Reality is not timeless, and your ego doesn't need to die.

[zn13bt]

I'm coming down from an MXE trip, and I see some of the recent thread titles here and I have something to say:

There is a seductive state of mind that we can attain on psychedelics.
It seems perfect and timeless, we forget who we are, and all of our worldly concerns fall away.
Many of us have been rejuvenated and our lives enriched after encountering this place in our minds.

But then we try to explain what happened, and we fall into a trap of language.
We say that we became God, or experienced ego-death, or discovered that time is an illusion.
But these are distorted descriptions of what really happened.
After all, how could you know that you transcended your ego if supposedly there was noone there anymore to experience anything?
How could you say that you experienced a timeless state of being if you had to enter into it and then exit out of it?
What would it even mean to have a conscious experience without some minimal sense of self-awareness or the passage of time?

These ideas point at the special place in the mind, and yet they set up false oppositions that lead the mind away from it.
In fact, this place is always with us all the time, even when we're not aware of it.
It's not really a separate place at all. It is the foundation from which all experience comes and goes. We exist within it, always.

Your ego doesn't need to die. You need your ego to live.
Reality is not timeless. Things need to exist in time to exist at all.
And that is just as it should be.

 

[Solipsis]

Pretty sure one of the threads was the current ego-death thread and you are talking about the post where I mention timelessness among other posts you may be referencing... right?

To clarify about that particular strong ego-death I was calling timeless: if I enter a state, then experience 'something', then during that state simultaneously get the feeling that it might be lasting a second but it might just as easily be lasting countless years, then after coming out of the state extremely confused (and triggering an existential crisis lasting years) discover that I had been in that state for about 5 hours... how can I not describe the state as feeling timeless? If time and frankly everything else loses meaning, I'd call that timeless.

Time being an illusion is a reference to someone else's words I guess, either way.. there are many ideas and theories about 'time' many involving the belief that it is a human concept. Whether it is illusory or not (and with that whether it is extra illusory during some states of consciousness) really depends on how you look at it. We consider spacetime a fundamental property of reality but time taken from that is a sort of derived model.

I think it can have meaning to temporarily lose yourself because it can reframe your beliefs about your self / yourself and your place in life or reality. However it can also be damned confusing.
No I would not say that there is any need for people having ego-loss but it is not completely pointless either. Although I am familiar with the feeling that dissociation can feel in vain.
And just like much can be said about the unhealthy nature of people seeking numbness in opiates, seeking oblivion in dissociatives can also be a real negation of our beautiful lives.

But I don't think that means that all ego-deaths on psychedelics are really similar to that.

Obviously these experiences are extreme distortions, but that is kind of the point. I don't think it is reasonable to say that they are untrue descriptions compared to what really happened because our sense of self is dependent on ourselves, you can't say that during an ego-death experience in actuality your sense of self is intact when it subjectively just isn't experienced that way.

Maybe you mean that the death of your actual self must not be taken too literally and that this may possibly lead people to get stuck in 'purgatory' unnecessarily long?

Going to oblivion and back can really be quite special, but no it is pretty tricky to consider it as something more than life or something that is a goal of its own or has bigger importance than it actually has.
There is great potential in integrating such experiences and growing from them, and it is certainly okay and healthy for the sense of self to bounce back with resilience. I think we should be able to have some flexibility there, to be able to both see that our 'self' is not something static and fixed we can't change anything about... but we should be kind to our self, indeed not try to 'kill' it every chance we get and pretend that it is a lie.
Putting it in perspective and in its place, seeing it for what it is, that is good.

 

[pupnik]

The experience of timelessness is crucial.
more than timeless what is happening is a change in the sense of time passing. Yes?

Our consciousness is normally experienced as a series of moments that arise and pass away, which has a lovely movie like consistency, and from that consistency we experience all of our senses normally: our vision seems well integrated with a 3-d world and the we know what has come before what - the passage of time is sensed as a consistent continuum.
Later on we can recall things fairly well, reconstructing what happened with relative ease (depending on the significance of events that happened).

