it's time to start discussing EGODEATH in concrete terms.

[FreshFr0mDet0x]

1) go to www.egodeath.com
2) begin by reading whatever looks most interesting to you (if you have nothing but time on your hands (you know you do!) start at the beginning and read 'til the end.
3) whenever you come across a word or concept that you don't understand, go to google and look it up. don't be afraid to spend lots of time researching and link chasing, but always return to the original document.
4) "ohhhhh i'm getting all verklempt. talk amongst yourselves. i'll give you a topic: the chic pea is neither a chick, nor a pea. discuss!" just kidding. the topic is EGODEATH and any and all ideas found at www.egodeath.com which all happen to be absolutey factual. i nominate michael hoffman for next einstein. too bad they're about to stop giving nobel peace prizes (are they? nobody seems to love peace anymore anyway . . .) and i don't even mind, being half jewish, that he used to advocate revisionist history and be a fucking nazi (i think). he's that brilliant. this stuff is that accurate as to the real condition of the human plight

"life is just a game . . . that we can play together"

-sheep on drugs (if you've never heard of them get into it, they'll blow your mind. and if you "don't like electronic music" it's time to stop bullshitting and wake the fuck up. not kidding. i aplogize if i sound self-righteous or arrogant (of course i am both, but not really, my ego is dead.)

if you want to understand this better, try drinking a whole bottle of delsym asap. and savor the fear . . .

someone wiser than me (ha!) said "GOD enters through the wounds."

good luck, and fave fun explorers. always remember to have FUN!

 

[protovack]

Cool site. I found this link which I thought was awesome:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/4452

There is a lot more of his writing on this yahoo group as well. I found his ideas about determinism to be very profound

 

[FreshFr0mDet0x]

discussing a little bit more people. jesus. sorry for bumping. peace

thanks for the comment proto.

 

[heliospan]

What "concrete" terms? Philosophy is defined by not dealing with the concrete. Read some of the many philophers or scriptures of mysticism. Pick up Chittick's Introduction to Sufism or perhaps a collection of Gnostic scriptures. Read Alan Watts. Read Einstein or Heissenberg. Read Ken Wilber if you are especially scientifically-minded. Read Rumi, a sufi poet. Or perhaps you can find some academic philosophy that's not prone to the excessive superstitions of scientism (which is difficult). Academic philosophy (e.g. dry logic like A=B=C; A=C)--which is what the intellectual trends our our age insist is the only respectable approach to philosophy--is pretty empty of the conclusions that its reasoning clearly leads to. Man, there are soooooo many philosophers (which includes scientists and theologans) that give you more than what you probably even what to think about. It's futile to discuss something like this here "cocretely" in the space of a few sentences or paragraphs. The best anyone can do here is give you mottos; true, concrete understanding of "ego death" comes from introspection and confusion, not reading a few words on a messageboard.

You nominate some guy who has compiled knowledge that has already been mastered and transmitted and accessed for thousands and thousands of years as the next Einstein? "Ego death" is a pseudo-scientific name for "Awakening" (Bodi), "Ressurection" (the death of one's ignorant identity with the small self and resurrection of awareness of identity with the 'big' Self that includes and transcends that small self), or many other terms that many other traditions use. None of this is new knowledge. It's just that people's ignorance has lead them to think that mysticism and spiritual experience is a matter of religious beleif, when actually, it's a matter of direct science.

Read Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality if you want a more concrete merger of spiritual knowledge with scientific jargon.

Second, if you want to be able to discuss "ego-death" more concretely, you should find a guru who can teach you the experiments and methods of attaining it, namely, meditation. By meditation, I mean a skill that takes years to acquire. You can't just sit there for ten minutes every few weeks and then give up or think you are doing it right. Meditation is an art that has been developed for thousands of years and it's up to you to access that knowledge in a teacher; otherwise, everything that you can say about it comes from speculation or perhaps a distant memory of one or two experiences while intoxicated.

 

[cxsx]

i dont understand ego-death really. why would someone want to reach this realm or place or whatever it is. is it like when you realize that you're not the only person in the universe or something? does this realization have benefits? we stop thinking of ourselves - like we stop being selfish? i dont get what's so great about. why would i want a part of me to die unless it was causing me or others harm?

 

[heliospan]

i dont understand ego-death really. why would someone want to reach this realm or place or whatever it is. is it like when you realize that you're not the only person in the universe or something? does this realization have benefits? we stop thinking of ourselves - like we stop being selfish? i dont get what's so great about. why would i want a part of me to die unless it was causing me or others harm?

