eli5: What is an “ego death”?
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Ego death is a “complete loss of subjective self-identity”. This means, you do not know who you are, what you are doing, what your past is, what your name is, how the people around you relate to you, what species you are, etc. This is a failure to connect to your long term memories.
There are a number of ways for this to occur, Meditation, Psychedelics, Brain Damage, Hypnosis.
In the Buddhist Tradition, Ego Death is gaining a sense of self that feels pure, true, intentional rather than one tied up in programming and unconscious decisions.
From Wiki: the ego death that Buddhism encourages makes an end to the “usually-unconsciousness-and-automated quest” to understand the sense-of-self as a thing, instead of as a process.[54] According to Park, meditation is learning how to die by learning to “forget” the sense of self: Enlightenment occurs when the usually automatized reflexivity of consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling into the void and being wiped out of existence […] [W]hen consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become nothing, and discover that I am everything.
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