When we are high, however, each signal in the affected parts of the brain fades more slowly but they continue to arrive as per usual.

This causes the experience of each moment to last longer in our consciousness, and, by fading more slowly, to overlap the following moment - the overlap is longer the more stoned we get. and when we are very blotto the overlapped moments are actually stacking up which enhances and encumbers the stream of consciousness, and the "sense of time and space".

Because of stacking, all senses seem richer, and significantly the sense of time passing is different: you easily move back and forth through several moments or time seems to stop as you linger with a slowly fading gestalt.

Time seems to stop and then you may continue (not stopped) and then you may pause and it stops perfectly smoothly. This describes timelessness, and it does feel like a perfect place: this simple mechanism also generates the scenario for deja vu and time running backwards, I have puzzled at a rotary clock's second hand running backwards for 10 seconds on my first acid trip.

This perfect place is not a place it is a side effect of conscious moments fading more slowly,
which is literally a state of mind, or a brain state with longer (more resonant) fading of signals.

The resonant brain state can be drug induced or emotionally induced or induced by concentration meditation. A version of this state occurs as we come out of deep sleep and go into deep sleep. It is the sweet spot in psychedelic drug dosing. Higher doses than the sweet spot cause severe or intermittent blackout or white out due to incomprehensible layering of the longest fading of signals....

 

[Zebra or the Logos]

The experience of timelessness is crucial.
more than timeless what is happening is a change in the sense of time passing. Yes?

Our consciousness is normally experienced as a series of moments that arise and pass away, which has a lovely movie like consistency, and from that consistency we experience all of our senses normally: our vision seems well integrated with a 3-d world and the we know what has come before what - the passage of time is sensed as a consistent continuum.
Later on we can recall things fairly well, reconstructing what happened with relative ease (depending on the significance of events that happened).

When we are high, however, each signal in the affected parts of the brain fades more slowly but they continue to arrive as per usual.

This causes the experience of each moment to last longer in our consciousness, and, by fading more slowly, to overlap the following moment - the overlap is longer the more stoned we get. and when we are very blotto the overlapped moments are actually stacking up which enhances and encumbers the stream of consciousness, and the "sense of time and space".

Because of stacking, all senses seem richer, and significantly the sense of time passing is different: you easily move back and forth through several moments or time seems to stop as you linger with a slowly fading gestalt.

Time seems to stop and then you may continue (not stopped) and then you may pause and it stops perfectly smoothly. This describes timelessness, and it does feel like a perfect place: this simple mechanism also generates the scenario for deja vu and time running backwards, I have puzzled at a rotary clock's second hand running backwards for 10 seconds on my first acid trip.

This perfect place is not a place it is a side effect of conscious moments fading more slowly,
which is literally a state of mind, or a brain state with longer (more resonant) fading of signals.

The resonant brain state can be drug induced or emotionally induced or induced by concentration meditation. A version of this state occurs as we come out of deep sleep and go into deep sleep. It is the sweet spot in psychedelic drug dosing. Higher doses than the sweet spot cause severe or intermittent blackout or white out due to incomprehensible layering of the longest fading of signals....

Pupnik, I have seen you post similar responses as this regarding the phenomenological aspects of the psychedelic experience. Your insight into the experience of time and space is really quite fantastic. I am most Interested in your notion of "stacking" and the layering of perception. I would imagine that your insight comes from personal experience and I find that it overlaps with my own quite nicely. Could you point me in the direction of some texts (like the quote at the end of your post) that have been useful to you? If you have links to other similar threads that you have started or participated in that pertain to the same or similar subject matter then that would be helpful as well. One thing that reminds me of some of your writing is "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan. The chapter on marijuana where he describes the perception of time (under the stoned mind) is excellent.