It's not that a part of you dies. It's you experience that your feeling of being an "I" is not real. In other words, you stop having identity with "I" the individual self and instead have identity with something OTHER than "I." Ego-death is the stopping of the ignorance of thinking that the "I" and the "you" are actually, eternally REAL things.


Here's a passage from a transcript in Ken Wilber's book *Grit and Grace* that I have pain-stakingly re-transcribed for j00!

---
Ken Wilber speaking to his wife:
"Whole and part are not mutuall exclusive. Mystics still feel pain, hunger, and laughter, and joy. The be part of a larger whole doesn't mean that the part evaporates, just that the part finds its ground or its meaning. You are an individual, yet you also feel that you are a part of the larger unit of a family, which is part of the larger unit of a society. You already feel that, you already feel that you are a part of several larger wholes, and those wholes--like your life with Devers--give yor life much more value and meaning. Mysticism is just the even larger identity of also feeling part of the cosmose at large, and thus finding even greater meaning and vallue. Nothing contradictory about that. It's a direct experience of a larger identity; it doesn't mean your arms fall off."


---
TKW: Is enlightenment actually experienced as a real death, or is that just a common metaphor?

KW: Actual ego-death, yes. It's no metaphor. The accounts of this experience, which may be very dramatic but can also be faily simple and nondramatic, make it clear that all of a suffen you simply wake up and discover that, amonth other things, your real being is EVERYTHING you are not looking at, that you are literally one with all manifestation, one with the universe, however corny that might sound, and that you did not actually BECOME one with God and All, you have eternally been that one-ness but didn't realize it.

Along with that feeling, or the discovery of the all-pervading Self, goes the very concrete feeling that your small self simply died, actually died. Zen calls satori "the Great Death." Eckhart was just as blunt: "The soul," he said, "must put itself to death." Coomaraswamy explains: "It is only by making stepping stones of our dead selves, until we realize that there is literally nothing with which we can identify our Self, that we can become what we are." Or Eckhart again, "The kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dea."

TKW: Dying to the small self is the discovery of eternity.

KW: [long pause] Yes, provided we don't think of eternity as being everlasting time but a point without time, the so-called eternal present or timeless now. The Self doesn't live forever in time, it lives in the timeless now. The Self doesn't live forever in time, it lives in the timeless present prior to time, prior to history, change, succession. The Self is present as Pure Presence, not as everlasting duration, a rather horrible notion.

Anyway, that brings us to the sixth major point of the perennial philosophy, namely, that enlightenment or liberation brings an end to suffering. Gautama Buddha, for example, said that he only taught two things, what causes suffering and how to end it. What causes suffering is the grasping and desiring of the separate self, and what ends it is the meditative path that transcends self and desire. The point is that suffering is inherent in the knot or contraction known as the self, and the only way to end suffering is to end the self. It's not that after enlightenment, or after spiritual experience in general, you no longer feel pain or anguish or fear or hurt. You do. It's simply that they no longer theaten your existence, and so they cease to be problematic. You are no longer identified with them, dramatizing them, energizing them, threatened by them. On the other hand, there is no longer any fragmented self to threaten, and on the other, the big Self can't be threatened since, being the All, there is nothing outside of it that could harm it. A profound relaxing and uncoiling occurs in the heart. The individual realizes that, no matter how much suffering might occur, it doesn't fundamentally affect his or her real Being. Suffering comes and goes, but the person now possesses the "peace that surpasseth understanding." The safe feels suffering, but it doesn't "hurt." Because the sage is aware of suffering, he or she is motivated by compassion, by a desire to help all those who suffer and think it's real.

TKW: Which beings us to the seventh point, about enlightened motivation.

KW: Yes. True enlightenment is said to issue in social action driven by mercy, compassion, and skillful means, in an attempt to help al lbeings attain the supreme liberation. Enlightened activity is simply selfless service. Since we are all one in the same Self, or the same mystical body of Christ, or the same Dharmakaya, then in serving others I am serving my own Self. I think when Christ said, "Love your neighbor as yourself," he must have meant, "Love your neighbor as your Self."

 

[Free Radical]

I dunno.

*I* seem pretty real to me.

I used to subscribe to that one with the universe horse-hockey....but now I realize that I've always been at two with the universe

Seriously though, all this eastern mysticism stuff seems like pretentious nonsense....

And if karma was real, I should've been getting dividends for quite awhile now. I've been a fucking paragon of virtue for most of my existence... 8)

 

[heliospan]

I dunno.

*I* seem pretty real to me.

I used to subscribe to that one with the universe horse-hockey....but now I realize that I've always been at two with the universe

Seriously though, all this eastern mysticism stuff seems like pretentious nonsense....

