I don’t know where to begin in describing the experience I have had. I feel that if I can successfully communicate the insights and revelations of my trip, all further reports would be obsolete from a philosophical standpoint. I wasn’t expecting the trip to take me where it did, but I went with the flow and allowed my thoughts to probe the depths of my psyche. In doing so, I was able to achieve the state of ego death while meditating at the peak of the trip. I was on two hits of acid and one pill of Ecstasy and had smoked two joints at the point I had the experience. This was my first time on LSD, and I think that it allowed me to conceptualize the experience in a very analytical manner. I find that LSD is more intellectual and less emotional in its effects than psilocybin. I doubt I would have successfully achieved the state if not for the E. MDMA completely dissolves any fears and anxieties that come up in the psychedelic state and has allowed me to go further into my trips than I have been able to without it. Having said that, when you’re as submerged in the experience as I was, you don’t care what drug is contributing to what effect. I honestly don’t know at this point how many of my insights and revelations I will be able to remember and carry into the future. I almost worry that time will progressively make me forget the lessons of the trip. I will try and capture as much as I can in words, but words don’t map exactly onto thoughts, and I know that I will never be able to describe the whole experience in writing.
Ego death shows the illusory aspect of the ego, your sense of self. It is the apex of the psychedelic experience. For me, it was a moment of Satori enlightenment, an experience of the infinite. In my opinion, once you have achieved the state and can learn from it, there is no need to fear physical death. That is how profound it is. The experience was so powerful that it shook the philosophical foundations of my reality to the core. This wasn’t the first time I had achieved the state: I came close to the threshold throughout the summer and then finally had a breakthrough experience on 6 g of shrooms and two hits of E at the beginning of September. After the trip, I don’t think I was able to frame the experience in my everyday paradigms of reality. Since then, I’ve been reading up about ego death and finding out how it relates to practices and experiences like meditation, prayer, sleep deprivation, and fasting – how it is an experience that anyone can have in a sober state with enough training and patience. The issue with achieving ego death through psychedelics is that the lessons are harder to integrate because the experience is forced on you so suddenly and is not easy to comprehend without the appropriate expectations and knowledge. I was able to handle it because of my experience with the psychedelic state, but being an introspective and philosophical individual certainly helps.
I don’t think there is any one way of making sense of the ego death experience. You could even say that meaning is antithetical to the experience because it is what the ego uses to try and understand the state in retrospect. Simply put, ego death is the lack of any meaning, or at least realizing that meaning is a label affixed to reality by the ego and that existence is possible without meaning. As a science student, I have framed the experience in terms of my knowledge of the biological, chemical, and physical basis of consciousness. I equate ego death to transcending the four-dimension bound state of waking consciousness and entering a state of infinite awareness in which everyday frames of reference for processing and making sense of information don’t exist. You are simply being, not knowing or feeling or observing, but existing for the moment and independent of meaning. The experience takes time dilation to an extreme – indeed, it has changed my ideas about the perception of time at a psychological level. Ego death is a fusion of perception and reality, where to think is to exist. All boundaries between your self and the environment cease to be, and the only reality is your moment-to-moment awareness. I see this as equivalent to removing all the filters and barriers information is normally processed through by the nervous system. When we are first born into our bodies – when a human consciousness starts to develop from the cells of a fetus – we have no sense of self at all. We don’t have much in the way of sensory input either. After birth, we experience our first sensations but have no means of categorizing them. In other words, we lead an existence free of meaning. This state changes, however, under the influence of genes and environment and the complex interplay between the two. Gradually, an ego emerges that learns how it relates to the environment. As a result of cumulative changes, personality develops. Over time, these processes serve to funnel waking consciousness through specific filters and barriers, which is what learning is all about. The filters are necessary to allow you to function in everyday life because you would be overwhelmed with all the information your nervous system receives in your moment-to-moment awareness unless you had a means for processing the information. The ego is thus a functional necessity of existence, but it isn’t necessary for your physical existence and, in my opinion, can serve to distort your mental picture of reality and impede living life to the fullest of your abilities. This is why ego death can be a very therapeutic experience if approached properly. Drug-induced ego death can feel like physical death if your ego doesn’t accept the state and tries to fight the thoughts, which is why people have trouble with it. Some drugs overwhelm you with the experience and don’t give your ego enough opportunity to fight back because the ascent is so quick. I think DMT and salvia (at breakthrough doses) fall into this category. Those ego death experiences are accompanied by a lot of sensory and perceptual distortion as well, i.e. hallucinations. Ego death is more difficult to achieve using shrooms and acid unless you go to the high doses and isn’t accompanied by as many hallucinations (in my experience, at least), but I doubt the drug actually matters when it comes to the core of the experience. Ego death for me was not a hallucinatory experience in any conventional sense – in fact, it was a very lucid and clear-headed state in which the cognitive, sensory, and emotional qualia of consciousness all blended together to produce a mental state focused solely on momentary awareness. Rather than sensing what was not, I felt as though I was perceiving what had always been.