 

[pupnik]

Pupnik, I have seen you post similar responses as this regarding the phenomenological aspects of the psychedelic experience. Your insight into the experience of time and space is really quite fantastic. I am most Interested in your notion of "stacking" and the layering of perception. I would imagine that your insight comes from personal experience and I find that it overlaps with my own quite nicely. Could you point me in the direction of some texts (like the quote at the end of your post) that have been useful to you? If you have links to other similar threads that you have started or participated in that pertain to the same or similar subject matter then that would be helpful as well. One thing that reminds me of some of your writing is "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan. The chapter on marijuana where he describes the perception of time (under the stoned mind) is excellent.

I will look up Botany of Desire, sounds interesting. that at the bottom is not a quote it is me trying to stop talking or silence myself rather than just going on forever, so I reduced the font to make ending easier than just stopping abruptly.

yes several decades of personal experience, and studying of brain and behavior... what I propose is not contra any of the science, and it is a synthesis of bits of Buddhism (abhidhamma) as well as western psychology. I took a degree in biochemistry, and I am a systems person, so I try to take into account the whole scheme when I highlight relationships. I first came up with the observation of slower fading and stacking in 1974, and kept revisiting it. Around 2003, when I got into salvia, I realized that I could time mind moments and measure the stack and relate it to my dose.

ordinarily a signal pulse train (from any sense object or idea object - so any mental content) lasts up to 1/15th of a second with very little overlap, but usually there is overlap of one kind or another to facilitate formation of short and long term memory. when stoned the signal pulse train in the cerebral cortex can be extended up to 20 - 30 times in my case, and longer for many other people before blacking out begins. with the longer pulse trains it is easy to go off on a side trip and say something with one attitude and then answer it with a completely different attitude, and then answer back as if possessed of seemingly autonomous entities which persist by not quite fading, and react as if by reflex that is not alone in the stream of consciousness, which can buffer more than one self at any of these extended moments.

 

[Goddess Mode]

My thoughts on...

Becoming God: For me, this kind of experience is what occurs when a point is reached that your imagination becomes a fully immersive world that you inhabit, and so literally anything you think materializes in real-time. I personally wouldn't describe this as becoming god because I'm not religious, but the implication in any context is clear, and even someone like me who does not believe in god while sober can believe just about anything on a drug.

Timelessness: When I say this, it has nothing to do with me not perceiving a passage of time. It has to do with me entering a plane of existence which at the time feels as though it has always existed before me and we'll always continue to exist after me in the same state, and hence time is truly meaningless there. So far, I have only and always experienced this following the experience of my own death.

Ego Death: A more proper term would be ego loss. When put that way, I don't think there's anything wrong with how people put it at all. You cannot experience ego death, but you can experience extremely severe ego loss, enough that you will lose any ability to discern who you are. Beyond that I think it's just nitpicking.

Ego loss is a real thing as far as I see it, but not necessarily mystical in any way. The ideas of becoming god and timelessness for me are just delusions. However, I also don't think that there's any better way to describe them, or that those descriptions detract from them. I am merely explaining how I felt at the time, like describing a dream after you wake up. I don't think the scrutiny should fall on the experience itself but whether or not we allow them to perhaps mistakenly influence our lives by taking them too seriously, but not everyone who talks about them that way necessarily does.

 

[Vurtual]

@pupnik - That moments fading/stacking idea is a fascinating way to explain it that rings true with my own timeless experiences. It seems to be be saying similar things to the 'neural feedback' model of psychedelics i half-remember reading about (like agonists turning the gain up in a neural feedback loop usually used for pattern recgnition or something).

