The Big & Dandy Ego Death Thread

[nopipesdfw]

Didn't do Alan Watts himself any good did it - seeing as he ended up a hopeless pisshead who drank himself to a miserable death. I remember reading how his kids would beg him to stop knocking back the whiskey and he couldn't.

Pick your poisons of this Earth carefully, kids, because if you achieve anything, they will be bitched about by Ismene.

 

[villian]

Since a couple people have mentioned ego death not being scary (which its not) I just want to elaborate a bit about what I went through. My trip was terrifying, not the ego death itself.

I was a lifelong 26 year atheist when the trip (DMT) started, and watching my body tear apart into atoms I instantly thought I had killed myself. I thought I was dying. I was fighting to hold on to life/reality extremely hard even though I had lots of psychedelic experience. I wasn't familiar with the concept of ego death and I thought I had literally managed to kill myself. In retrospect, I know it was just my ego holding on to dear life because it didn't want to die..

When I came back into my body I was drenched in sweat..

In the following weeks on 2 separate nights while drifting off to sleep I was able to return to the same "place" for a couple seconds with absolutely no ill feelings at all and an intense euphoria when I returned..

I think the initial terror for me was 26 years of life experience and world view being destroyed within a 5 second window.. I was not familiar with the concept of ego death before it happened and I was not prepared to have my sense of self obliterated as it was.

I didn't find religion through this experience (as some of this is bordering on religious talk), but I am definitely no longer a materialist

 

[villian]

Also recommend this documentary to anyone interested in the subject matter;

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7799171063626430789#

The fundamental nature of reality is actually consciousness. In his documentary Peter Russell explores the reasons why consciousness may be the fundamental essence of the Universe. Many have made such claims from metaphysical perspectives, but the possibility has always been ignored by the scientific community. In this talk, he discusses the problems the materialist scientific world view has with consciousness and proposes an alternative world view which, rather than contradicting science, makes new sense of much of modern physics. He presents a reasoned argument that shows how they are pointing towards the one thing science has always avoided considering – the primary nature of consciousness.

This documentary basically seeks answers for these questions: What is consciousness? How could consciousness arise from matter? Paradigm shifts in science. The materialist meta paradigm. A new meta paradigm. Consciousness is in everything. Everything is in consciousness. Matter is a mental construct. Relativity and light’s point of view. Light lies beyond space, time and matter. Photons and the quantum of action. Parallels between light and consciousness. Consciousness as the fundamental reality. The mystical experience of consciousness. Who am I? What is the self? The meeting of science and spirit.

 

[Foolishfool4]

iv never done thisss

my first post ever about anyy thingg

ego loss i juss had the plesure of experiencing once again while IV ing 5-7 mg of 4-aco-dmt

its like losing who your mind made your self to be and feeling like your the last perfect fitting piece in a puzzle called the universe and all experices are new and veary much appriciated

kinda like bing reborn or on the brink of death deep deep meaning and appriciation for every single thing

 

[Psychodelirium]

...you read that book Buddhism and psychdelics (Zig zag zen) and all the buddhists are saying "Oh you can't compare what we experience to what a drug abuser experiences, they're worthless compared to us".

True, there's similarities in the literature if you're a drug user and you're looking for them but a lot of eastern religious people would disagree strongly If you tried to tell the average buddhist "I experienced what you experience while I was tripping my tits off". You try having this argument with a buddhist and he'd say that the very act of taking a drug puts you in a completely delusional state to begin with.

It is not that I am looking for similarities because I am a drug user. It is that I was a cognitive science enthusiast before I ever touched psychedelics and I know that the scientists and philosophers who are writing about the mind in the West are constantly quoting the Buddha and admiring Buddhist epistemology and doing this kind of thing. I can direct you to any number of sources if you are not convinced.

Sure, I agree with you that most Buddhists would say that drug experiences are fundamentally delusional, but honestly, why should I care? The historical context in which we now find ourselves is entirely novel. We need a new way of thinking about mysticism and about what the mind is and why it can produce the states that it does. We need to be informed by the fact that the mind supervenes on the physical substrate of the brain, and for that reason may be fundamentally and reliably altered by very simple devices (such as plants) and not only by elaborate religious practices and symbolism.

