What is Ego-death ???

[user_1919]

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.

I agree, thats exactly it. I would just like to also add, it is the point where you dissolve all your culture conditioning and stand naked before your own psyche. The judgements you make about anything have no culture conditioning behind them because you are ripped off them.

PEACE & LOVE

 

[st.bot.32]

Ego-death is never painful. It's characterized by the complete absence of pain, and accompanied by intense feelings of ecstacy.

That's exactly how I think of my experiences. A bit difficult to get to (well not too difficult) but when I look back afterward, the absolute ecstasy, bliss of being alive and existing.

 

[GOD]

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

Ha ! , Ha ! , Ha ! , Ha ! , Ha ! ...... hysterical laughter !!! you mean like the bag of snakes that i just threw at the MAOI facts thread ???? A bag of snakes that i am looking forwards to opening soon ............ before i open my next amanita / piss drinking broadside , game , set and match blitz krieg ?????

 

[Forkbender]

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.

I agree. The state of ego death is not painful at all. However, the road leading there can be pretty rocky, because of the fear people have of loosing their illusionary identity or individuality.

 

[Forkbender]

you mean like the bag of snakes that i just threw at the MAOI facts thread ????

Yes.

Oh, btw, did you see my response there?

 

[tryptonaut]

I think what I had on my first high-dosed shroom trip could be called ego-death (at least the word suddenly made sense to me after the experience).

I had blacked out first, after experiencing some kind of "sitting next to myself and watching myself sit-experience" (the last thing I remember before opening my eyes again). When I opened my eyes again, time had stopped moving (literally, I knew it had stopped), I felt translucent, stretched out endlessly in an empty universe. I felt like everyone and everything could see right into me, my thoughts and feelings - yet there was no one except me, because I was everything and everyone at that moment. I was pretty sure I had died and was now floating in empty space forever. I began regretting all the bad things I had done now that my life had ended and I started crying for forgiveness like a little baby.
But then, slowly, I started to understand what it all meant. The feeling of being the only one in the universe and at the same time being seen by everyone meant that I was everyone and everyone was me. I started to understand karma - everything you do you do to yourself because you are everything there is, because "you" is not little tryptonaut in his room but we are alltogether one energy floating in space.
With understanding my situation the ecstasy began and lasted for hours as I was slowly floating back to real life.

Was this "ego death"? I don't know, it surely was the death of an old me, the birth of a psychonaut

 

[Brugmansia]

Unboundedness freedom. Everyone and everything is in your soul. You can choose your form, your place, your company, your gravity... everything. This is a dose very close to ego death.

But if really crossing that dose, nothing goes actually through me, body and soul are just frozen. It someone would look at me at this point, he'd think I turned to stone. I even feel that way. Sometimes it's even hard to remember some parts afterwards. I'm just a fossil at the peak.

For me this totally another experience than tripping. And the ego death only lasts 2/3 hours for me on an LSD trip (500 ug) if not less. After this, there comes a micro connection with reality and then I'm about to fall back into tripping.

 

[spice]

Ego death is not a state of bliss, people, sorry, that's called SATORI and bliss can accompany it, but everyone here should already know that there are two sides to these coins.....

What's the ego?

A construct.

There fore, it is a deconstruction. a de-struction, of what is essentially a bunch of programs.....to say it isn't painful in any way tells me what level you're at.

If all you're getting is that egodeath is a state of serenity and bliss, then I say you miss the point......and entirely, too.

 

[Thinker]

Ego death is not a state of bliss, people, sorry, that's called SATORI and bliss can accompany it, but everyone here should already know that there are two sides to these coins.....

What's the ego?

A construct.

There fore, it is a deconstruction. a de-struction, of what is essentially a bunch of programs.....to say it isn't painful in any way tells me what level you're at.

If all you're getting is that egodeath is a state of serenity and bliss, then I say you miss the point......and entirely, too.

I agree

 

[HeartCore]

Yeah I experienced Satori a year ago when my ego jumped out of the window

 

[Guest]

what do you mean by painful ?
in the sense of sticking your hand in the fire ?
or in the sense of it hurts a lot to see you dissapear, and facing you is just an enourmous abyss where there is no place to hold to ?

losing the ego is a painful thing, as it hurts to exist and to think.
perhaps there is bliss and completeness after your ego has came back and see that it is still alive and breathing. when you lose it, there's no sensations. there's no feelings or thoughts. if there is, how can your ego be dead ? there is only absolute caos and nothing else. you stop understanding and cataloguing things to be as you cannot be with your ego attached.

 

[Caduceus Mercurius]

What's the ego?

A construct.

There fore, it is a deconstruction. a de-struction, of what is essentially a bunch of programs.....to say it isn't painful in any way tells me what level you're at.

If the ego is a construct, a bunch of programs, then how can it experience pain?
And if the construct is dissolved, why would the observer (the self) experience that as painful?
Even without the bliss, nirvana, satori or ecstacy, why would the sleeping-mode of the ego have to be painful?

there's no feelings or thoughts. if there is, how can your ego be dead?

Depends on your definition of ego. I don't consider feelings and thoughts to pertain solely to the ego. There are transcendent feelings and thoughts.