My experience: Last time on the allad peak when i lost my ego 'i' had a 'timeless' perception of a whole spectrum of moments/thoughts/actions at once in some sort of complex superposed wave, fanning out from the point i'd dropped the tab, like a rainbow coloured smear across existence (this is what it 'looked' like to me, not gratuitious language). I perceived the successive moments that i was in the peak (about 2 hours) as a single timeless gestalt, that i was nonetheless exploring and interacting with in some non-linear way (i know the language is paradoxical). Only after my 'me' came back later did i recognise what i was perceiving as moments of 'my' life, and remember the 'proper' time sequence, and how it related to 'me'/reaity; in the peak i had no idea that there was a me; though it seemed there was some sort of 'me' observing and choosing, separate from the 'moments' i was perceiving, it was not 'conscious'.

While i only put it together and 'understood' it afterwards via my 'ego'/time-brain, the actual memory itself is still vivid to me right now and can be dipped into, so i don't think it's retrospectively created meaning (like some theorise about dreams etc).

Maybe that timeless state is a glimpse of the real reality oustide of plato's cave, and in that state the intractable problems of meaning/god/exisitence are as simple and obvious as the beauty of a sunset or pythagoras' theorem (or maybe i'm just tripped out on drugs). eg, all moments all just exist eternally connected together by causal connections as one big complex wave; our brains/minds create an illusion that reality is one snapshot moment threading through time, but all the moments that have/will/could have been all just exist together infinitely interconnected when seen from outside the time dimension, and timeless experience is a transient recognition of that reality.

 

[psy997]

Maybe that timeless state is a glimpse of the real reality oustide of plato's cave, and in that state the intractable problems of meaning/god/exisitence are as simple and obvious as the beauty of a sunset or pythagoras' theorem (or maybe i'm just tripped out on drugs). eg, all moments all just exist eternally connected together by causal connections as one big complex wave; our brains/minds create an illusion that reality is one snapshot moment threading through time, but all the moments that have/will/could have been all just exist together infinitely interconnected when seen from outside the time dimension, and timeless experience is a transient recognition of that reality.

This is exactly what I believe.

 

[pupnik]

the thing is, "when the me comes back" then I can begin to see what the sequence was - is the same thing.
that the experience occurred means that experiencing does not require processing and reacting which can be reduced to a long slow "... wow... " or a long slow " yaiieeekes..." depending on set and setting.

the me coming back is the facility of processing and reacting, that facility becomes encumbered by the layering...
i.e. the layering of sensation and thought objects, producing space and time dilation, misaligns our usual associative abilities:
the linkages (between ideas) depend on timing being similar as well as shape, smell, color, sound, feeling, etc.
especially any linkages with language based thought.

 

[zn13bt]

Pretty sure one of the threads was the current ego-death thread and you are talking about the post where I mention timelessness among other posts you may be referencing... right?

Actually the other thread I was referencing was the DMT timeless reality one. I wasn't trying to single out any particular post or poster though, these ideas are very common when trying to describe the ineffable mental states achieved on psychedelics. (Also I was trying to write an "MXE sermon" in the style of Asante )

To clarify about that particular strong ego-death I was calling timeless: if I enter a state, then experience 'something', then during that state simultaneously get the feeling that it might be lasting a second but it might just as easily be lasting countless years, then after coming out of the state extremely confused (and triggering an existential crisis lasting years) discover that I had been in that state for about 5 hours... how can I not describe the state as feeling timeless? If time and frankly everything else loses meaning, I'd call that timeless.

I would say that your sense of time was distorted, but still it sounds like you had some sense of time passing and you recognized that there was a duration to the experience even if you were confused about how long it really was. I don't see how it would be possible to have a conscious experience that is literally timeless, as in lacking any dimension in time at all.

Maybe you mean that the death of your actual self must not be taken too literally and that this may possibly lead people to get stuck in 'purgatory' unnecessarily long?

Going to oblivion and back can really be quite special, but no it is pretty tricky to consider it as something more than life or something that is a goal of its own or has bigger importance than it actually has.
There is great potential in integrating such experiences and growing from them, and it is certainly okay and healthy for the sense of self to bounce back with resilience. I think we should be able to have some flexibility there, to be able to both see that our 'self' is not something static and fixed we can't change anything about... but we should be kind to our self, indeed not try to 'kill' it every chance we get and pretend that it is a lie.
Putting it in perspective and in its place, seeing it for what it is, that is good.

