Thank you for sharing your experience. I am curious- how did your ego reveal itself during your experience with psychedelics? What form did it take? How did it talk to you?
A bigger question is what was that 'you'. Was it the ego? Was it my sense of self? We keep changing throughout our lives. But psychedelics are more than just a life changing experience. AFAIK, it's the only way to experience ego death. The dissolution of self can remind you of the transient nature of things and lead you towards spirituality. The good or bad aspect should be judged from that perspective rather than your perspective. The ego is temporary, but the spirit is not.
Sure but its isn't your mind. Just an aspect of it (that often causes problems).
I had an interesting experience with psychedelics where my ego revealed itself as a kind of front or mask that I put on to impress other people. The personality that I reveal to the public. There was a whole other deeper part of my mind that was able to observe that. That was actually what got me started meditating.
Its strange, its was like two parts of my mind talking to each other (as in inner talk). The closest I could describe it when you do something wrong and reflect on yourself / your actions, except it's in the present rather than the past. As I say, like two parts of my personality talking to themselves, though the non ego side was definitely a lot deeper, more objective and seemed like my "true self".
(Psychedelics are definitely strange, the hallucinations come and go. At some points like that one I felt quite "with it", just inner talk. Often once you have "sorted out" things like that the pleasant stuff live visions begin, though I think they affect everyone differently).
I find it really interesting that psychedelic drug users frame their experiences in Freudian terms, using terms like 'ego' and its struggle against other entities within the mind.
Interesting. I guess everyone has their own journey. I haven't deluded myself about being the chosen one since I experienced ego death. It has seemed quite clear since then that being alive and alone is strange and temporary.
I'll leave it up for posterity but I stand corrected on the psychedelics part.
I find it weird people keep saying they lose the ego-based view of the world after taking psychedelics, it has had the complete opposite effecf on me. I know the experience is very personal but I have never read about experiences similar to mine. I become very ego-centric and just think about how I can get the most out of the world.
I do think it has affected me positively overall. I find it easier to work through tough times in order to reach what I want these days.
It's really quite hard to explain as anybody who's had psychedelic experiences will probably tell you - but for me it was something like this:
A major reason for my depressions where my fathers early death, which i hadn't really processed up to that point. In my first ever trip, some hours in i fell into a state where all that sadness and regret just overpowered my conscience, quite literally myself. Yet at the same time i was calmly observing myself, and i was able to reflect quite deeply onto my emotional state, ironically all whilst beeing utterly unable to control it.
This "loss of ego", i could maybe describe it as an "out of body experience" made it incredibly obvious to me how to put my regular emotional state into context and understanding how rejecting the process of grief and feeding my fears of loss had created the state i was living in.
Afterwards all those things that had an unshakeable grip on me started to become understandable in a way you'd understand ANOTHER person going through this, reasoning wasn't clouded anymore from my affection. I think that was the tipping point
I thought maybe you was influenced by people accompanying you. But I also did some reading and see that loss of self-identity is an often symptom caused by psychedelics, so I don't know.
BTW, eastern practitioners explicitly advice against drug use, they employ other methods to achieve and retain this state of mind: bhakti (love), jnana (knowledge - means analysing the difference between thoughts and thinking process and Atman - the Self who perceives them), karma yoga, raja yoga, etc.
Some people fall into this state spontaneously, Ramana Maharishi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi) got this "enlightenment" at 16, and didn't speak several years after that.
I enjoy reading eastern texts, as artifacts of brilliant thought, also interesting in context of our development towards AI, where we still don't have satisfying theory for consciousness (that Vedanta calls atman). They have also accumulated interesting theories and terminology about mind mechanics. But I think it's worth to remain skeptical. After all, those strange states of mind may be just dysfunctions. For example, anoxaemia, inhaling vapors of glues and varnishes, sensory and motor deprivation induce "special effects" on cognition and mind too.
Through the temporary dissolution of ego and other defensive mental constructs, psychedelics can help rewire the brain and flip on some hiterto unknown inner switches. One of which is better self knowledge. It's not a path to be taken lightly or alone. But is has certainly opened up new worlds to those who dared to thread it.
Agreed. I am a traveler and we are all connected, everything has beauty.
Ego death from psychedelics is realizing ego is a tool, that it isn't truly you, just a tool or armor you use to navigate reality. We live in a self-interested world, people must have an ego or you get steamrolled by the machine and divided by walls. Ego can help you tear down the walls or ignore them entirely as they are the ego of the real world and others. It helps you realize the world is nothing, unless you make it something, unless you create it for yourself.
Ego is "a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance" and "the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity".
Awareness of ego is key, psychedelics help you recognize it is an abstraction to you.
