What is Ego-death ???

[GOD]

I often hear and read about people talking about ego death . Please give your definition of ego death . What is it ? What do you experience ? What do the words ego death mean to you ?

 

[Forkbender]

I'll have an attempt:

Ego death is the moment you notice that you are not the programs you usually run in everyday life, that you as awareness are somehow separate from the habits and character you normally expose.

 

[st.bot.32]

Geez. I guess the whole thing comes from Timothy Leary and his book of the dead, right? I'm certain someone can provide a more concrete example, but the experiences I guess I would think of as maybe ego death would be just really intense trips where you practically forget who you are, and become on the receiving end of whatever is happening in the trip:

on an acid trip as i came close to peaking, i fell into this mental spiral, loop where words, nouns, verbs, evaporated, i could no longer think in terms of language and ended up laying down, and became basically just a sensor.. all my senses and thought processes fused into a single band of information which took the form of these crazy organic visuals, outside of which there was nothing else.

on a hash trip i felt and saw this inner self... a presence of consciousness that merely existed, sensed.. but surrounding it in a shell was this sort of crystalline lattuce of fragments that had built up around the self. Personality and ego could be seen as structures or lattuces that accumulate from experience over time and can be shattered, rearranged, etc.. its crazy actually a few of my trips on hash/cannabis have turned into these quests to figure out what consciousness is, where sensory information, where thought processes accumulate and at some point become awareness.

i'm not saying these experiences were profoundly useful in my life but definitely they felt akin to some kind of religious experience.. i'm not even assuming they are "ego death" just using the term because as vague as it is i think that explains it the closest.

 

[Caduceus Mercurius]

When the sense of autonomy ceases and one becomes aware of the overarching higher principle that factually creates and controls everything, including one's thoughts, the ego has died. In psychedelic trance ego-death is not dark and painful, as one would expect of a death, but colourful and ecstatic.

I remember a couple of times when the term ego-death made me anxious during the onset of my trip, because it created an image in my mind of a discomfortable transition. But when it happens, it's invariably a comfortable experience, a complete letting go.

 

[magickmumu]

enlightenment freedom

 

[spice]

It is the realization that the world doesn't revolve around you.....the realization that, really, there IS no you, just a string of programs, connected by impulses.

This kicks most peoples ass pretty severely, the more bloated the ego, the woese the pummeling....ego death is painful, because it shatters the fantasy that everyone works so hard to build with words and actions.

 

[Meduzz]

ego death is painful, because it shatters the fantasy that everyone works so hard to build with words and actions.

including pain

*having my first mescaline experience*
Low dose and already such beauty :shock: :shock:

 

[spice]

absolutely, but the pain doesn't leave untiil you acknowledge it, and assimilate it.....not everyone is able to stick with it till they get to that level...letting the pain die is pretty advanced psychonautic navigating.

 

[Meduzz]

Spice, there is no need to be defensive... I was just trying to sound wise :wink:

Sorry guys!!


PS: I LOVE YOU ALL!

 

[spice]

Sorry Meduzz, I wasn't intending for that to sound defensive.

I just meant that getting past the pain isn't a given, but a gift.

( You did sound wise, that's what I meant when I said what I said )


Sorry my style is so abrasive......

 

[Rymmen]

When your awareness is seperated from your identity.

 

[Meduzz]

( You did sound wise, that's what I meant when I said what I said )

Yes but re-reading I regret typing it because it's misinformation...
It may sound like the route to ego-death is simple and pure bliss, which it's not.

On topic:
If a hard disk drive would contain only ones and no zeros, does it experience ego death?

 

[Guest]

It can be heaven, it can be hell.
What Spice refers to (shattering of your being you have worked so hard for to create) can be freakingly scary.
Actually thinking of having the experience of dying and letting go of the social/cultural things that were taught is not an easy process when you're clinching on to the physical and metal while being slinged into the experience of the soul or being small as a grain of sand and as big as the ever expanding universe at the same time, fully lucid in the magnificence of infinity.

