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.
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.
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?
I've described it as a form of ego death in my own philosophy. We basically have three selves: self, self-in-world and self-in-society. Ego death happens when the self-in-world dies (derealization) or the self-in-society dies (depersonalization).
It's not actually that "self" that dies, though, just the associated narrative. You can still get emotional rewards of that flavor, just not from that narrative. Your other two "selves" have essentially voted it out and will no longer play along with it. The narratives can be as simple as I'm invincible or I have a special role to play in society which of course psychedelics can break apart.
I've only experienced that ego-death through meditation (twice while I was in high school.) Just wanted to mention that it can be achieved without psychedelics. The easier to describe experience consisted of 'me' as a tiny speck of dust floating in a featureless, dimensionless void. As I tried to grasp a frame of reference I snapped back to my normal reality. I did not meditate much after that, mostly because I felt I had accomplished something.
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 those experiences repeatedly (shrooms, which should be +-same), but always alone. I can't imagine doing that journey with anybody else, even close girlfriend, it would be just negative interference and distractions. In fact, I lost all my regular senses, laying on the bed, listening to very nice shamanic music (that must have helped a bit). I understood where religion comes from, or so it seemed to me at that time. At the end of the trip I had spiritual experience without any classical presence of god, at the end just chemicals going haywire in my brain.
By huge margin consistently the most intense experience in my life, and I've been through some stuff (birth of my son, 6 months backpacking in Himalaya, adrenaline/mountain sports, not in that order).
That was some 10 years ago, I don't even feel the need to try again. Kind of lesson took, not much more to gain, only risking some bad drama.
Additionally, self-discovery is not inherently individualistic. The most powerful discovery I made during my first trip was that I would not be who I am (self-discovery) without the influence of the many, amazing people I've had the good fortune of knowing (anti-individualistic). This understanding came with overwhelming gratitude and a desire to become closer with more people in my community.
In general psychedelics strip away your ego such that your self appears illusory. I've never met anyone whose takeaway from psychedelics was individualistic.
This type of experience was exactly what I experienced my first few LSD trips. It's a type of disassociation or ego death, where you really feel deeply the experience of observing yourself, your thoughts, from a seemingly separate viewpoint.
It made me question reality in a way I hadn't before.
Is all of this pre-determined? Is it arbitrary? Is it random? Is there an underlying meaning here we should recognize?
I came to believe that love, connection, existing itself, were all somehow significant. Hard to say if this is real, or just part of the pattern :)
I personally love the experience of so-called ego death ("complete loss of subjective self-identity") from psychedelics, but I can understand why other people don't.
The brain filters reality in a highly organized and optimized manner. It takes all our sensory input and fuses it into a remarkably stable, though inherently subjective reality. Psychedelics attenuate the filter. Suddenly, things aren't so organized or stable. That can be very scary to some people and thrillingly fun for others. Add to that, deep-seated emotions and repressed memories, which can bubble up without warning when you lose control, and things get even more fraught.
I hear ya. My anecdote is unique. If I provided more context, and told you my life story, it might make better sense. And it’s impossible to assign responsibility solely to psychedelics, but after years of hospitalizations and addictions and depression and suicidal attempts and witnessing a few friends suicides, there was a turning point in my life, and it conincided with my experimentation of LSD and mushrooms, something I only put together years later in hindsight.
I think the psychedelics nurture the ability to recognize that feelings and narratives are not representative of reality, that there are multiple realities bound up in which perspective you possess, or which one possesses you.
The ability to detach from self, to recognize a spectrum of truth, of perception, is one of the greatest benefits of psychedelic experiences.
I’ve used LSD for years off and on, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken it. So many I lost count long ago. It’s a beautiful experience, and it helps me and everyone I share it with to this day.
I have friends who remark what a profound life changing experience it was for them years after our trip together, and it always catches me off guard. You never know how profound it affects a person. Sometimes it takes years to recognize the shift that took place.
Either way, I think there is so much promise. I’m a huge advocate, and I think people who struggle with mental health issues should definitely explore psychedelics (I would caution those with schizoid tendencies/ family histories). Anyone with anxiety, depression, addictions, compulsive thoughts... there is much promise there.
I've got friends who go into reactive dissociative states. Rarely do they emerge with a new story of self where they've grown through what they triggered around. I'm saying rarely here to account for the fact that while I've never witnessed it, I'm not saying it's impossible.
This is definitely not the case for friends or myself who've experienced ego death, with or without psychedelics.
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.
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.
It's called ego death and it can also be terrifying. I've tripped with people who thought they were dying because their subjective self identify was dissolving.
I'll leave it up for posterity but I stand corrected on the psychedelics part.
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