something that ego death helped me learn.
You have five common senses that take in stimulus from outside your body. You have memories and the action of DNA that gets stored inside your body and passed on each generation.
Your ego is the captain of your mind that interprets those two elements to create your interpretation of reality. Because one’s genome and past experiences can vary between people, your ego’s interpretation of reality can differ from another individual’s reality or the collective reality. As a result of our world being limited by our five senses and being impacted by our past experiences, our interpretation of reality is flawed. For instance, we can look at a bird and because our eyes are limited in the spectrum we see, the color of the bird is not the same as what another bird would see. We can have a social exchange and another person may interpret the scenario completely differently.
The ego death is a first hand experience, not just reading , that provides knowledge of the limited nature of the human to grasp any truth about reality. This includes the concept of what a human may be at all — this process is often a spiritual awakening in the human experience. The loss of that reality constructing element of our mind can also lead to psychosis from the perspective of the collective consciousness.
I’ve had it when I accidentally consumed far more magic mushrooms that I should have because a friend of mine had cultivated and dried them perfectly and they were way too easy to eat. I ended up eating 6g of perfectly dried shrooms, which is 1g over Terence McKenna’s suggested ‘heroic dose’.
Started off feeling extremely weird. Could not hold a bottle of water properly to drink. Past trauma really rearer its head for a moment where I was certain and paranoid that there was something wrong with me. Everything was becoming blurred. Then I switched into being pretty sure that I had died, aa though I was sure I was experiencing the minutes after death in spirit form.
Then every physical sense just dissolved, and my ‘spirit’ went on this massive trip through what I assume was my life journey, in some form. I can’t actually articulate that experience entirely because it goes beyond words and I can’t actually remember the details to narrate it adequately. What I do remember is letting out the deepest, most guttural laughs I’ve ever had, which reverberated throughout the forest we were in and made my friends say ‘oh my god’, who hadn’t had quite as much as me. In retrospect, I’m now pretty sure those laughs were symptomatic of a healing process. The resentment I’d hung on to appeared incredibly silly in the face of what I was seeing, and so I learned that people are way more valuable than being right or holding grudges. Despite that I have cause to be angry at a lot of things, the things that came up in that trip were healed in that they just don’t carry any emotional weight anymore that is capable of bringing me down.
I’m quite sure that I’ve had an extent of clarity in my life since then that I’d only very rarely experienced before. I consider myself extremely lucky because I’m now very cognisant, empathetic but also strong and able to deal with things. I’m under 30 and, to be honest, often feel like I’ve magically attained the wisdom of somebody far older.
imagine your mind is like a big tree with lots of branches and leaves. Now, sometimes, people have a feeling called “ego death.” It’s like when a strong wind blows through the tree and all the leaves fall off.
During ego death, a person might feel like their thoughts, feelings, and even who they are as a person all disappear, just like the leaves falling off the tree. It can be a bit scary, but some people say it’s like hitting the reset button on how they see the world, helping them grow even stronger, just like the tree grows new leaves after the wind blows them away.
Our ego is the “engine” that processes our reality (constructs and meanings). The rules/beliefs of the engine are based on our historical experiences.
During ego death, you experience reality without the processing filter of the engine. E.g. things can feel absurd without the social constructs, experiences have new meaning or no meaning at all.
Everything superficial in my mind almost dissolved and I felt like I could see the truth more clearly. I felt free yet trapped in the confines of time and space. Things I used to care about seemed so irrelevant. I felt disconnected from my body for a long time and weirded out by the human experience. It just made me feel like there was something more and I couldn’t hide from it any longer. Everything on earth felt so temporary and almost silly/fake. It was a terrible experience but I would go through it again.
Imagine you’re playing a video game. In this game you’ve designed a character that looks a certain way and has certain traits. You’re the one playing this character. Now let’s say it’s a VR game and you’ve been playing this game and this character since many many years without ever taking a break, and you become so immersed in the game thinking you’re the character and you forget you’re the one playing the game. Ego death means that you remember that you’re the one playing the game, playing the character, and not just the character in the game.
Imagine you *love* pizza, and that loving pizza is a major part of your identity. You eat it every day. You love all the toppings; you recommend pizzerias to your friends, your favorite shirt has a picture of pizza on the front, and “Pizza is the BEST!” on the back, etc. Pizza is your life.
Now imagine you find yourself unexpectedly in a situation with strangers, maybe in a classroom at a new school, or at a business meeting in another city. Everybody is hungry, and has to decide what to order for lunch. A few people immediately, and aggressively, state they will *never* agree to pizza. In fact, they say, menacingly, they will literally hurt anyone who suggests it. One of them brandishes a knife. “I’ll stab anyone who says the word!” he claims–and he’s actually dead serious. Everyone else in the room agrees. Pizza-lovers are aholes, and should be killed.
