ego loss: meaning?

[Fistfulofdust]

I'm wondering
about ego loss, and trying to gain a more tangible sense of what it
really is. These questions have been floating around my head for a long
while, and this forum seems like a great place to gather information on
the topic.

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I'm wondering;
has anyone here achieved ego loss -- and if so, were you at all aware
of your own existence? Were you existing only in a subconscious state?
(I would assume that the subconscious also contains 'ego.')

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More
importantly: is ego loss possible? We can't really be sure that it's
not just another hallucination? (assuming you were on a drug, not
meditation). Even with meditation it could be a response to your
brain's desire to make it real, like speaking in tongues. If you are
thinking at all, you must still have an ego - I presume, but correct me
if that's a misconception.

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And finally, what has it done for you? What state of mind are you in an immersion immersion in such a strange state?

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Any input,
answers, or general comments are very welcome. PM me or contact me
through AIM if you would like to have a more in-depth discussion.

</font>

Reputation Comments on this post:

interesting thread

[Dimitri]

Hi Fistfulofdust,



hot topic that you want to speak about. Even so hot, that it is a
unspeakable one, meaning that one who experienced complete ego death
will not be able to describe it in words. Thats the nature of this
experience: the loss of the verbal concepts is a assumption for its
occuring.

Yes it is possible. After that you might be changed very deeply. It is
the deepest experience man can do. Nothing behind, the end of
everything. It doesn't matter if you judge it as another hallucination.
Because it is the infitity. the void, the nothing filled with pure
existence and nothing else. Hallucinations that is, what you have
before arriving this final state of concioussness.

Some philosophs also call it the "nonduality". It means, there is not
such thing that you can divide into 2, because it is the ONE that is
the last category you can put things in. It is precicely speaking not
the experience of something, because YOU, the experiencer and IT, the
experienced things are the same, without any boundaries.



Psychedelics, mostly tryptamines are a good tool to reach it, some
dissociatives as well (Keta, DXM, PCP,...). But you can also reach it
by meditation or other techniques. The drug itself is just a
catalysator, it can help you, but you need to do it on your own. Even
high amounts of Acid or whatever can not bring you there, without your
"permission".



What it did change for me? Everything. My thoughts, my perspective on
the world, myself, my state of conciousness, my life. It is something
that, if you experienced it will be difficult to deny, so think twice
before you want to go there.

[P!MPJU!C3]

Ego loss? What purpose must ego loss serve? Surely an ego to big might mean that communicating with other human beings might be somewhat difficult. On the other hand, being with out an ego is also not good in my opinion. Ego means I. So loosing ur ego would mean losing urself. That would/might make u somewhat bland, boring and people will walk all over you. Standing in line to get in 2 the club with out an ego will mean that ull never get in. Ull be pushed a side. Please explain to me what purpose ego loss serves.

P!MPJU!C3

[Creeping Death]

Ego loss is not permanent, its something that you can reach during a trip or deep meditation. When its over, its over.

And it can be very good. To discover yourself, you need to first lose yourself.

"If you ask yourself "who discovered water", you can be sure as hell that it wasnt a fish" - Terence Mckenna

[P!MPJU!C3]

Thanx man, that makes sense

The question, however, still stands.

What do u expect to find by doing all this medication and stuff? Find out who u are, what is the purpose of live? Look, ive read a lot of bullshit literature about people doing that kindah stuff and all sorts of psycho babbel bullshit. Really, it doesnt make sense. What do u hope to find? My friend, people have been doing this since the begining of human kind with adam and his hot stuff eve. Who are u? Its a trick question. Especially because it doesnt exist. Languege is a form of communication. There is no answer to who u are. Theres an answer to what u are and how old u are but not to who u are. Think about, take a second, as a matter fact take 4 minutes....U are u. Its as simple as that. Anybody that says he can answer that question is either a fool or a lier. Whats the purpose to life. What could be the answer to that question? The real answer and who would give it? Think about it. There is no answer, just theories.

P!MPJU!C3

[Diego]

Well, maybe my answer is not so profound, and since this is not my mother language I have linguistic limitations.


Ego loss ... try it with Ketamine, and you will know it right away. Most of people doing K inject themselves IM. This is a sure way to go "ego loss". SWIM doesn´t like needles, so he takes nasal bumps instead.


Once, in a rave in the dessert mountains, he took 3 or 4 bumps of K in a row (after taking bumps of K spaced for an hour for the last 4 hours). After a few minutes he was laying on the sand, holding his friend´s hand, unable to see the physical world.


He was going somewere, and told his friend not to let go his hand, or he would fall into somewere. These were the last counsious thoughts he had for the next 30 minutes.