One of the most fascinating and important lessons of the ego death experience, I think, is realizing how alike and interconnected all living things are. All known forms of life are iterations of the same unique algorithm written in the code of DNA, to use a computing metaphor. On a cosmic scale, every human being is almost identical when you consider how much more of the universe is gas and dust than living, self-aware matter. The ways in which we see ourselves as different are insignificant compared to how alike we are as sentient and social beings. You have more in common as a carbon-based lifeform with a bacterium than with 99% of the matter in the universe. If you run the cosmic laws that govern the existence of elementary particles across sufficient stretches of space and time, you will get the marvel that we are all a part of, the enterprise of life. The special thing about life is that, given enough time, lifeforms complex enough to be self-aware will evolve. The only thing separating bacteria from sentient creatures is time, but the first bacterium was nonetheless a key step in the process that over time lead to the sprawling diversity of lifeforms we have today on our planet. The atomic particles that make you up had an existence long before they congregated in a particular three-dimensional arrangement to produce the entity that is you. Achieving ego death is like tuning in to this cosmic frequency in your psyche, like transcending your sense of self not just as a human but as a living thing and becoming one with the eternal energy of the universe. After all, consciousness is the result of mass interacting with energy. All of your sensations and perceptions can be explained as the result of chemical reactions and physical processes. I liken ego death to experiencing consciousness at this atomic and molecular level.
I can try as much as I want to define and describe it, but I know that ego death by its very nature has an ineffable quality, an aspect to it that can only be experienced and never communicated through words. I don’t expect any of you to take for granted any of the ideas I present in this report. These are my views on the experience, and I am only concerned with how much sense they make to me. But believe me when I say that I am not exaggerating about the magnitude and power of the experience. I truly feel fortunate to have had it, and I hope that I can integrate the lessons more successfully and fully this time than the last. I can actually write an entire report on what lessons I think I’ve learned through the powerful depersonalizing and decentering aspects of ego death. I will also write a fuller report later including the actual doings and happenings of the trip, but for now I only want to capture my thoughts about the core of the experience, since all other details are essentially irrelevant. Even if you choose to dismiss my opinions and ideas, I hope I have given you something to think about, something to challenge your notions of what the human mind is capable of. As humans, we have amazing potential within our psyches, and psychedelics (if used wisely) are an amazing tool to make you realize the existence of this power within you to shape your own reality.
its one of those things that our language cant really convey
she resisted the whole time even though i told her dont fight it, you must let it take you. and my e-tard friend made everything so much worse!!! he acts like he knew what to do and he split me n her up n wouldnt let us communicate together and turned her against me even though the whole time me and my 2 friends all felt like we needed to be together for it to end and he wouldnt let us even talk to each other. It really scared and confused her, after it ended she said that He turned her against me n she wanted us 3 tripping to be together and alone