Great topic guys, maybe a good sticky?

 

[No-Key]

Ego death is where your identity breaks down at the conceptual level.
You realize how words like "I" "you" and "me" are really only accurate to their specificity about your physical being (which is transient), and make no true statement about any fixed or intransient "human essence" which you have up to this point connected at a fundamental root of your personal reality.

The result is you become decentered.
The ordinary distinctions which keep you separate from the universe break down,
heaven opens up,
and then, on what we cannot speak,
we must pass over in silence.

 

[Forkbender]

I agree with pretty much everything that has been said.

@GOD: why the question? Just interest? Or have you got some trick up your sleeve?

 

[Caduceus Mercurius]

Ego-death is never painful. It's characterized by the complete absence of pain, and accompanied by intense feelings of ecstacy. Psychotherapy or psychoanalysis may be painful, criticism and ridicule may be painful, but ego-death, or rather ego-dissolvement, through the use of egolithic agents is never painful. Ego-death is something to look forward to, not to fear.

 

[Guest]

ego death is the complete circle. the full absense of the senses, of thinking, of time, of space, of living and of dying. to reach it, one must take a high enough dosage and belive me that you WILL let go in a certain point. you will have no other choice besides going nuts, if you are unexperienced.
human vocabulary was not meant to explain these experiences, so every attempt we make will sound short, perhaps redundant.
i don't think that at low dosages one can reach it. that kind of ego death one can reach with meditation. true, mind-blowing ego-death is only found at very high dosages, and it still won't happen everytime, it depends -suprise- on the set and setting.

 

[Thinker]

Good thread! I think this sums it up quite well:

...total annihilation on all imaginable levels - physical destruction, emotional disaster, intellectual and philosophical defeat, ultimate moral faulure, and absolute damnation of transcendental proportions. This experience of ego death seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of the individual.

-Stan Grof

Also I read a very good description/trip report of someone handling ego death on on shroomery.com:

----------------------------------------------
EXPLORERS in the FURTHER REGIONS of EXPERIENCE
----------------------------------------------



Where to begin? Where to start telling the tale of the night my Old Self died, died on my living-room couch? That fateful night had been long in the coming so let me briefly flash back a few years before telling the tale of last Friday, when I died and was born again on approximately 150 micrograms of LSD.

I?ve been a Psychedelic explorer for 11 years now and my first true voyage started in 1993 with 1.2 grams of Liberty Caps. (Psilocybe semilanceata) I have tripped approximately 100 times on mostly Psilocybin and LSD, using LSD only about once in every eight full-blown trips. As my experience grew the trips got evermore intense and difficult/bad trips started happening and naturally they intensified too.

In my view the so-called ?bad trips?, Hellish as they may be, are a sign you are experiencing life itself in it?s fullness, that you do not flee suffering but rather confront it.

But a few years ago a peculiar thing started happening every once in so many trips: I felt a Presence, demon or angel I could not tell, that asked me if I wanted to follow it. And I always have known that if I were to follow, there would be no turning back, that I would experience the greatest horrors imaginable. And so I declined, time and time again, not ready to go Beyond.

Last Friday night no such luxury as Choice was offered to me. LSD took me far beyond that boundary and made me face the greatest Hells imaginable, only to discover that the Gate of Heaven sometimes is to be found at the Center of Hell.

One of my Spiritual brothers and me got together for a weekend-long Session. The plan was to take a small dose of LSD on Friday night and then take a larger dose on Saturday afternoon. We had blotters that had tested to be 50 micrograms and microdots that had tested to be around 200 micrograms of Lysergide.

But it was not to be.

Blotter sheets, shortly after they are laid, are often hung out to dry. This can have the effect that the lower rim of the sheet through gravity accumulates more Lysergide solution and ends up having been laid with far more LSD than the rest of the sheet. These blotters are called ?sheet ends? and it happened to be so that on the night that we were to try a 50 microgram blotter they turned out to be well over 150 micrograms, a dose roughly comparable to 3.5gr (1/8 ounce) of dried Liberty Caps mushrooms, or 5 grams of regular Cubies (Psilocybe cubensis) as they are usually sold.

