Losing my Religion: Adapting to Ego Death, or How not to have a bad trip

[Euthanatos93420]

I would have put 'psychological' as the prefix but that's not really an option. This was written elsewhere in response to a person who was talking about their struggles through switching religions and the innate deep seated fears that were cropping up.

I'm posting this here in Salvia because Swim has told me that what I described about the process of deprogramming religious brainwashing is similar to what he experiences when using Salvia. More specifically he tells me that while for me and these other people these real life situations were directly confronting issues as they arose. Salvia is more direct. I will post his writings in a quote, and then mine.

Edit: Well I was going to anyway but then I though it belonged here because it could apply to other psychedelics although Swim hasn't been able to advise me on the matter with any personal experiences, only the anecdotal reports of others uses of them. That and it has a lot to do with psychology and religion as well...

Originally Posted by Swim

Salvia is like surgery to to mental programming and that it will cut your Ego's attachment to egregores with the speed and precision of a season cancer surgeon. The problem is that people have become so attached to this cancer which attaches itself to vital mental organs (Psychological archetypes) that being awake while the doctor does his work can cause fear to manifest. If allowed to reign during the surgery the fear can cause so much trauma that the surgery will be unsuccessful and the cancer will not only remain but the patient will be so traumatized by the experience that scar tissue will arise over the surgical cut that will make getting to the cancer very difficult in the future.

The Ego is a clever bastard. He knows how play on your fears and convince you that what you are experiencing is 'evil' according to your established beliefs. It won't kill your belief in God. You won't lose your faith. You won't become an atheist. At worst, if you were part of an abusive cult you will probably realize it and leave.

It's actually more like liposuction than cancer surgery. Once all the garbage is out of your system it's up to you to stay physically fit. Furthermore, just because the fat is gone doesn't mean you don't have high cholesterol or blood pressure anymore. Or that you won't have cravings for food. You are stuck in old thought patterns. You will have many new and enlighten patterns become available to you. Insights and epiphanies will avail themselves to you constantly as you experience the freedom of having that burden lifted. Just don't let your sexy new look go to your head. Remember you didn't earn it by hard work so it's not authentic spirituality unless you learn from the process and are able to achieve those same understandings yourself because the insights salvia will give you won't be complete. You have to learn to replicate the process of recieving them on your own in order to gain authentic freedom and maintain your new form of awareness. It takes exercise.

Exercise. That's how you prepare for salvia. Mediatation. Try reading some stuff on bhuddist pracitces and the goals of the meditation. It's about obtaining a third person person perspective on yourself so that you can observe yourself without judgment and the trappings of the ego, most namely, fear, shame, pride, lust etc.

He also wrote:

Originally Posted by Swim

It always comes about that I feel so articulate as I write. This must be pride and not truth because I always look back and while I understand what I was saying can't help but think that it was poorly written and/or incomplete.

It is on this practice of self-criticism I have developed a path of personal evolution. I don't aspire to be 'better' as a whole but just to be whole. To integrate yet another part of myself. I find my time and space limited to do so and always end up sacrificing something to incorporate something new.

It is thus that my focus has been fire, death, change, personal evolution. Always incomplete but always becoming complete.

I would like to elaborate on my methods. Several years ago I came upon a book about Buddhist practice. It talked about how to use meditation to achieve a third person perspective. Using this perspective allowed one to observe oneself without shame or pride and thus allow for a broader perspective by being free of limiting emotions and opinions.

Or, to gather relevant information without interpretation.

By doing this one becomes able to more accurately make decisions about how to transform oneself. Naturally that decision cannot be made without an objective. Objective requires judgment, opinion and first person character.

Thus I have what I call a Recycling Bin within my mind. This is where I put all my opinions, judgments, morals, or any preconceived notion of 'right', 'wrong', 'good', or 'evil or any such labels. Any and all labels are appropriate to this bin. Never can I completely put all such things there, but the more I find within my mind the more I can put it in there because the only thing that really prevents me from putting that stuff in there is being aware of it within my mind. And so I have learn to observe myself observe myself. Compounding the rate at which I expand my awareness.

