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Can an ego dissolving dose be a bad trip?

^not to harass you or anything but in a true state of ego-loss you aren't going to be scared, you literally have no sense of self temporarily anyway. I usually don't realize I even had it until after it's over. The scary part is before it happens when you feel like you're being launched out of a cannon. The only true self we have is from our ego, the self does not exist without it.

I agree with !!4iV4HF9R34g, in saying that ego-death is impossible without dying; ego-loss is more like ego-softening where the ego takes a back seat and is still somewhat there to observe. I usually have very little memory of the experience, mostly the before and after. There's no sense of control in the situation, it's just raw experience. I don't get ego loss from the typical psychedelics, at least not consistently in any way. 5-meo-dmt and salvia are the only drugs that have this power over me. With 5-meo-dmt I take a hit and feel a massive rush, am shot out of my body, stop breathing and enter the 'void.' Afterwards i find the whole experience frightening but after you inhale it it's like being at the peak of a roller coaster ride.

I can sort of see Ismene's point now, that ego-death is overused as a term to describe regular old intense psychedelic experiences. I still believe that it's possible to lose your sense of self, temporarily, which is probably better described as ego-loss or ego-lessening or something. If you have a memory that it happened to 'you' then there must be a little part of the ego still there. The experiences are more than just 'being high' but I can't describe them properly, they are strange, ineffable, and fleeting.
 
Biographies are works about the lives of an individual, not an empirical presentation of their works.
Leary's own books regarding this subject are (then) modern renditions of Tibetan teachings.

I get my information from definitive empirical sources like The Cognitive Science Journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and The Journal of Neuroscience.

I also do not take anything personally; it's actually quite difficult for me to experience negative emotion (neutral usually). I do not know if I have ever called you a troll Ismene, but if I have then I simply thought it seemed that way. I do not think that right now.
 
This argument again?

Maybe the concept of "ego death" sounds spooky and airy-fairy to some people because they think of it as an outgrowth of some discredited psychological theory where the "ego" is literally a thing of some sort, like a brain structure or a mental function. When I talk about ego, and I assume when most people talk about ego, they're not talking about anything like that. Ego is just your self-concept, i.e. the mental model that you have of yourself when you think about yourself. It is literally just the thoughts that you think about yourself. It is a complete abstraction.

Ego death is just the state where this model falls apart and no longer makes sense, in the same way that various other things that you think about while tripping may fall apart and stop making sense. The difference is that people lean on their self-concept to regulate their behavior and cognition. I.e. they think "if i am in situation a, i should act like b" or "when i am around person x, i should act like y", or whatever. When your understanding of yourself is impaired, these judgments lose their force, so you act and think in ways that are surprising or confusing to you. Such experiences can be liberating and enlightening because acting in accordance with a rigid self-concept constricts your range of behavior and cognition.
 
^^good posts guys, now we're making progress. when the heat ceases intelligence takes the driver's seat. :D
i'll have to ponder on this before another rambling of my own, i can feel it cookin though ;)
 
I stand by my assertion that ego-death is not legitimate terminology due to the fact that death equates a cessation of activity; and it should be obvious that states of ego-softening are not permanent. Ego-death can only be achieved through the incapability of the perception process to execute within the brain, i.e. death.
 
!!4iV4HF9R34g said:
I stand by my assertion that ego-death is not legitimate terminology due to the fact that death equates a cessation of activity; and it should be obvious that states of ego-softening are not permanent. Ego-death can only be achieved through the incapability of the perception process to execute within the brain, i.e. death.
Click to expand...

Obviously it's a metaphor. And you can find this metaphor all over the place - not just in psychedelic literature. The idea of orgasm as "the little death", the concept of "annihilation" in mystical and occult traditions that predate the psychedelic scene, the death of the "old man" in rites of passage, etc. As far as whether it is permanent or not, it just depends on what you mean. In a sense a poorly constructed self-concept can fall apart once and forever, but then it would be replaced with another one. So you can describe what happened in terms of death and rebirth, and so on. But this is all just poetic. It's all a dance of concepts in the mind. You are not supposed to take it literally.
 
I find this to be a misuse of language. It's self-aggrandizing, and leads to confusion.
These same tactics are employed around the world to sell garbage to ignorant masses, only because it sounds cool.
People want to believe in such romantic and obscure and mysterious ideas and concepts, just like they want to believe in the Loch Ness Monster and elf-machines and UFO consciousness.

Just take the psychedelic surge of the 60's for example.. Countless young idealists were brainwashed into believing bastardized versions of Eastern philosophy and ideologies under the guise of their "new psychedelic enlightenment".
And this was even after the initial cults of misinformation on the psychedelic experience and compounds themselves!

For psychedelia to ever have a chance at legitimacy in the eyes of the public, we must work towards abandoning and correcting all the damage done already.
 
!!4iV4HF9R34g said:
I find this to be a misuse of language. It's self-aggrandizing, and leads to confusion.
Click to expand...