There is every reason to believe that a mature neuroscience of a few decades from now will offer a mastery of the mind that is incomprehensible to us today. This is unsettling to think about but it is almost certainly true. This things that we now can do with psychedelics and traditional spiritual practices, we can do in almost total ignorance of the underlying mechanism. Imagine what we will be able to do when this ignorance is dispelled.

 

[nervousone]

...you read that book Buddhism and psychdelics (Zig zag zen) and all the buddhists are saying "Oh you can't compare what we experience to what a drug abuser experiences, they're worthless compared to us".

If you read The Spirit Molecule Strassman says many of the high level Buddhists he practiced with originally became interested in the practice because of psychedelic drugs.

 

[Psychodelirium]

If you read The Spirit Molecule Strassman says many of the high level Buddhists he practiced with originally became interested in the practice because of psychedelic drugs.

Yes, but I'm sure he means old Western converts who dropped acid in the 60's.

 

[nervousone]

Yes, but I'm sure he means old Western converts who dropped acid in the 60's.

He discusses it more then once in the book here is one snippet and is an Eastern Buddhist more of a Buddhist then a Western Buddhist or something?

Once more,
Jim Fadiman at Stanford pointed me in the right direction, this time to a
midwestern United States Zen monastery run by a rather reclusive, but
startlingly solid, Asian teacher. I attended two weekend meditation retreats
there in 1974 and felt as if I had arrived home. The monks were
serene but down to earth, and we enjoyed being with each other. Most
interesting was that most of them had gained their first view of the spiritual
path while on psychedelic drugs.
They did not volunteer this information, of course. But in the freewheeling
early days of the temple, such informal self-disclosure was
common. It was as simple as asking, "Did you take psychedelics before
becoming a monk? How important were they in your decision?" The overwhelming
majority had taken them and had experienced their first glimpse
of the enlightened state of mind with their assistance.

The next year, 1990, I was married at the monastery. At separate
meetings before the ceremony, I chatted with two other monk friends, now
some of the highest ranking officers in the order. Both of them had taken
psychedelic drugs in college with a fellow who later became a close friend
of mine in New Mexico. This mutual acquaintance was well-known for
using MDMA in a psychotherapeutic setting. They both asked about their
friend and his MDMA research and were in kind fascinated by my plans
to study DMT.

 

[Psychodelirium]

Btw, on the topic of ego death and the cognitive science literature, one interesting example is Thomas Metzinger. Metzinger has a theory that the concept of "self" is a kind of user interface illusion that the brain deploys during the waking state to help organize complex behavior. One of the things that Metzinger says in his books is that although the concept of "self" is clearly an illusion, it is impossible to become convinced, subjectively, that is an illusion because that would require the brain to be wired in a way that doesn't make evolutionary sense. I.e. the kind of meta-awareness that allows your brain to be aware that it is deploying a user interface to organize behavior while it is doing so would be cumbersome and impractical and would waste attentional resources.

However, Metzinger makes the caveat that Buddhist epistemology is so similar in content to what his theory asserts, that it may be possible that Buddhist "enlightenment" refers to a state where the illusion is seen through (presumably by changing cognitive architecture in some fundamental way through the contrived and evolutionarily senseless practices of meditation).

I don't want to go too deeply into Metzinger, but I would like to bring up some interesting experiments that he frequently refers to. One is the rubber hand illusion:

In the rubber hand illusion (RHI, Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), human participants view a dummy hand being stroked with a paintbrush, while they feel a series of identical brushstrokes applied to their own hand, which is hidden from view. If this visual and tactile information is applied synchronously, and if the visual appearance and position of the dummy hand is similar to one's own hand, then people may feel that the touches on their own hand are coming from the dummy hand, and even that the dummy hand is, in some way, their own hand. This is an early form of body transfer illusion. The RHI is an illusion of vision, touch, and posture (proprioception), but a similar illusion can also be induced with touch and proprioception (Ehrsson, Holmes, & Passingham, 2005).