-----

After having picked up our weekend groceries, dined and waited 3 hours for our stomachs to empty, we both took our Lysergic blotter, a quarter-inch square of colorfully printed paper, and placed it under our tongues to absorb the LSD through the mucous membranes of our mouth.
This provides a rapid ascent and greater dose efficiency.
And a greater dose it was, exceeding the amount we had planned to take three times over.

We were aware in a minute and were steadily climbing some twenty minutes later. We had printed the Erowid dose/response graph for LSD and put that on the living-room table with the time of ingestion written onto it, which was to be 9 PM.

About one hour into it, 10 PM, we were clearly on higher ground. We had turned the light off and there were many visuals, but they were bleak. It was hard to gauge the extent of our inebriation. It proved to be the silence before the storm. A little later we both were intellectualizing and pacing around the living-room and kitchen, discussing all kinds of matters of the real world. We discovered we were clinging on rather then letting go of consensus reality, so we turned off the light again and looked inward, by which time it was clear that we had overshot the mark three times over, and that a Great Session was to unfold.

A candle was lit and guided our way through the night.

-----

We found ourselves intellectualizing once more.
?The queen ought to visit and give us a medal for still being in the Resistance sixty years after the war.? I joked, and indeed we were fleeing into rationality and again turned to introspection. By now it was obvious it was going to be a direly intense trip.

At about two hours into it, well after we had achieved plateau, we were subjected to the great mental compressions and decompressions of intensity that are called ?waves?, a fluctuating sensory and psychological intensity characteristic for Lysergide inebriation.

I started to feel an all-too-familiar aura. The room was shifting in color and lost proportion, looking almost like it were filled with water rather then air. I knew all too well what this meant: I was in the place where the Mushroom had taken me several times, but now on LSD, the place that lay between psychedelic voyages as I knew them and the Great Beyond that lay ahead.

The Mushroom had often asked whether I would follow, not unlike a telepathic experience or rather an intense thought emanating from my Subconscious.
LSD offered me no such choice: It pulled me right in, no questions asked.

I was starting to feel suffocation, as if I got no air, and this became evermore acute and intense. Finally it overcame most of the Trip and was quite overwhelming.

Oh God Almighty.. was I going to die?

I decided I had an acute anxiety attack and that the asphyxiating feeling was due to hyperventilation, so I slowed my breath and breathed through my cupped hands as to accumulate the CO2 my lungs needed to break the cycle of overbreathing.

It passed, but now my back locked into tight muscle tension like I never had experienced before.

?I feel like a Ninja Turtle, I already got the half-shell, but it remains to be seen whether I can be the hero I need to be this night.? Trippers in peril say the oddest things.

-----

The suffocation returned with a vengeance.

Suddenly separating barriers slammed shut between me and my Spiritual brother, I was in a cocoon that separated his reality from mine. When he spoke I heard him, but his words had lost all meaning to me. I knew he was making sense but it just did not register. I was mad, psychotic, clinically insane and dying by suffocation.

I walked off to the bathroom but was smitten in my kitchen and sat down right on the floor, looking away as my brother, now quite worried went to sit in front of me and started a talkdown which must?ve been a gem? if only I could register his words because nineteen out of twenty times I just could not understand and was kept away from his tender loving care.

?Ooohh.. I want out? Yup I want out of this mayhem.. I got a goal in life and that is to make it out of this madness.. This is the grandmother of all Bad Trips?? And my grandmother had died. And I knew that I was to die that night in agony and insanity.

My friend rationalized away, deeply involved in his Trip but committed to pull me into the comfortable space where he was. He had a basic trust that I in my frantic struggling did not possess..

?It can?t BE worse. I have reached rock bottom.? I replied to my Brother?s question, or at least I believe it was a response to what he had said.