Sometimes, after my awareness I find that I think it appropriate to pull things back out of the bin and put them on my 'Shelf'. This is rather like a bookshelf, or a trophy shelf. It's useful, displays my accomplishments, but means very little about who I really am even though it is something that I use to make decisions. It's like a temporary moral. I don't quite agree with it but I haven't created anything better yet.

Then I burn the recycle bin. I sit on the Funeral Pyre. Discarding those taboos. Becoming Aghori.

Meditation is a nice skill to be able to do all of this with. But what if I could set up a mechanism that would force my mind into that third person perspective? It upon this idea I have found and adapted a ritual exercise I do about once or twice a year. DXM. Dextromethorphan. Found in Cough Syrup medicines. Taken to certain dosages it produces dissociative effects.

Note that I am not here advocating it's usage. I make no excuses or justifications. I simply am saying what I do and why. If this is all you have read about the spiritual use of DXM, and find yourself intrigued enough to consider it. Do not without considerable education on how to use it. If you are interested in such I can discuss such briefly in PM but would recommend you seek a post of mine called 'Alternative Resources.'

That said, I have another powerful tool in my Entheogenic repertoire. Salvia Divinorum. I use this to evoke a state of mind where ALL egotistical opinions and judgments are removed. It is true ego death in it's higher plateaus. Some claim to talk to spirits here and I think perhaps I do as well but in my own fashion. For I what I do with this tool is observe myself discarding those egotistical trappings. By watching myself do it I can seehow it is done and replicate the process without it.

A note, Salvia is not fun; rather, it is funny. It's hilarious what you see when you're aren't attached anymore. It's like listening to George Carlin. The problem is that if you are afraid of letting go of your ego you will not find George Carlin funny at all. And you will go to hell for listening to him because the ego fearing death will flood the mind with nightmares attempting to preserve itself by making the experience unpleasant.

And even when it is funny, it is unpleasant. It's about as unpleasant as sitting on a bed talking to your family while you have only moments to live. Imagine though, that you can experience that with the assurance that you will in fact not die because no one has ever died from consuming Salvia.

I dealt with this issue for many years and can personally relate to that knee jerk fear reaction. The bad news is It won't go away, not for a long time no matter what reassurances anyone give you. Just a heads up.

Good news is, that doesn't mean it's acutally bad or evil because it's just that:

An emotional reaction.

Programmed by people telling you it is bad/evil. Hilter said that if you tell a lie long enough and loud enough people will eventually believe it.

I'll not cozy it up for you and tell you it's 'good' or 'safe' or 'not-harmful' because that's just as much a fantasy of arbitrary morals any egregoric system uses to propagandize itself and at the same time make sure those immature enough not to meditate up the spiritual ladder and gain awareness of actuality instead of morality remain more or less benign to the image of the egregore.

Just remember the only thing to fear is fear itself. You can tear down this wall they built in your mind to pacify their own fears and insecurities. Or you can remain, 'just another brick in the wall.' More good news! You have a choice.

You don't have to practice witchcraft or any egregore to break down the wall either. In fact doing so won't. I recommend studying and practicing some Bhuddist type meditations because they are design to teach you to remove yourself from preconceived notions of the world such as morals, ethic or any other scheme of arbitrary judgments based on words and not reality. Doing this will take you out of the matrix (Or, if you don't get that as a metaphor, try Plato's Cave). I can't tell you what it's like outside but I can tell you how to get there.

Bad news. It means killing your ego because everything you believe about yourself and this world is somehow locked deep inside you unconscious mind and you need a lot of meditation and education to dig it up, criticize it, rewrite it and put it back.

More bad news, the ego actually fights back. We've all been feeding it so long without letting it know that we are the master of our minds and not it. Good news is that it can't damage your psyche if you don't let it. You already have become aware of it's one and only weapon against you for it's survival: Fear. The same meditations to gain greater awareness will also give you mental skills at handling the fear it kicks your way.