The other is body transfer illusion, which is a more advanced form of the same basic illusion that uses virtual reality to construct the sensation that one possesses a virtual body. (The analogy to the "astral body" in Western esotericism or the "rainbow body" in Vajrayana Buddhism couldn't be plainer. Both are constructed through intense imaginative effort.)

It is important to understand that these illusions are truly convincing. It is not like a professional race car driver "feeling one with the car", or being immersed in a computer game where you identify with the avatar. The rubber hand feels like your hand. What these illusions show is that the brain is constantly projecting the sense of "I-ness" onto objects in the environment, including parts of your own body, and your mental processes. However this sense of "I-ness" is merely a convenient way to process information and does not refer to any real properties in the objective world.

 

[Psychodelirium]

He discusses it more then once in the book here is one snippet and is an Eastern Buddhist more of a Buddhist then a Western Buddhist or something?

Not at all. I agree with you. If anything this just goes to show that there is no "official" Buddhist position on psychedelics, and even if there is why should we care?

 

[nervousone]

I don't care about their stance either it doesn't effect me. I do think however that saying it is possible to achieve enlightment without drugs but not possible with drugs doesn't make much sense (what ismene quoted). I believe there are multiple paths to the same destination. There is a recent study on ketamine involving the rubber hand as well http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/12/whats-really-interesting-about.html

 

[nopipesdfw]

Not at all. I agree with you. If anything this just goes to show that there is no "official" Buddhist position on psychedelics, and even if there is why should we care?

The most seemingly correct religion to me is still a religion.


Rust finds a way to build on everything, especially things that refuse to move.

 

[Shambles]

The most seemingly correct religion to me is still a religion.


Rust finds a way to build on everything, especially things that refuse to move.

I really don't do religion at all but if I had to pick one that seems closest to what I see as the best refelection of any possible deity it would be Hinduism. Buddhist meditation (well, meditation in general really) is something I also think very valuable but I don't find the religious aspects very compelling, personally.

I don't want to go too deeply into Metzinger, but I would like to bring up some interesting experiments that he frequently refers to. One is the rubber hand illusion

There is a new study of the same illusory feeling involving subjects given ketamine due to be published next year - Ketamine and illusory body ownership from EADD

Ponti: If I was to be shot in the head anyway then do it whilst tripping by all means. If you could catch me in a state of ego-death when you killed me all the better. I wouldn't actively choose to be killed any more (maybe thought diffeently a while back though) as it no longer feels like it has any value. Life is worth living due to it's brevity and beauty. If you see life as just an island in eternity then it becomes nothing more or less than a fascinating holiday getting to check out the natives and see things differently for a while. It's kinda like asking if I'd rather be shot on a warm, tropical beach rather than in grey ol' Brittania. I would, but I'd rather live to see both until the holiday comes to a natural end

 

[Musk_Wallace]

I read a book by Dan Siegal about treating depressed teens with meditation training. He wrote about the basics of meditation- Learning to ride the surface of the sea of conciousness, and become aware of the deep places that are always calm and undisturbed. This is similar to what I've experienced on mushrooms: I reach a point where my sense of self has totally dissolved and theres just the endlessly calm, yet devastatingly intense ocean of being. The best musical expression of this paradox (quiet, but loud at the same time) is Talk Talk's later albums (especially Spirit of Eden)

 

[nopipesdfw]

I really don't do religion at all but if I had to pick one that seems closest to what I see as the best refelection of any possible deity it would be Hinduism. Buddhist meditation (well, meditation in general really) is something I also think very valuable but I don't find the religious aspects very compelling, personally.

Quite agreed. (Except for the caste system being some sort of rigid order within our world, everything between us in general consensus is too relative for that imo.)