I got up and hugged my Spiritual brother with all my might.
?Life is so hard.. It is so hard to hold on.. I don?t want to die?? he lovingly held me in his Spiritual embrace and I cried lamenting about my life. I believe he must?ve cried too.
After three million years we let go.

I went to the bathroom and slammed my ass on the bowl. The bathroom door and walls breathed and closed me in, but not nearly as confined as I was by my isolation from reality. I leaned with my head against the wall and was consumed by the torment. I was beside myself, looking at my tortured self sitting there.

I put my hand on my bare leg and looked at it.
My hand lost size and shape, my leg bubbled and boiled as if it were full of reptiles fighting their way out of a leathery egg.

?Oh GOD? Help me PLEASE??

It couldn?t be more from the heart. I was at the end, Sheet?s End, in the bowels of Lysergic Hell.

And then I felt it. That is when it happened. Amidst my suffering I sensed I was not alone. A benign force was with me. I felt the Presence of God.

-----

Somehow it felt like matter became transparent. I felt the Cosmos as One. I felt the galaxies through the walls, ceiling and straight through the Earth beneath my feet as if it were somehow transparent as glass. My hand on my leg now radiated with the Life Force, the flesh of my leg breathing and embracing my fingers.

My Brother asked if I were OK.
Yes. Somehow I was.

I was an organism, a suit of flesh wrapped around an Essence that was I. And I was not alone. A Force that encompassed and permeated everything was with me. The Universe was the Body of God and all matter was his Flesh.
There is nothing but Deity, and nothing does not follow the Master Plan. And my Hellish Death was entirely symbolic and I had to go through it that night.

Off the toilet.

Dying outstretched on my living-room couch.

I felt a calm come over me. I remembered it well: It was the calm I felt when I lay on the Heart Ward of the Intensive Care Unit with my heart attack, and Death was imminent. It was the Calm of Death.
This time a peace came over me that reassured me it was truly good to let go, even if I were to die by ceasing all struggling.

My Spiritual brother was talking non-stop trying to get me out.

?No: It is my destiny that I must die tonight. I?m going through a Grofian cycle of Ego Death and I must complete it. If I don?t complete this I will come out of this trip insane. Let me die.?

?Well, DIE THEN!? my Spiritual brother blurted out and seemed to feel sorry.

?You are forgiven. All is forgiven.? This I said from my death bed.
I would die, there was no doubt that at least my mind would die and that death was imminent.

Then he asked if it were good if he left me to go to the bathroom.
I said yes. He left, and I would die.

Peace in Death. The Psychedelic states, exceedingly strange as they may be, are deeply rooted into the fabric of reality. Having had a true Near-Death Experience I can vouch for the fact that the fears and torment that accompany Ego Death, and the calm that may follow, are identical to the struggle of Biological Death, exactly the same and every bit as intense as it can be when you will die.

I closed my eyes.

?Goodbye, my Ego. I have loved you with all my heart, but now you must die, die so I can be reborn anew. Goodbye, my Old Self??

The calm gripped me. I saw veins, and the blood sinking down through them. I saw my body as if from a distance. Detached from it, totally in peace as the hectic Voyage now hushed into a tranquility unlike anything before it.
Time dissolved.

-----

My Spiritual brother returned and I snapped back into my body. He poured out words of guidance and good intentions, but sky-flying on LSD his mind was vexed by my agony and he had locked into talkdown-mode.

I got up and ended up on the kitchen floor again. He sat down in front of me and we established connection, slowly but surely he got me connected again.
Bless him.

I was amidst the stars, the Earth and bricks of my house transparent to my mind and at one with Deity, the Deity that is the Universe, the sum of the Anything & All.

I still was in pain and very much out of tune with my Spiritual brother. But I was returning to normalcy, my Brother talking me down from the agony that still was.

?Keep going: I don?t know what you?re doing but it?s working.?

Slowly my agony dissolved and gave way to what Eastern Paths and the hippies of old call Cosmic Consciousness. I was to find Heaven in the deepest abyss of Hell.