Hey, there is even some stuff from back home you can look to for support. I always liked the 'Yea, tho I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for the Lord is with me." I liked it because it assured me that no matter what occult I studied, no matter what 'evil' I encountered I would always be safe. An ex-demonologist and atheist (Yeah, he was a piece of work, one of my best friends too) once told me (just as I was starting to question my religion and ask questions) that the one things about summoning demons was that if you ever summoned something you couldn't handle that you could always repent on the spot and pray for salvation and the Lord would come and banish away your mistake. He spoke from experience. Little did I realize he was using my own terminology to explain Consciousness (light) and unconsciousness (darkness, and the 'demons' within) and telling me that my own old egregores would always accept me back if I believed they would (and he fostered my belief).

Faith in old egregore's. Taken far enough though it fosters true faith in the self. That's why I became a Shoe Pirate. I call it as such after the old adage "walk a mile in someone else's shoes...'

You do know that the idea that 'he' isn't with you is just due to deep set trappings of your old programming right?

What about devotion to the people's idea of 'him' of that egregore makes you think you cannot devote to him unless you follow their way? In fact, doesn't exclusive devotion necessitate discarding of their egregore?

Remember, your perception of 'God' is just that: Your perception.

It's your mind and the only one stopping you from taking full control over it is your ego. If you like you have the will to dominate your ego. The ego serves a function and must have some construction but what that construction looks like is entirely up to how you build your walls. To tear down old walls necessitates the building of new ones or you will get rained on. Still, sometimes you need to build a new house if your old one was built on a poor foundation. I think there is a bible verse about that and I even think it's in red too.

Finally, I would like to address the fear of hell. After four years of occult study and personal alchemy I couldn't get over this gnawing fear that what I was doing was somehow wrong. I knew it stemmed right down to the fear of hell. I was deathly afraid that if I was wrong that I would go to hell. Ironic that, it was that self same contradictory notion (That a loving God would not use intimidation tactics to acquire devotion) that opened my eyes in the first place.

So I recommend the very book that dug so deep and showed to me why my fear of hell was completely unfounded. Why, if I chose to go to hell, it would in fact be a conscious choice and not a 'mistake' or something I did by accident.

C.S. Lewis, a highly acclaimed and famous christian apologist of the fifties and sixties, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia (a childhood favorite of mine), wrote a book, The Great Divorce. It's about some people the died and went to hell, they were given an opportunity to go to heaven but they had to endure certain painful trials. It explains firstly, why those trials were painful, secondly, why demons were in the mind, and lastly, why those who chose not to go to heaven did so. It's ironic how the sensualist gets into heaven before the fundamentalist. It goes hand in hand with Einstein's relative universe when it's you're closest friends and family that travel so far to talk to you to and show you the way to help you understand what you are experiencing.

Most of all, it makes sense. It's in plain language. You don't need to be a scholar to get it because it's all the same stuff you see in real life every day. People do it all the time, they deny the truth that is so obvious:that they are all wrong because no one can know everything (Omniscience:Absolute Truth) because their egos won't let go of their old egregores. Perfect harmony just doesn't have a place for such abusive paradigms that arise from using limited awareness to judge other people.

It's not a big book either. It's really short. Furthermore, it's completely void of any real egregore propaganda save a quite note at the beginning and another short bit at the end that seem more like a clever way to get those of limited awareness and harsh judgment to accept it just long enough to consider it's implications about how they think.

You Will find your true path because that's what Will is. You can't avoid it, so don't fear it. Fear only distracts you from being aware of what your Will is so that you can do it more effectively and 'timely'.

That's my 2 pieces 'o eight. Now don't take my word for it and go find your own.

I hope you do. well, not 'unleashing' them per se so much bringing them into the light of consciousness. If there are dark forces would you rather not be familiar with them and learn how to handle them so that you can properly deal with them instead of letting them stay in the shadows? I can assure you they are not 'leashed' as such. They do however know that if they step into the light of your awareness you will name them for what they are and have complete power over them. They know to hide themselves and work on you from the shadows. Bringing forth light into their darkness and naming them is in fact leashing them. Whereby they are as such 'purified' in a sense by the fire of light.