Out of fear, you refrain, not just from enthusiastically suggesting pizza as you normally would, but from even conveying a hint that you like pizza even a little bit. You zip up your hoodie a little more, so no one can see the pepperoni slice on the front of your tee. You basically have to *pretend you are someone else* for the rest of the day. At first, you’re really confused and uncomfortable, resentful, scared, etc., but by the end of the day, you have adapted to the situation you’re in. You’ve effectively played a role, incentivized by self preservation.
Now consider that your pizza personality, or any personality in real life, is also just a role you play. Your identity, defined by your likes, dislikes, comfort, discomfort, strengths, weaknesses, just define the attributes of a character in play–like Shakespeare wrote (and Rush co-opted,) “all the world’s a stage, and we are merely players.”
Ego-death is what occurs when you unequivocally realize, and comprehend this fact–that your identity is just abstract and arbitrary–experience it in realtime, overcome the terror it invokes, and fully accept it.
One often emerges from that experience as more open-minded, tolerant, and creative, because the experience of living through it is incontrovertible and visceral, and the implications of it are that biases that define identities, and often lead to conflict, do not implicitly imbue superiority, i.e., no idea or identity is inherently better or worse than any other. Those values are imposed by ego.
I experienced this once on an irresponsibility large dose of LSD about 20 years ago. I was convinced I had overdosed and died. It’s still the most profound experience of my life (*or at least, one of the top two*). This has been the most accurate and succinct definition of the whole thing I have ran across:
Source here: https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Memory_suppression
> ***Memory suppression*** (also known as ego suppression, ego dissolution, ego loss or *ego death*) is defined as an inhibition of a person’s ability to maintain a functional short and long-term memory.[1][2][3] This occurs in a manner that is directly proportional to the dosage consumed, and often begins with the degradation of one’s short-term memory.
> Memory suppression is a process which may be broken down into the 4 basic levels described below:
[ ***We are interested in level 4, the highest level of memory loss*** ]
> **4. Complete long-term memory suppression** – At the highest level, this effect is the complete and persistent failure of both a person’s long and short-term memory. It can be described as the experience of becoming completely incapable of remembering even the most basic fundamental concepts stored within the person’s long-term memory. *This includes everything from their name, hometown, past memories, the awareness of being on drugs, what drugs even are, what human beings are, what life is, that time exists, what anything is, or that anything exists.*
> Memory suppression of this level blocks all mental associations, attached meaning, acquired preferences, and value judgements one may have towards the external world. Sufficiently intense memory loss is also associated with *the loss of a sense of self*, in which one is no longer aware of their own existence. In this state, the user is unable to recall all learned conceptual knowledge about themselves and the external world, and *no longer experiences the sensation of being a separate observer in an external world.*
> Complete memory suppression can result in the profound experience that *despite remaining fully conscious, there is no longer an “I” experiencing one’s sensory input*; there is just the sensory input as it is and by itself. Although ego death does not necessarily shut down awareness of all mental processes, it does remove the feeling of being the thinker or cause of one’s mental processes. *It often results in the feeling of processing concepts from a neutral perspective completely untainted by past memories, prior experiences, contexts, and biases.*
It’s a state of being where your personal identity dissolves and merges with the universal existence.
There are no barriers or separations between the world and the mind.
And naturally, no pain or pleasure(mental-emotional). As those two revolve around the gain and loss of a personal image associated with the self(experiencer), once that personal identity goes away, then there’s no registering of a gain or loss.
This leads to a state of bliss which is constant. Constant doesn’t mean monotonous. It means consistent of a quality as its base with various forms on the surface.
One may be blissful yet still.
One may be blissful yet dancing passionately.
Meditation intends to develop the mind enough to detach from the persona and reach this state.
It is sometimes called enlightenment but I firmly believe it’s not.
There’s work and then more work.
Nothing such as coasting.
It’s a personal, achievable state.
Right now you are something separate from the world, reading this text and deciding how to interact with it. It’s likely, if you think about that your body is “special” to you. You feel deeply connected to your arm in a way you do it, to say a random chair. You divide the world into subject and object, and you privilege the subject.
In ego death, there is awareness but no subject, and no sense of distinction. I tend to feel like the world experiencing itself. I feel as connected to a chair as to my arm – that same sort of sense deep connection and concern I feel for my own body, except it encompasses everything as a connected whole, not as something outside myself.
I imagine it’s all some weird neurological trick, but it’s one of my favorite things about psychedelics.
I’ve heard, and experienced, that some people experience no ego death by virtue of just already understanding we are one person in a sea of people, responsible for how our actions and words affect others, and responsible for advocating for ourselves and those that need help.
For a few years I couldn’t figure out what the hell the guys I was talking to were talking about when they talked about Ego death until one of the girls took me aside and explained it basically made them realize the world is more than just their perception… It’s like the solipsism cure
On the other end of the spectrum, after my ex experienced ego death he was confident that reality wasn’t real and that everything was meaningless. He became a very different person after ego death, but not for the positive.
One thing I noticed is that people tend to be obsessed with eradicating the ego but disregard the root cause behind it.
There’s a thing in the mind that acts like a Google search engine. It provides information in such a way that doesn’t require complex thinking. This is where blind assumptions, predujices and ego come from.