I looked at my Spiritual brother. I was still a million miles away, my mind separated from his by the cocoon of separated realities. It dawned upon me that each organism is like that: fully isolated in their own universe with but few ways to communicate between them.

He had told me it was 1:30 AM which now dawned on me and it gave great comfort. I was in the midst of a raging LSD trip, approaching the peak. I wasn?t insane, I wasn?t experiencing the aftermath with me emerging shattered and mentally unstuck: we were a mere four and a half hours into it, a good two hours before the descent would even present itself and we had traveled only but one-third of the way.

?I want to be who I am. I really want to be who I am.. I want to LIVE..?

This was far more then a yearning for sobriety: this was nothing short of a renewed commitment to life itself. I felt profoundly changed after my Ego had died on that couch.

I was no longer suffering. I was beyond conflict and out Exploring once more.

-----

I wanted to go outside to see the Cosmos, my Spiritual brother opened the door and told me the sky was overcast by clouds, no Cosmos to see.

?Oh trust me: it?s there.?

Back on the couch.

I closed my eyes and there was so much to behold, most of it symbolic and three-dimensional.

Suddenly I was gripped by imagery.
I saw Africans. Men, women and children, not just imagery but I felt them like I had been them another time around, that I had known them. I held their memories and accumulated them until I experienced what seemed like racial, ancestral memories of the suffering and greatness of our African heritage and those who remained in Africa after my later ancestors left the continent for the lush forests of Europe, paling in skin, hair and eyes as the memory of our ancestry receded to our innermost minds.

Then, when the full scope of the experience was reached, the imagery and memories shrunk into the tiniest of the tiny to merge into a minute speck of a geometric patterning I saw before my eyes. I felt like this sequence was part of the pattern, and that the pattern was the Energy Form of the Universe.

We got up off the couch again into the kitchen.
I was overcome by the organismic Experience. My Spiritual brother and I so clearly were animal beings walking the surface of a planet, I felt One with all the Beings that ever were or will be.

I sliced an orange in two and shared it with my Brother.
I leaned to the sink and sank my teeth into it, overcome by the organismic experience of eating. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being a young African boy, leaning against a hot loam wall in a village eating a piece of fruit. This lasted a split second but gave me great joy: I knew I had been that boy in a former lifetime and would become him again, fully convinced reincarnation is absolute and the Divine Force is perfect and infinite.

Then Divinity let itself be truly felt and filled me. My Spiritual brother talked about his love and devotion for Jesus Christ.

?Back off with the Christianity!?

I said this rather harshly because I felt the Divine Force touching me, that it was All Gods of All Religions, that it was Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha in one, and my Brother?s loving words from his Christian faith felt like they tried to fence in the Deity that revealed itself to me right then and there.
The God/Goddess/Force truly is the Anything and All.

I remained in Cosmic Consciousness for the longest time, aware of the galaxies and stars that are all around, aware of this Force that encompassed the Anything and All and acutely aware of my organismic nature and our shared but separate universes.

Beyond the six-hour point we started a peaceful descent and discussion of what we had experienced but I was too overcome by the naked intensity of what I had lived through to grasp his experience, no matter how I wanted to I grasp his Journey I was filled to the brim with my own experience.

?God is ready with me this weekend. I will not take LSD again for some months but I definitely will take it again.?

It is odd, but those five hours between 10 PM and 3 AM seemed to last an entire day, but the five hours of the descent that followed passed almost unnoticed as we told of our experiences and tried to piece together where our experiences had merged and where they had parted.

Around the tenth hour we popped open a beer to celebrate our Journey, and later on we went to sleep. We clanged together our shotglasses of ice-cold J?germeister and toasted.

?To Brotherhood.?

-----

Then he went to the guestroom and I went to bed myself.
In darkness there was much imagery but all too soon I drifted off into deep sleep. My final dream before awakening was that I stood in front of a closet with many compartments and was neatly arranging the matters of Life into the appropriate places.