Yes, this is exactly what I'm getting at. The self is not an illusion; it is a boundary which we are constantly renegotiating moment by moment. And it's not a spiritual flaw or something that needs to be transcended or obliterated, it's actually a very necessary part of our psychology as conscious, biologically embodied beings.

I'm not saying that these experiences aren't valuable, just that the way they're commonly conceptualized is misleading. Describing these mental states as "ego-death" encourages self-destructive behavior, such as taking higher and higher doses or unfamiliar combinations of drugs, in an attempt to obliterate the sense of self. The first post in the ego-death thread is a good example, the guy had a blackout while tripping and wondered if he had experienced ego death. Well he did, if you take the meaning of the term literally...

I've seen similar kinds of problems in certain meditation groups, where the members keep spending more and more time in meditation and suppress their own individuality in an attempt to become more enlightened....but this just results in a bunch of creepy anhedonic pod-people.

I don't know what a better name for it would be though....maybe "boundary loss"? Not quite as catchy though. How about, "plumbing the depths"

This perfect place is not a place it is a side effect of conscious moments fading more slowly,
which is literally a state of mind, or a brain state with longer (more resonant) fading of signals.

The resonant brain state can be drug induced or emotionally induced or induced by concentration meditation. A version of this state occurs as we come out of deep sleep and go into deep sleep. It is the sweet spot in psychedelic drug dosing. Higher doses than the sweet spot cause severe or intermittent blackout or white out due to incomprehensible layering of the longest fading of signals....

What you described makes a lot more sense than the mental model I had, which was that the "frame rate" of conscious processing is somehow suppressed in normal everday reality but increases to its full potential while tripping.

What do you mean by "emotionally induced"? Such as, in a traumatic experience? I was hit by a car once, and I remember experiencing it all in slow-motion.

 

[pupnik]

yes emotion does it,
drugs do it
and naturally moving into and out of deep sleep we do this
by concentration meditation, one can do it without falling asleep and without drugs or emotional trigger.

 

[Solipsis]

I would say that your sense of time was distorted, but still it sounds like you had some sense of time passing and you recognized that there was a duration to the experience even if you were confused about how long it really was. I don't see how it would be possible to have a conscious experience that is literally timeless, as in lacking any dimension in time at all.

Acknowledging that there was a time dimension to the experience is something you and me are attributing now to it, a posteriori. We operate under the assumption that there must have been, as is usual for us, but no there really was no meaningful time factor to that experience.
There was no differentiated events registered by me during what I later found out where hours that had passed. Since we measure the passing of time mentally by the frequency of events that register with us, absence thereof rendered the whole experience timeless.

I kinda know DMT hyperspace where things can be felt to happen outside the domain of time. I think that is slightly different. There are still events we register as having happened but they are just not put in the usual timeframe. We cannot use any perceived frequency to give us an idea of how long it might have taken. In dreams something similar weird effects can happen with time. But I might argue that the experience I described having was more complete in its timelessness. I think a whiteout is also sometimes what it is described like what happened to me. Something that can also for example happen with 5-MeO-DMT.

All that timelessness talk might sometimes also be a bit of a semantics discussion I guess....

Yes, this is exactly what I'm getting at. The self is not an illusion; it is a boundary which we are constantly renegotiating moment by moment. And it's not a spiritual flaw or something that needs to be transcended or obliterated, it's actually a very necessary part of our psychology as conscious, biologically embodied beings.

I'm not saying that these experiences aren't valuable, just that the way they're commonly conceptualized is misleading. Describing these mental states as "ego-death" encourages self-destructive behavior, such as taking higher and higher doses or unfamiliar combinations of drugs, in an attempt to obliterate the sense of self. The first post in the ego-death thread is a good example, the guy had a blackout while tripping and wondered if he had experienced ego death. Well he did, if you take the meaning of the term literally...