 

[Guest]

the ego doesn't go to sleep. it thinks it is dying. therefore the pain.
you are the ego. you are not a watcher.
if you are a watcher, why would you take psychedelics ?

 

[Jahvisions]

I always describe it like this: In normal life, you life and think in certain patterns so you have something to rely on and feel comfortable cause you have something to fall back on something familiar, psychedelics mix these things up and break that, you have a natural resistance against it, when you give up that resistance the ego has died.

 

[BrainEater]

Ego death can be painful! but it doesn't has to. maybe it has to do with the level of attachment that binds consciousness to the mind. it can feel like something is being ripped out of you, or cut out of you or similar sensations. (emotionally)

sometimes even the ego can think it is the soul of a being and therefore it can be really painful, because the level of illusion can be tis high and the corresponding fall afterwards too.

essentially one of the main problems of it is, how i see it, the perpetual motion of the mind and its momentum which can be insanely fast and not reachable. like programs that won't terminate and go on and on. also it can be that these processes keep feeding each other with energy and therefore draining your own energy. basically i think the comparison of mind activities and programs is quite good. also because programs normally have to obey the overall-system which is corresponding to humans the being itself, which is supposed to be the operator of the mind and not its slave or servant. that's why freeing the mind is important for not staying a servant of the own mind or other minds.

this automation is happening on lower levels (muscle contraction, digesting, communication with the brain of the nervous system thru highways) and on higher levels (thoughts,emotions). i think routine seems to be the criterium for the automation process. i'm not sure how the intelligent selective method of the mind works for these processes, but probably it can decide it on its own.


peace.

 

[Guest]

what is failing here is the definition of ego.
i am the ego. the personality is the ego.
persona was the MASK used in greek comedies/tragedies, and from there derives the word "personality" that we use today. it is the skin we use to disguise ourselves from our real beings. almost of our activities need this mask, and everything is organized around them.
the central problem here is that we are made to think that we are our personalities, we are our fears, our goals and our "way of being". i have read some ideas in this forum where users claim that ego death is like watching this marvellous movie where you feel apart from the universe, and experience a long list of emotions, confortable in your own body, just need to close your eyes and feel it. for me, this is not ego death, this is plain meditation catalized by substances.
be sure than an ego death will shatter you (and your life) just like you step on a dead leaf on the street. if you don't feel like dying, trying to grab to everything you remember, wishing that it was over quickly, then, you haven't experienced a true ego death. then, it comes and you are dissolved. you reach a stage where everything is, without fear or doubts. you stop being your ego and there is no "now", no "time", no "you" and no "something". you are everything, you are just one, without dimensions, without simmetry and without anything else, you just are. you can't even remember it, because you are uncertain if it lasted a split second or a century. but you know (and will never forget) what it is like in that last second, where you know you are going to die really soon and there's nothing you can do to stop it. then, you realize what is the ego: an illusion created by you, so you can protect yourself and be an animal like your genes tell you to do, and restrain yourself, like another human beings taught you to.
the bliss comes when you regain conscience, because you see you are not dead at all, it was just a hard lesson. or was your brain playing tricks with itself ? then, you say to yourself that you going to start again, and this time everything is going to be perfect! you just need to breathe and to love to be happy. why all this complication ?
then, the ego slowly starts building and takes over everything again. the more you struggle with it, the more it grows around you, like a skin, like a persona you have to wear so you can take (and want to take) the beatings you have to.

 

[Brugmansia]

losing the ego is a painful thing, as it hurts to exist and to think.
perhaps there is bliss and completeness after your ego has came back and see that it is still alive and breathing. when you lose it, there's no sensations. there's no feelings or thoughts. if there is, how can your ego be dead ? there is only absolute caos and nothing else. you stop understanding and cataloguing things to be as you cannot be with your ego attached.

I agree. In fact, I was nothing more than a statue, physically pure concrete. Couldn't move, my vision was just a computer screen that was hanging and the vision I had at the hanging point didn't exist, it was just there, but it wasn't anything. There were no changing visuals either, just hanging patterns in diamond form. This state lasts only about 2 hours on a strong dosage of acid. What follows after can be marked as excessive tripping or tripping.

With a full dose of Ketamine I might have experience a different form of ego death. I lose my consciousness, I truly felt like I had a fatal dose of opiods, alcohol or GHB or a downer which would stop my central nervous system. I lost my breath, my vision, my senses, my skin, my body and what remained was nothing more than dust with no gravity. It was a short extreme flight of terror but the strong anaesthic part of Ketamine made it truly enlighted as well. (In fact nothing is suppressed, but the soul loses any awareness of physical impulses, this makes Ket fairly safe.)

At some point I was a sheet at my office-desk and my collegeaus were all present, I accepted with no resistance that I was this sheet. But had compassion with this sheet for never seeing life. Which I was myself, but I didn't cared about myself, only for this lifeless sheet.

 

[Psychoid]

I think tuesday night I experience what you would call a complete loss of ego... I don't even know if I could have remembered my name (I didn't try of even think about it). I find it hard to describe what I experienced in english so I writed my TR in french... here's the link:

http://www.psychonaut.com/index.php?opt ... 08&lang=fr

 

[acim2]

(Great thread!)