So what happens when you temporarily disable that search engine? You’ll return to a deep sense of wonder and curiosity about the world.
Have you ever noticed that children in their “why” phase have no ego whatsoever? They’re soaking up information without assumptions and predujices.
It’s said you can trip, see the Big Picture, then become a part of that without having your ego heavily influence you any more. A lot of people say a lot of things in this life. The myth is that a person can take psychedelics and be cured of psychiatric disorders. It’s proven to be about as effective as the lobotomy. It’s pseudoscience. The hope is that you gain 10 years of therapy in 10 hours. The reality is that you have your trip, go to sleep, then life returns to normal the next day.
All these scientific explanations are well and good, but from a POV explanations an ego death basically makes you 10x more annoying than you previously were for however long the psychedelic lasts.
Ego death is the sacrifice of personhood for a religion, ideology, or other cause. It’s suicide of the mind but not the body. The religion, ideology, or otherwise takes control of the thoughts, attitudes, and behavior.
Not recommended, unless you’re trying to build an army of mindless zombie bots. Even then, still not recommended.
In the simplest terms, it means to experience the world through a perception not limited to notions of the “self.”
With slightly more explanation, you experience the universe as a part of *it* rather than as a separate and distinct entity.
An ego death to me is the realisations that you mean absolutely nothing to the world more than anyone or anything. We’re simply here to procreate and enjoy the passage of time. No deep meanings. No philosophy just life and time.
When I experienced ego death, it felt more like a dissociation with my idea of ‘self’. I was looking inward from a third-person perspective and my personal failure, success, pain, happiness etc., didn’t matter to that third person. My being felt like an insignificant speck in this vast ocean of life but somehow being that speck meant a lot to the self. The ‘self’ was trying to protect this precious thing called ‘life experiences’ and the third-person me understood and empathized with the ‘self’. Just like everyone else.
I came out of the experience with being more softer on my self and naturally felt kinder towards others.
PS – ego death can be easily experienced by a constant practice of meditation. Just give it time and patience.
I took 2 tabs of acid alone on my bedroom. I forgot my name, what I look like, everything that has ever happened in my life. It feels like you become a piece of furniture, no past, no present, no future, you just are everything and nothing all at once. It’s very difficult to put into words
Ego death is incredible. Normally when you think of another person, you see them as just that. A different person. But in ego death, you see them less as a totally different person, and more like a different facet of the same gem. And the same applies to yourself. The boundaries between yourself and others erode away. For me, it’s an incredible sense of unity. I cried over a game of League of Legends game because it was so beautiful that me and nine other people could share this moment together.
Ego death helps you recognize that we aren’t just the leaves falling off of branches. We are also the tree.
Your ego dies, pretty self explanatory. Do you know what ego is?
I had an ego death overdosing on xanax, it wasn’t a psychedelic trip but it was the first time I was under the influence of something, waking up in the hospital knowing if my mother never found me id be dead completely changed my character in a 180.
I am that I am . The true reality (a truth/fact) we often describe ourselves using names, professions , achievement and gradually we build our sense of self around it.
But the truth is you are none of these things. When you start to meditate by watching your thoughts …you’ll slowly experience the I am.
Plenty of great and scientific answers here, my personal experience was with two tabs of LSD and too much weed. The LSD just kept getting stronger and stronger and eventually I became worked up and convinced I was dying. I pretty much accepted my fate. Then it was like I blacked out for a short time and awoke anew, not necessarily for the better.
I had zero concept of time, I was repeatedly asking my friend the time and checking my phone but the numbers meant nothing to me. I forgot who I was, what my name was, who my friend was and where I was. I was only 16 at the time and it pretty much shattered my reality and concept of what the human brain was capable of. The me that I was simply ceased to exist. I was instead a nameless entity, almost like a baby in the sense that nothing made any sense to me and everything seemed new.
We spent the rest of the night watching concert films, trying to piece together what happened and what was going on. It was a formative teenage experience lol
It is the stripping away of .the shields and defences that you have constructed in your mind to enable you to function in society.
For example avoidance,altruism, passive aggression , humour,dissociation , projection, denial and rationalisation are tools that the Ego uses to protect you. Ego death in Psychedelics is simply letting go of these and resetting your mind. With DMT, it can be letting go of your fear of death, as it can be similar to a Near Death Experience.
Afterwards, your mind is calm, and free from the anxieties and neuroses that inhabit it. For a while,at least
It’s like when you stop seeing yourself as you and more like a character you control.
Before ego death, we do what feels good now, rather than what’s best for us in the long run. We eat candy and drink soda. We spend money on things we don’t need.
But if we see ourselves from some outside perspective, we often do what’s best for “you” to win. We exercise to raise our str stat and study to raise int. We talk to everyone and make allies.
We prioritize success in a completely different way, as if our true self were not the flesh and bones, but some outside mind.
Kind of like controlling a video game character. Are you the character, or the person controlling the character? Ego death is changing from being the former to the being the latter.