I've seen similar kinds of problems in certain meditation groups, where the members keep spending more and more time in meditation and suppress their own individuality in an attempt to become more enlightened....but this just results in a bunch of creepy anhedonic pod-people.

I don't know what a better name for it would be though....maybe "boundary loss"? Not quite as catchy though. How about, "plumbing the depths"



What you described makes a lot more sense than the mental model I had, which was that the "frame rate" of conscious processing is somehow suppressed in normal everday reality but increases to its full potential while tripping.

What do you mean by "emotionally induced"? Such as, in a traumatic experience? I was hit by a car once, and I remember experiencing it all in slow-motion.

Yes, if we are under great pressure I think things like hormones and adrenaline can contribute to shifting our state of mind. But with psychedelics it is already so warped that reactions the mind might have to protect itself like protective mechanisms may be warped into really unusual states of consciousness where we are seemingly disconnected from our body or self or something else we are definitely not used to being disconnected from.

I do dislike the term ego-death and frankly most of all the confusing effect it is having on people. In the current 'was it ego-death' thread it is getting very tiresome to address reactions I consider misled. I wanna help clarifying there but I'd really prefer it if I would get some assistance. Not in that people should agree with me, but rather that people may share their own opinion and perspective, but contribute to answer and clarify and not only to ask, doubt, misunderstand.

 

[pupnik]

what kind of assistance do you want?

ego is arbitrarily defined,
and ego death is unfortunately defined as a thing that comes with a strong dose of psychedelic.
But we know that the timeless thing or an odd dimensional shift is happening at the same time with nearly all mention of "ego death"

Another terrible term is Breakthrough. oy!

the worst term is "bad trip"

the terms are so frequently floated around that it is like a political argument when you take any stance that is against the grain - people are making friends with each other using these terms, and becoming clique members with these terms, how dare we question the foundations of friendship...

 

[Solipsis]

Well just answer some people's questions I guess, there seems to be a lot of confusion.

And yes I agree that there are a number of ambiguous terms and sometimes they are used or misused in a way that doesn't clarify but mostly convolutes or obscures matters.
Subjectivity definitely has to be taken into account at all times... but it can also get really interesting talking about strong psychedelic effects and strong dissociation. And I think that distortion of relatively normal / typical psychological states can tell us something about those states. It's important to be able to take a step back to put things into perspective, although we can never truly escape our vantage point.

 

[Vurtual]

the thing is, "when the me comes back" then I can begin to see what the sequence was - is the same thing...

And yet there remains the strong impression that even when the me was gone, there was still some sort of me left (or at least a point of observation) which was seperate to the sense data cloud; similar to how sure i am that i actually went through a dream, even as i forget the details (which is not that sure i suppose). So i wonder what is 'processing' that under-me, as i don't think i stitched that in afterwards (though i suppose it all rest on processes all the way down to the lowest cellular/biochemical level (or it's turtles all the way down), so who's to say ultimately at which level the basic me-ness starts or ends?)

 

[velmwend]

It's all good. It's all in the mix. Experience whatever: a few firings here, a couple of twitches there. It all ends, then it's back to the mix. There's no time scale, it only exists in a conscious mind. Everything is happening now...including you birth and death.

 

[pupnik]

Well just answer some people's questions I guess, there seems to be a lot of confusion.

And yes I agree that there are a number of ambiguous terms and sometimes they are used or misused in a way that doesn't clarify but mostly convolutes or obscures matters.
Subjectivity definitely has to be taken into account at all times... but it can also get really interesting talking about strong psychedelic effects and strong dissociation. And I think that distortion of relatively normal / typical psychological states can tell us something about those states. It's important to be able to take a step back to put things into perspective, although we can never truly escape our vantage point.

that vantage point is what makes us special
hey
maybe ego loss is just the vanishing of the vantage point?

(I will think of something tomorrow.)