I've often wondered about this. Especially because DMT is such a strong overwhelming experience, but I almost never seem to come close to ego loss. I almost always seem to have myself (my ego) somewhere in the background still watching the whole thing, aware.

I have always thought that ego death was related to awareness of the self and consciousness. That's why it seems somewhat contradictory to say you "realize" that you are one with everything. If you are realizing something, then you have not lost the ego completely because something is there to realize.

(This is just my interpretation...I'm not saying it's right or what others mean by the term.)

So, my thought is that with complete ego death, you won't really have any recollection of it. You may feel yourself entering ego death or coming out of it, but when you are there, there's nothing/nobody to realize it or remember it.

Recently I've taken 5gm or cubensis, but didn't seem to approach ego loss. Most of my recent very strong DMT trips didn't lose myself (some I may have...more on that later). I wondered did I "break through" because I was still aware that "I" was experiencing something.

Years ago, on very high doses of excellent acid, I did drift off. I remember coming to, aka regaining the ego, and "realizing" that the experience was as representation of us (my and two friends). I was seeing a cartoon like, psychedelic image of three blobs being pushed around in an outer blob as I came too. I suddenly realized that the three blobs were us, and we were being pushed around in a representation of the apartment we were in. I think that the moments (I have no idea how long) before I relized that, I was in complete ego loss and unaware of myself or that what I saw represented us or me.

On some very intense DMT trips recently, I similarly "came to" after an apparent ego loss. Realized that "I" was experiencing a drug and was in a different reality. Similarly, the moments before that, I was not there to experience it or to observe. It was a different world with different rules, and I was swimming in the chaos...or I was not there swimming...but chaos was what there was instead of me and the rest of the world. Coming out of this state was when I realized that I was separate and able to observe and realize.

There's a taoist poem (or maybe prose) about how our uniqueness and distinction from the chaos (chaos in the sense of the non-separated, non-distinct everything) is like reeds in a marsh. The wind blows over the reeds and they each make their own sounds. These distinctions from the everything that has no distinction.

That is what life is, I believe. We make ourselves distinct from a chaos..or a primordial soup of everything. We see other things as distinct. But it's really a homogeneous soup of everything...call it the universal mind maybe. As we die, we rejoin the soup..the chaos. As we are born, some aspects of the chaos become separate and distinct for a time...or we just perceive it as distinct.

Because of this, I believe in reincarnation in a different way....we rejoin the whole and maybe parts of us are reborn in to many different people along with the soup of many other people. I kind of think that the belief that our part of this "universal stuff" being kept separate over different live times is an exaggeration of our separateness....an ego trip. To believe that we will always be separate in the same way is just us holding on to our ego. It's still important to live a good life in hopes that future lives will be more enlightened...but I don't believe it is for us as an individual entity. It is for the further enlightenment of the whole. To do it just for yourself is to hold on to the ego even beyond this life, which would not be good, and is not possible.

So.....based on that model, perhaps ego loss is rejoining the soup, the chaos, the universal mind, for a moment before becoming distinct again. We can do that with psychedelics (or maybe meditation) before we completely die and rejoin the whole until parts of us are born again into other distinctions with other parts of the soup.

 

[BrainEater]

what is failing here is the definition of ego.
i am the ego. the personality is the ego.
persona was the MASK used in greek comedies/tragedies, and from there derives the word "personality" that we use today. it is the skin we use to disguise ourselves from our real beings. almost of our activities need this mask, and everything is organized around them.
the central problem here is that we are made to think that we are our personalities, we are our fears, our goals and our "way of being". i have read some ideas in this forum where users claim that ego death is like watching this marvellous movie where you feel apart from the universe, and experience a long list of emotions, confortable in your own body, just need to close your eyes and feel it. for me, this is not ego death, this is plain meditation catalized by substances.
be sure than an ego death will shatter you (and your life) just like you step on a dead leaf on the street. if you don't feel like dying, trying to grab to everything you remember, wishing that it was over quickly, then, you haven't experienced a true ego death. then, it comes and you are dissolved. you reach a stage where everything is, without fear or doubts. you stop being your ego and there is no "now", no "time", no "you" and no "something". you are everything, you are just one, without dimensions, without simmetry and without anything else, you just are. you can't even remember it, because you are uncertain if it lasted a split second or a century. but you know (and will never forget) what it is like in that last second, where you know you are going to die really soon and there's nothing you can do to stop it. then, you realize what is the ego: an illusion created by you, so you can protect yourself and be an animal like your genes tell you to do, and restrain yourself, like another human beings taught you to.
the bliss comes when you regain conscience, because you see you are not dead at all, it was just a hard lesson. or was your brain playing tricks with itself ? then, you say to yourself that you going to start again, and this time everything is going to be perfect! you just need to breathe and to love to be happy. why all this complication ?
then, the ego slowly starts building and takes over everything again. the more you struggle with it, the more it grows around you, like a skin, like a persona you have to wear so you can take (and want to take) the beatings you have to.

very well described daytripper!! its true!!