When I woke I sat down on the couch where my former Ego had died only a few hours ago. I wept overcome by the sheer beauty of the Divine Force that had revealed it?s presence to me. I was in awe and joy. This experience of the Divine I was to take with me beyond the days of the Voyage and even though my rational mind distances itself from it my Spiritual self was uniquely enriched by it.

I grabbed the phone and called my other Spiritual brother, a Tripteam-mate who couldn?t make it to this Session and blew him away.

?Full Intensity. I lived my worst fear and got through it. I feel reborn. I know I will meet with these Hells again, and far worse then I did now, but I know that if you truly surrender to Hell, Heaven awaits.?

We talked and talked until his mobile phone battery went flat and that night he joined us. We then embarked on an MDMA-Journey which made it the best, most productive Session the three of us have ever had. Having been filled to the brim I could use this second journey to recall and integrate my LSD experience into my memory and mind. It became clear to me that the pains endured in the Entheogenic Experience are not without use and that they can be great opportunities for Personal and Spiritual Growth if you fully surrender to them and not hold back to experience them to their full extent.

In the Empathogenic state that MDMA brought about the three of us celebrated our Spiritual Brotherhood, re-affirmed our bonding and shared our love and respect for our Selves, each other and the Deep Path the three of us are walking together.

The Spiritual brotherhood, the Cult of Three...

Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience.

 

[HeartCore]

I often hear and read about people talking about ego death . Please give your definition of ego death . What is it ? What do you experience ? What do the words ego death mean to you ?

The point where you know we are all one, connected, we (you/I) created everything, all the people we met/meet are teachers, created by US (so by ourselves). Worries are preposterous and we all are God.

Something along those lines.

 

[Thinker]

I think there are three similar states which are generally confused on the net: ego loss, ego death and depersonalization, which can cause serious anguish.

IMO ego loss=realising you are at one with the universe but at the same time retaining your sense of conscious self.

ego death=the quote I posted above, loosing all reference points to your life and even your consciousness which is generally terrifying unless you know whats going on. But if you do and you can handle it you can reach what I imagine is probably the most free and blissful state a human can experience. Akin to "meeting god".

and depersonalization=a milder but permanent/semipermanent form of ego death. In everyday life you feel that everything (including yourself) is unreal, detached or fake. That you are like an empty shell or a robot without a soul. Not that you have actually lost your soul, is just that human beings tend to feel like their ego or at least some part of it is their soul.

When I first tried shroooms I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I was told that they didn't really do much, just made things slightly more interesting. So I happily munched them down even though I was in an unfamiliar place and not with close friends, I had also just left home and moved to a completely different country so I wasn't feeling particularly secure...

It was indeed quite a mild trip but because of my overthinking and bad circumstances it led to a complete ego death followed by depression and depersonalization for a couple of months. I had no fucking clue what had happened to me and when searching online all I could find were blissful ego loss descriptions. I couldn't understand why I had felt hell where others had felt unity, which made me think that I had simply gone insane.

I have never ever felt that scared before in my life. I spent most of the night curled up in the corner of a dark room trying to convince myself that I still existed. It really is the most soul shatteringly awful thing that you can experience. I felt like an empty shell having lost everything that was my life. My family, my memories and my possessions all felt like they were someone elses, it was to such a degree that when I walked into my bedroom I thought I had accidentially gone into one of my housemates rooms. When I saw a family photo I noticed that I didn't love them anymore, which was very distressing because I'm extremely close to them. I also had a recurring image of a pot, symbolising my mind and self, being blown to pieces by TNT in the shape of a mushroom (which is actually really funny thinking about it now!). But the worst part of all was not knowing what was happening and whether it would end. I came very close to suicide that night.

After a shitload of searching, reading and thinking I realised what had happened and that even ego death is actually an amazing thing but most people are so consumed by panic at the time they can't relax and enjoy their pure awareness without the limits of their ego.

So thats my 2 cents