what exactly is the concept known as “ego death”?
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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