This is just a matter of style and taste, imo. I'm sure some day soon this will all be explicated in dry cog sci terminology - hell, I've tried doing it myself - but that language has a limited appeal. These states are of more than academic interest. It is good that the mytho-poetic language captures the imagination of people. That is what it's for.
 
I agree. The experience is profoundly beautiful.
I'm a writer, and I do love the use of language to express this beauty.
The psychedelic experience also generates works of unimaginable creativity; they're often awe-inspiring.

I was just commenting that this is not very useful for describing the effects to someone who is skeptical.
They're lovely sentiments, but they can easily be dismissed as merely being high..
 
It's semantics, but perhaps ego death is indeed the wrong term and we'd be better off with ego scrambling, ego fragmentation or ego softening. For it all though, I stand by the 'ego' being a legitimate thing, even if it's an abstract concept. The other, related, definition of 'ego' i.e. one's pride and sense of self-worth, is not a structure in the brain either. But I don't think anyone would deny that plenty of people have that kind of ego.
 
Yes, and since there is a very diminished ego in this state, experiencing fear, or any emotion, is uncommon (except in retrospect or rejecting the experience).
 
I think Ismene's question "How do you know you are experiencing 'ego-death' and are not just simply so fucked up on psychedelics that you don't understand what is going on" (or words to that effect, not an exact quote just a paraphrase) is pretty hilarious.

Ismene - the two states you describe can be the same. If you are SO fucked up, stoned, whatever that your mind looses track of the memory-based concept that "I am <insert name here> a <insert sex here> human being living at <insert address here>... etc etc etc" and you experience some cosmic psychedelic experiences, then THAT IS EGO-LOSS, silly! If you are so fucked up you are fully conscious but can't remember anything about who or what you are... then your "sense of self" has been temporarily incapacitated and you are experiencing "sense of self" - loss.... or "ego-death". Capiche? I cannot fathom you reflexive argumentation against the very clear and obvious concept. All your arguments about the history behind this or that idea in literature are totally beside the point.
 
DwayneHoover said:
Ismene - the two states you describe can be the same. If you are SO fucked up, stoned, whatever that your mind looses track of the memory-based concept that "I am <insert name here> a <insert sex here> human being living at <insert address here>... etc etc etc then THAT IS EGO-LOSS, silly!"
Click to expand...

So every one who drinks so much beer they can't remember where they live is having an ego-loss? They arn't just drunk?

and you experience some cosmic psychedelic experiences

How can "you experience" cosmic psychedelic experiences when "you" don't exist anymore?

See how frail your logic is? Just look at it from the slightest different perspective and it all falls apart.
 
Interesting point that Dwayne unwittingly suggested there.

There are hundreds of thousands of people every weekend who drink so much alcohol that they have no "sense of self". Can't remember who they are, what their name is, where they live etc. Are these people all experiencing "ego-loss"?

And if they are then clearly alcohol is the best drug to create ego-loss. Seeing as people are insisting "It doesn't happen all the time on psychedelics". It certainly happens with alcohol - drink enough beer and you are certain to lose all "sense of self".

Could be a good excuse - the next time you get pissed out of your mind on beer tell whoever finds you that you wern't "drunk" you were "having an ego-death dude".
 
I think "fucked up" is just the wrong way to describe it. The difference with alcohol is lucidity. Alcoholic stupor is basically an unconscious state. To the extent that psychedelic ego-whatever is fruitful, it is lucid and conscious.
 
Alcohol is a CNS depressant, the ego is diminished because all neurological functions are diminished. Like psychodelirium said, cognitive abilities are altered rather than suppressed on psychedelics.
 
Maybe it wasn't so "unwitting," Ismene, give me a little credit. OK I should have said "The consciousness-related processes inside one's skull" have a cosmic psychedelic experience, not "you."

The "you" was from the perspective of later when "you" reconstitutes, and you remember having an experience in which "you" were not there. But you have the memory nonetheless. Yes it is a paradox. That is what makes it interesting and why we are talking about it. DUH!

Apparently you just cannot grok the idea of paradoxes so you twist and shout to argue against the impertinence of the very idea. And obviously there is a huge difference, being LUCIDITY as was mentioned, between psychedelic "ego-loss" and alcoholic-generated unconsciousness.
 
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I'm not sure that there's really a paradox. There is always a subjectivity experiencing something. It's just that normally, this subjectivity conceives of itself as a "person", and in ego-death it conceives of itself as mind-as-such, or sentience, or something like that. At least that's how it is for me. It's ultimately just different concepts of "self".

On the one hand, you have a primate brain thinking thoughts like "my name is so-and-so, and I have such-and-such friends and relatives, and such-and-such a place of residence, and such-and-such a life situation, and here are the bills that I have to pay, and the job I have to go to, and here are my fears and my dreams and my ambitions," and so on and so forth.

And then on the other hand, you have the same primate brain thinking thoughts like, "holy shit I am alive and conscious (or: I am life; I am consciousness) and things exist in the universe and that is amazing and ridiculous and profoundly weird and how can it be?" (maybe not in so many words) But it's the same primate brain experiencing itself in these different modes.
 
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