I had the opposite experience with psychedelics. I was dissociated from myself for many many years and mushrooms/meditation over the course of a year helped me find my true self.
back in the day I experimented with psilocybin mushrooms and experienced what is called 'ego death'. basically, you lose a sense of self and identity. You are literally a blank slate. It was a surreal experience and I felt panicky like 'oh shit i think im dead but im still concious'.
Before I reached this state I was seeing math formulas everywhere. Basically when my internal thoughts stopped, that is I was experiencing reality in the rawest form, the only truth we have in the universe is math, in all shapes and forms, we live inside the 'body of god' that is math, but of course, so extremely complex to express in our 3rd dimensional world.
I tried Psilocybin on two different occasions and two very different trips. The first being pleasant, the second being my last.
The first time I took it, I was outside. The very first thing I notice is just how vivid the green leaves swaying in the wind were. How calm, serene, peaceful. Then I started seeing the walls, "breathe". I've never been able to feel such inner peace before. In this moment, I realized, I have so much potential. We all do, yet it's our own doubts, and the internalized opinion of others or vanity metrics hindered our progress. I've found "spiritualism". I started playing Gran Turismo and realized how effortless I've been able to drive around the Nordschliefe. Normally I'd crash but I was putting no effort yet I was playing at a level that surpassed my normal everyday skill. Then I started joining meetups. Like groups that I never thought I'd join. I was suddenly interested in women's rights, I got interested in Hinduism.
The next day, the inner peace continued to linger. However, after a few months, I was back to my old self.
So this econd time, I upped the dose (bad idea). This time I stayed in my room (another bad idea). Instead of the inner peace, I was in a state of panic. There were some scary visuals like the Eye of Providence, I could feel the presence of some extra-terrestrial intelligence, looking at me, judging me with those unchanging Eye on the US dollar bill.
I headed downstairs and the visuals just got stranger. I close my eyes and see complex geometrics, and reopen them to see math formulas everywhere. I was getting even more panicky and I head to lie down.
Then I experienced what is called "Ego Death". I felt like I was dead. No identity, no awareness. It was awful, I longed for anything, any sort of order and structure I had in my normal reality. I was thinking "yup I fucked up. I poisoned myself. good god."
During the ego death, the only certainty I felt was Math. Math is the language of both this universe and the fabric of our universe. We are made out of math. The gut feelings we get, the emotions, thoughts, they were ultimately mathematical manifestations. This was the intuition I was feeling, a spiritual plane where Everything is Everything while being Nothing. The ubiquity and the ephemeral nature of both our life, and the universe.
There is a positive story out of this. I came out of the ego death, and I was sooooo thankful that there was something in this reality instead of nothing. The trip was not over, and I started seeing this bright pulsating object that looked like a symbol of sorts....kinda like a lightning symbol appear right above between the eye brows of the people I looked at!
I am not a religious person and have not come into contact with any Hinduism materials but when I looked up the Hindu symbol for the Third Eye, I almost fell out of my chair-it was the same. I never even heard or seen the Third eye before, and I was just reading other people's trips and there were people who saw the exact same thing....
After the trip was over, the next morning, I woke feeling light. It felt like I sat in a sauna but instead of sweating out chemical toxins, my spirit felt like it was cleansed. I did make some positive life changes....but ended up right back where I was.
It seems like you need to keep taking psilocybin to see the benefits but after that trip, I'd rather not open that door anymore. It was frightening more than it was awakening but perhaps because the possibility that our material reality that the Western civilization claims is be-all and end-all is not only incorrect but immature-civilizations and cultures that existed longer all have gone through such stages, and eventually gave way to spirituality at some point.
Curious. If you don't mind answering on a public forum, what was the ratio of your dosage to bodyweight? For instance, my experiences were usually around the ratio 5e-5.
It is true that some people's egos "fight" the drug more than others. All the bad trips I've seen in others have been the result of a person's ego refusing to relinquish control over the body, and fighting to remain relevant to the host. They were driven to a maniacal series of "I want/I need" demands and their satisfaction, which is precisely what the ego thrives on. Below a certain level, the ego does not feel threatened but continues to act, as it did for you I guess. Above a certain level, the ego is forcefully dissolved but this may not always lead to a beneficial experience that feels safe.
From my completely inexpert perspective, and keeping in mind I've never taken any psychedelics, I'd guess that 'ego-busting' as you call it is almost certainly the component of value here. Our traditional notions of self are ridiculously naive and very poorly model reality, and I think working from poor models of reality is part of why we suffer like we do, which leads us to being worse people. Psychedelics allow people to more easily shift their perspective and see the world differently, hopefully expanding their conception of it and enlightening their understanding of their place within it, but they are not the only way to do that.
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