That's unusual - there's a big thread on ego death on the board and when I suggested people would still be aware of who they were during an ego-death they all argued "Nope, I didn't know who I was, what I was or where I was". I asked if a tramp entered the room and began removing your trousers before fucking you up the arse would you try and stop him? They all said "No, the tramp could fuck me quite happily - I wouldn't even know he was fucking me". I wouldn't like being that far gone on any drug.
I guess that's what I mean. It's a paradox: I have memories from the period of time between ego-death occurring and regaining my sense of conscious self, yet in the words of the dude you quoted I "didn't know who I was, what I was or where I was". So if I didn't exist, where did the memories come from and how can they possibly exist? If I was no longer in existence then logically I couldn't be observing anything, a prerequisite for memory.
I will say that my memories of the time between ego-death and ego-rebirth are NOT at all like my normal memories though. There is a serious lack of a linear progression of events, and the memory is suffused with incredibly vivid and powerful emotions, shifting through the whole spectrum of feelings that humans can experience. Also the visual aspect of the memories is weird. It's not easy to explain but I'll give it a shot:
Normally, our eyes scan the scene in front of us, using constant unconscious movements called saccades to cover the whole visual field. The stimulation of the three types of cones and potentially the rods too is then sent to the brain. It works by having each cone connected to a single nerve cell (rods are connected with only one nerve cell for every ten to one-hundred rods, this is why our vision in the dark has lower resolution). When a photon hits one of the numerous copies of the pigment protein that are found in a cone cell, the cone cell then stimulates the nerve cell it connects to.
The sum total of all of these individual cone cells being activated produces an equal number of stimulatory events in the corresponding nerve cells, which relay those signals to another nerve cell, which relays it to the next nerve cell, and so on down the line. For each cone cell, there is a chain of nerves that reaches into the visual processing parts of the brain. The optic nerve is simply a bundle of those chains of nerve cells (the signals for each chain of nerve cells remains distinct from the end that touches a cone cell, through the optic nerve, and into the brain, and only then in the brain are the individual cone cells' signals combined.
So what does this have to do with the visual aspects of my memories of what took place while I was nonexistent? Well, I said that the visual aspects of those memories were weird, not at all like the visions that accompany other memories. So what those 'weird' visual memories consist of is this: imagine that something stopped the electrical signals (nerves work by passing along electrical signals) traveling from my cone and rod cells before they reached the brain and substituted in an electrical representation of ridiculous 10-dimensional shapes.
Ten is just a random number, as I'm unsure how many dimensions these solid figures existed in. And by solid figures I mean like a square has two dimensions, where a cube exists in three dimensions, and so a tesseract exists in four spatial dimensions, but these shapes that were turned into electrical representations and substituted for the normal visual content reaching my brain possessed volume in way, way more dimensions. Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Who knows?
And so my brain, which can't really naturally conceive of more dimensions than three of space and one of time, took that way-too-many dimensional visual input and recorded it with the formless, infinitely vivid emotions, and so necessarily my memories of it now are nothing compared to how it was at the time because I think humans can't really fully process the experience that we have during ego-death, you have to be nonexistent and one with the universe and the pure creative motive force that suffused the universe on psychedelics to fully comprehend and experience that state to its fullest. But I do remember it quite clearly, I'm just very aware that my memory is somewhat limited by the nature of the limitations of the vessel in which the memory resides: the human mind. It's not a blank space though, entirely the opposite.
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You do mention whether people are aware of – or can respond to – the external stimuli from the outside world. I don't know, buttrape may be strong enough of a stimulus to get through to the ego-dead, but when I experience ego-death there's absolutely nothing in the outside world that is making it to my brain, and furthermore I don't even have a real consciousness with which to process external input were it intense enough to get through the shell.
If you dig it then I'm glad for you mate, I just can't imagine what the fun is laying there thinking you're dying. I like listening to music, going for a walk in the countryside and having deep emotional catharsis about people I love who have died and I miss etc - obviously to think about your past you have to be able to remember who you are!
In my eyes it's not like feeling like you're dying at all. Sure, as you slide into the ego loss you realize you are dissolving piece by piece and soon nothing shall remain, and yeah, I bet that feels like it does when you are actually dying. But once your ego is then fully dead, it's not like you continue to feel the utter terror and apprehension of impending death. Instead it's like all of a sudden you are the entire universe, and the universe is you, except there is no you, there's just the entire universe, just the infinite. Infinite space, infinite time, infinite emotions all wound up into a single feeling, infinite life, infinite creative power (in the sense of things tending toward complexity despite the overall tendency of closed systems to tend towards disorder, like there's a force within the universe that is tirelessly working on every single boson and fermion to try and create life).
It's just not something that can be put into words, everything I've tried to explain in this post is just a pale, transparent shadow of what it really is like.
But I want to stress again that your choice to simply enjoy tripping without ego-loss is completely okay! I have never sought out ego-death, it may have ended up happening a few times, but I never sought it out on purpose. And even if I had, that doesn't make my experiences any 'more correct' or 'deeper' than yours. There is value in ANY AND ALL psychedelic exploration. That exploration is worthy on its own merits alone, without regard to other possible states or to what other people like to do while tripping. If you enjoy tripping your way, then that is the exact right way for you to be tripping, right? Seems so to me at least...