SWIM was ... he doesn´t know where. He did not remember who he was, more precisely, WHAT he was. Did he existed at all? was he a thought? a physical being? a mental being? WHAT WAS HE??? HOW MANY TIMES WAS HE? WHAT DOES "TO BE" MEANS? WHAT IS THIS ?


The he got in touch with beings, unable to see them but able to feel them and comunicate with them. The he saw himself as an amorphous material, that exploted in small little cubes and this cubes got integrated in all other material beings in the universe. He was becoming part of everything.


For him, ego loss is forgetting WHAT I am, forgetting that I AM, like being death and not knowing it.


IM ketamine is a sure way to go, or high dose of nasal ketamine. Ketamine gives an interesting trip, but "dark, obscure". SWIM thinks Ketamine should be in every man´s phychedelic experience.


After ketamine experiences, SWIM changed the way he sees this world and his belife of the non physical universe and the things to come. Now he is sure of life after death, and he is confident and has a more relaxed life. All these trough ego loss.

[psychotropic]

Great topic. Ego loss lies at the center of my theory of self and the core satisfaction I get from drug use.


I subscribe to a cognitive dissonance theory of psychology. Basically, it means that we all have multiple concepts of self: one ideal self that we strive to become and an appraisal of our actual self.


When we're in a bad mood, or are unhappy, or feel unsatisfied, it's because of cognative dissonance. If you sat down and thought about it for long enough, you'd eventually figure out that you were dissappointed in yourself for not being productive enough, or not paying your bills, or you let something critical that someone said about you disrupt your view of yourself, and so on...


When you trip out hard you overload your brain such that it loses the capacity to retain either of those concepts completely. It's what Aldous Huxley called the 'not self' state in the 'Doors of Perception'. I've tripped out so hard that when I look at my girlfriend I don't think of her as my girlfriend but rather Mike's girlfriend (which is me but I don't identify with myself).


The borderland to complete egoloss is scary, because you start to wonder if you'll come back from it. If you truly acheive it though, all the fear goes away. It has to, because the fears are all rooted in the value systems that you're shedding. If you're afraid, you didn't lose your ego completely.


When you finally complete your ego loss, the result is Zen to borrow a concept from our Buddhist friends. Or to describe the result in psychological terms: The result is cognative harmony. You have to be harmonious because your conceptions of your ideal self and your actual self are so basic that it's impossible to feel dissonance. At this point I do not fear death; I feel infinitely connected to all other matter because I see myself for the hunk of matter that I am.


Sure, you could probably acheive the dissolution of self with years of meditation study, but I like my self. Drugs cheat that by allowing you to be self absorbed like everyone else most of the time, but selfless and sublime at other times. It's one of the greatest gifts I've ever received from reality.

[daeron]

i have found that ego loss can be one of the most profound trips drugs can create,and after the initial scare you can observe the world through a very different perspective.I think when you look at the world during the ego loss trip you are as objective as any human can ever be(dunno if I expressed myself very well by hey..).


The ego loss on K is too confusing,cos youve got to not only cope with the fact that youre nonexistent,but you also have to fight to stay conscious.On lsd or high dose of shrooms,the trip is more clear and after a few ego disintegrations youll learn to enjoy it and to observe the world.Im not at all a spiritual or religious person,so my trips may be a bit different.i tend to try and percieve the universe as a reality without any human related distortions to blurry your vision.


i hope i wasnt too confusing..


PS have you ever had a "old man" trip during the ego loss?yknow when you look at eg. your handsand think: "these are not my hands these are the hands of an old man...wait what does "my" mean?And who is this sad old man.." ad infinitum


Ive talked to a lot of people and you would be surprised how many of them had the same trip..

[Fistfulofdust]

The only "ego loss" I get on high doses of dissociatives is emptiness.
I feel like I am nothing, and certainly nothing profound ever came from
that state I was in.



In that nothingness - there was no ego, because there was no mind, no
body, no world, no universe. If that could be likened, in a twisted
way, to a state of ego loss, I want to stay away. Life and all that
comes along with it are here so that I don't have to suffer the
nothingness.



In my experience, if it was at all related to 'ego loss,' I must conclude that I love my ego. Love it dearly.

