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Tuesday, May 27, 2014

You do not exist: A look inside ego-death

Note: There are ways to experience "Ego-loss/death" without the use of drugs. Even drinking cat nip and meditating can contribute to the help of experiencing "ego loss." Posting this to educatiate about "ego death," not drugs.

"We’ve all heard about the idea of someone having a big ego. Well, that’s not at all what we’re talking about here. Ego in the context of ego death points to something much more basic, namely, our persistent sense of self, that abstract aspect of our conscious experience that we compulsively deem as separate from the rest of the world. It’s a mysterious thing isn’t it? But it’s hard to deny its existence.

So why the confusion regarding the term? Surely, everyone can relate to this ego, as we’re calling it. The problem does not occur when we consider the spectrum of ordinary states of consciousness. The confusion only manifests when we try to speak of a state in which there is no perceived boundary between the self and the environment; the state of ego death.



When we speak of such a state, there is the inherent paradox in linguistically fabricating the observer, who is going through the experience. In other words, people are confused because when we speak of ego death, there is always an observer who is perceiving this so-called loss of boundary between the self and the environment. That observer, people believe, is the ego, still fully intact, and this in their minds is a case against the existence of the ego death phenomenon....

There’s one more ambiguity that I’d like to shed some light on. The death in ego death almost seems to imply a permanent change in the psyche where the ego has permanently ceased to exist. It’s not actually that simple. As I see it, the death refers to a permanent change in our relationship to this thing called the ego, one in which the the illusory nature of the ego becomes more transparent; we are more easily able to acknowledge the fact that the ego is a product of our minds, though we may still be subject to the illusion. We thus kill the delusion, not the illusion. It’s similar to marveling at the performance of a magic trick, even knowing that it’s a trick and perhaps even knowing how it’s done....

I think everyone should experience something as intimate and life-shattering as ego death. It has made me realize so much more about myself (whoever this myself is), and has expanded my perception on everything I once considered separate.

It was a significant change in my life, and the few days after there was an afterglow that consisted of blissful states of mind where the ego only lingered in a reduced form. After such a profound experience, it is hard to deny the existence of a range of phenomena that ego death can point to."


See the entire article about Ego-Death