 

[Shambles]

That's the part that really lets it down. I suspect that is mainly a cultural phenomenon but a good example of why I think it best to cherry-pick religious ideas rather than slavishly buy into the dogma that builds up around them. The general philosophy of the Divinity split into hundreds - or even thousands - of facets does have much to teach though, I'd say.

 

[villian]

This might be slightly off topic, but I really like the Hindi greeting "namaste", these are the interpretations from wikipedia:

* "I honor the Spirit in you which is also in me."

* "I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells, I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One."

* "That which is of God in me greets that which is of God in you."

* "The Divinity within me perceives and adores the Divinity within you."

Much classier than "hello"

 

[Psychodelirium]

Dwayne and pontifex,

I haven't read Chalmers in a while, but it's interesting that you find him convincing. Chalmers certainly has a valid point there that cognitive science is ill-equipped to deal conceptually with the distinction between first-person and third-person descriptions of things. Nonetheless, it does deal with that distinction. There is plenty of research that proceeds by eliciting a report of subjective experience and then coming up with the computational mechanisms that might plausibly subserve such an experience. Dennett calls this heterophenomenology. We may not understand exactly how, but we do it and it works. The "explanatory gap" appears wider in theory than it does in practice.

I would even add that heterophenomenology works the other way around, too. I.e. by contemplating a hypothetical computational mechanism, we should be able to imagine the subjective experience that corresponds to it. The bottom line is that we immediately intuit that there is and must be a lawful relationship of some sort. The nature of this relationship is certainly very puzzling, but not nearly as puzzling some of the things that people like Chalmers say about it.

For example, Chalmers' crypto-dualism commits him to the conceivability of "zombies". I agree with Dennett that "zombies" are just totally embarassing and any theory that allows for "zombies" has to be false in one way or another. Consider the following argument:
- If "zombies" are functionally indistinguishable from "conscious people", "consciousness" must therefore be functionally inert.
- If "consciousness" is functionally inert, then it cannot be the thing that causes Chalmers to talk about it.
- Rather, when Chalmers talks about "qualia" and "zombies" and the ineffability of subjective experience, everything that he says and writes is caused by computational processes in his brain - nothing that he says and writes is caused by his experience of his subjectivity. "Zombie Chalmers" would act in an identical way. Obviously this is absurd and whatever "consciousness" may be, it is not functionally inert and therefore may be fruitfully understood by functionalist cognitive science.

The solution that immediately presents itself is that Chalmers' "consciousness" is the same thing as the computational processes in his brain in some way that we can't yet understand. This position is held by the majority of people who waste their time thinking about these things.

 

[Shambles]

^ Doing the the docuwhore thing again but the one I posted a while back covers that too with some excellent studies in precisely the area of the "explanatory gap" stuff - that gap is getting smaller by the day and is far nearer closed than many give it credit for if you look at the most recent studies and experiments

Viillian: Definitely getting off-topic here but it's simple stuff like the Namaste thing that gives me some hope that not all religion is horrid. They certainly have their shady adherents and fundamentalist loonies (as does Buddhism despite it's Western image) but on the whole Hinduism comes by far the closest on it's wider philosophy for me

Also, I downloaded that talk on The Primacy of Consciousness a while back but not watched it yet. WIll make a point of watching it soon

PS: To demonsrate my lack of one trick ponydom in the docu world, from the same series as The Secret You (only a few years older) here's one specifically about psychedelics and consciousness (LSD, DMT and Ibogaine in this case) - Psychedelic Science.

 

[Sandozer]

Here's a real life story of what I interpret it to be.
I smoked approximately 50 mg of n,n-DMT. I was catapulted into a place I have never been to before. I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what "I" meant anyway. I was so immersed in the experience that I was no longer an observer, I was part of the whole experience.
I finally came back to myself when I started to realize I was hearing this blowing sound every few seconds. Then I realized what the sound was, it was the sound of someone breathing. "What is that sound? Holy shit, that's the sound of me breathing. Oh yea, I have a body! Oh yea, I am me!".
If you go to google.com and lookup "Ego Death", you will find many sites with different definitions.

Lol! I had this same exact experience on my first DMT breakthrough