[yuval]

very very nice thread


prospero said:


When you finally complete your ego loss, the result is Zen to borrow a concept from our Buddhist friends. Or to describe the result in psychological terms: The result is cognative harmony. You have to be harmonious because your conceptions of your ideal self and your actual self are so basic that it's impossible to feel dissonance. At this point I do not fear death; I feel infinitely connected to all other matter because I see myself for the hunk of matter that I am.


that's beautiful!


here's what i think:


First off i'd like to straighten a few things out. ego loss is not exactly what psychologists call ego. it is the eastern ego. the thinking mind, as opposed to pure consciousness in which there are no thoughts, only pure existence. so being walked on because you are egoless is not an issue. your egoless personality is very calm and very focused and very lucid. you actually understand people more and know how to manage them better (other than in stress situations) because what you see is the naked reality, unfiltered.


There is a great book written on why identifying with thoughts is not cool, and why not doing it IS cool, called "the power of now" by eckhart tolle. it's so good it became immensely popular - slowly gaining cult status, and finally, 5 years after its publication, it reached the #1 NY Times bestseller list.


now fistfulofdust, your question shows lack of understanding that is perhaps the most common misconception with people interested in mystical experiences -with people who didn't have it on drugs. druggies know better because they've actually experienced mystical experience. aren't we lucky to live in these times. i will explain:


you can cease all thoughts and become pure consciousness while in deep meditation. this type of meditation is called "samadhi" or sometimes "one-pointedness of the mind". a "thought" is defined in yoga as a fluctuation in the level of the mind, or to be more clear - anything you are aware of. when you become aware of nothing: let go of your thoughts, let go of all your body sensations, withdraw your senses from the outside world (called "pratyahara"), you go into samadhi and become pure awareness. all you have left is the feeling of existence, and a profound feeling of happiness.


"samadhi" is the last stage of yoga. the yoga path has 8 steps. the 6th is concentration (on an object). the 7th is meditation: deep concentration (so deep your EEG reading changes). the 8th is "samadhi", which isconcentration on nothing, on the void. it's a passive practice, you basically let all thoughts go away by doing nothing. like a car whose engine is turned off when it's doing 80. slowly the engines spins slower and slower until there's a sudden dropand suddenly SILENCE. it stops.


generally it took people many years to get to this. in 1983 one Rishi Prabhakar developed a technique you can now pick up at his org www.ssy.org in a 2- or 3-week course, then practice it for a few months until you get it right. it will help you greatly if you practice it in a sense depravation tank, e.g. www.samadhitank.com- physicist feynmann did that a lot, but on drugs not while meditating (read his autobiography, "surely you're joking," for the description)


when you're doing samadhi meditation 3 times a day for 15 minutes, your consciousness shifts into samadhi consciousness, which is the mystical experience or what is also called the ego loss state: connectedness with the universe, "surity of action" (no doubts), andsilence as asound: you experience stillness as the default experience, even in the presence of external noise. this is why eckhart tolle's second book is called "stillness speaks". also a nice one but not as groundbreaking as "the power of now".


and this is what everyone described here in this thread, which when you get to for the first time blows your mind out. mystical experience is consistently reported as the most significant event in the life of people who've experienced it. in my personal experience this is true. and the silence, at least for a newbie, doesn't matter much - neither do halluciantions. the real deal is the one-ness with the universe feeling, the feeling of harmonious existence.

[ramjet]

It's a term or phrase that's used very frequently when apparent veteren psychonauts are discussing trips.



For me, it is the dissolution of the selfish or self-serving, competetive sides of my personality.



It is also that part of a trip which takes you over the edge into never
never land, where you completely lose your sense of self-identity and
nothing quite makes sense anymore.



So my question is: what does it mean to you, how often do you
experience it and which drugs do you experience it on/have you
experienced it on?

[Dimitri]

I m not sure, what you exactly mean with your description.

Especially the question "how often do you experience it".

I experiences an ego dissolution every time I trip on a "normal" dose.


Lowdose on e.g. acid, mushrooms or any other psychedelic substances
have only very low potential to dissolve the ego. The substance is like
a fuel pushing the ego dissolution forwards. Sometimes (quite seldom
actually, only twice in my life) you can experience a complete ego
loss. Most dissoziatives (Ketamine, DXM, PCP) and Tryptamines (LSD,
Mushrooms,...) are usable, but it is NEVER the drug alone. You allways
have to at least admit or agree with the deep exploration and the
effects of the drug completely.

Complete ego loss or also called Ego death or in philosophical
literature "non-duality" experiences are something you don't just
have on a trip. It is a life changing thing, the deepest experience a
human beeing can have. No more answers, no more questions, everything
explained,...and so on.

Did you mean this term or did you refer to the process of ego dissolution? (which are two different things)




Edited by: Dimitri

[ramjet]

well, the whole idea confuses me, which is probably why my
description/questions are confusing. I've heard people talk about ita
lot and drawn inferences from that but I have never read any literature
on it.



I was probably refering to total ego loss, or maybe just extreme ego
dissolution. For me, if you hit the right dose (which is 50/50 for me:
I always er on the cautious side, but my tolerance has been building so
I don't feel any real sort of ego loss on one portion/20g fresh any
longer) it's like something suddenly switches in your head and you lose
your self-identity, at which point the nature of reality becomes very
confusing because to a large extent we understand the things around us
by comparing them to ourselves and realising that we exist independetly
of other things. When you lose your self-identity it's as if you don't
exist independently of everything else, but exist as part of a whole.
Well, that's just my understanding from my personal experiences, I may
be slightly off the mark. Is ego death something that only happens
once? What are it's consequences and surely if you really lost your ego
in the Jungian/Freudian sense?

[daeron]

when i say ego loss i mean what dimitri and others call ego death.It happened to me at least 12 times so imho its not a one time thing.Also it always occured while taking relatively high doses of psychodelics,so i guess there must be some point when the part of the cortex that defines you as a person gets "overloaded" as in lsd,shroom,etc exp or gets "shutdowned" as in a dissociative exp.Thats my halfass guess,anyway.

[polloloco001]

i tihnk i have experienced this twice, on 900 and 600 mg of dxm. it's
like you don't even have a concept of yourself as a person. you seem to
become just sort of a collection of sensory perceptions being analyzed
by a brain, but you don't even feel as if you're one entity. i never
felt it on shrooms though. i didn't even think it was possible except
on dissociatives.

[FrankenChrist]

Is the total loss (heh) of self and all material need not a goal of buddhists?
Do you not need this kind of experience or the striving to such an experience, to realise that there is/may be more than just the material world and superficial needs. To become something greater or become part of something greater, you need to stop being something smaller.

OK I'll stop for now...

[transit]

Each time that I think that I know what
such terms mean and that “I” have experienced it, along comes another
experience to show just how far off “I” was.
</span>The single most helpful book for me on the topic is <i style="">I am That[/i] by Nisargadatta Maharaj.</span>

[Dimitri]

Yes I guess the material (substance) one can use is just a individual
preferation, but it is definitely senseless to say: with this substance
you reach the end point (or better the turnaround-point) of the
universe. Some go better with tryptamines such as Acid, mushrooms or
some now available RC's, others have success with dissociatives and
then their is lots of psychological techniques as well. At least it
will not just "happen" to someone if he or she don't want it. The drug
itself is not all some agreement or hinking (or better nonthinking) is
also needed.

All this
methods are just "ways" or "path", the end point; the experience of the
complete void without concepts of words and terms is more like "the
same for all". You can give it some features such as there is no time,
no space or no other dimension. But precisely speaking this is wrong,
cause it is more like the absence of any features that we can give to
anything. It is just described from the existence side of the reality.



I for myself wouldn't be able to experience it a few times...it try to
avoid high dosages these days. Because my reality needs much of my ego,
I cannot destroy it and rebuild it just over a weekend. Think twice
before you head for such goal.

"The psychedelic experience" from Leary is kind of a guidbook for it.


Edited by: Dimitri

[jaguarangel]

Ego loss can be a very scary experience. I kept calling my name and hearing
me say it but I could not see my identity. Knowing that I could hear my voice
proved that I still existed. I am very grateful to be alive!

[prospero]

I get ego loss on Ketamine and mushrooms. For me it means the complete loss of all understanding of what it means to be 'me'. I can describe myself and my life in perfect detail but have no idea what it all actually means anymore. Also, as I have no concept of'me',I therefore can't relate to anything else either, so in fact the whole world around me loses meaning. Strangely though I can still function. For example I can decide to get out for a walk, and successfully leave the flat, lock the door behind me, and negotiate the outside world, without really understanding any of it.


Unfortunately, although some people say ego-loss is profoundly enlightening, for me it's just confusing and teaches me nothing at all.

[twintornado]

swim took 85 x 15mg dxm tabs and lost all sense of space and time could fly through time. i expect they looked almost comatose

v.interesting experience

[insanity]

egoloss in my experience has not always been a good experience. from my experience humans need ego to survive. thus the reason we have egos.

[Sick Jack]

Yes, but you need a equilibrium between no self-respect and an out of porportion ego.

You need this ego in order to differentiate yourself from the others, but an out of proportion ego leads oft to be convinced by your "superiority" in comparison to the crowd, just because you are unable to have feelings as compassion, empathy or love.

Compassion, empathy or love have a huge importance in our "evolution/survival metaprogram", because this feelings make living in community possible.

Lake of such feelings (= an out of proportion ego) leads to dominatior's behaviour, wars and globally the unhuman kind of societies in where we live .