And if karma was real, I should've been getting dividends for quite awhile now. I've been a fucking paragon of virtue for most of my existence... 8)

Things like "karma" and "ego-death" are not ideas to beleive in. They're not like santa clause. "Karma" and "ego-death" are just names; they are names for aspects of your experience as a self-conscious human being, and only if you don't know what those aspects are, then the names are empty and seem like ideas to beleive or not beleive in. Karma is something that is happening in your life right now, but to know what it is requires introspection and a sudden "ah ha! so THAT'S what the word 'karma' refers to!" It helps to be knowledgable on the ways to describe karma, too. Read some introduction to buddhism (or some mysticism) books.

But tell me how "I" is ultimately real? It is the "I" that goes away upon your physical death and which you were not aware of before you became aware of it sometime early in your life. The "I" is just something that "you" are aware of, just like other idea and experience you make sense of. But your mind's making sense of reality (of "I") is not reality--whatever that actually is--itself. In the mind, the Mind is not to be found. You are I are both at the center of the universe. You and I are both "I" yet neither are ultimately "I." Everything you know in the world--yourself, colors, people, emotions--exist RELATIVE to yourself; from the other side, yourself doesn't exist except relative to everything else. Nothing exists in your mind except relative to your sense of "I," yet that "I" is not perminent and objectively, eternally existent, for there are many "I's" but there is only one Reality, but that one reality is not-knowable because it transcends all knowing (and transcends even this way of talking about it).

 

[cxsx]

i dont like this idea and yet i do like it in some ways too. i dont like the idea of someones identity being gone or the intangeable thing that sets them apart from others. however i do like the idea of not being as concerned with ones own self for the sake of the cause.
example: i'm not going to NOT tell Jane about Jesus and how she can go to heaven when she dies just because she saw me shit faced at the bar the other night. my cause as a Christian isn't about ME being antiseptic and squeaky clean so others can see what a "good Christian" i am, it's about souls and their place in eternity and gently sharing that message with others if they allow me to. (that isn't to say that God doesn't want Christians to be obedient to His word tho either)

hmmm.. i think i might be catching on, i dunno. but i was also thinkin y'know how God refers to himself in a few places in the Bible as "I AM"

Exodus 3:14
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and He said thus shalt thou say unto the children of Isreal, I AM hath sent me unto you.

i mean that sounds like totally egotistic to me. and then we're made in the image of God... so.... i'm thinkin that ego is a good thing. *shrug* maybe the bible was talking sorta kinda about ego death when it says things like "he that findeth his life shall lose it and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

okay well i'm not so sure that my Christian slanted veiws are really gonna do much for this thread, but it's terribly interesting to place these views beside oneanother. thanks for your explanations, helios, much respect

 

[protovack]

Actually this Hoffman guy seems to write a LOT about determinism....namely....that we as humans are deterministic and that we must embrace this determinism.

 

[ebola?]

>>Seriously though, all this eastern mysticism stuff seems like pretentious nonsense....>>

It will continue to until you experience it directly.

ebola

 

[psood0nym]

heliospan you've put a lot of thought into this. Have you (or anybody) any thoughts about the diference between this experience (ego death) and the strange state of mind "break-through" doses of dissociatives like dxm, ketamine, salvia d., DMT, etc take you to?

I'm glad you put this question out there for everybody. There is definitely a difference between ego death and break-through experiences. The experience of full ego death, at least in my experience, is an electrical shock accompanied by a jarring buzzing sound (so that's what having awareness rended from ego sounds like) prior to what Hoffman refers to as 're-indexing' (paraphrased, perhaps incorrectly: a radical shift in the way you perceive yourself and agency (ego does not disappear entirely, as Hoffman attests, just the way it relates to awareness)). Whether this exact experience is shared by everyone I don't know, but the experience is quite distinct; there's no mistaking it. I've experience it with Ayahuasca, 5-meo-dmt, and DPT. Many people confuse ego death and ego dissolution, the later being common to almost every psychedelic experience to some degree. Ego death is also to be distinguished from 'hyperspace'. I've only experienced this once, in combining ayahuasca with smoked salvia extract, and believe DMT to be a necessary drug component. Hyperspace is the perception of spatial dimensions beyond three; again, there's no "I think maybe it was kinda hyperspace". People often refer to hyperspace when they are talking about a sense of Oneness; while perhaps related figuratively, speaking in this way just makes a recondite concept more ambiguous. Ego death is not 'identity substitution'; this happens most often for me in break-through salvia experiences where I am immersed in an alien identity, having forgotten my own, and even continue to act out a salvia-supplied narrative of what this new bizarre identity was doing before I dropped in; individual experiences may of course differ. Then there are many species of emotional/spiritual peak experiences, which are too varied to distinguish.

I really like Hoffman's fresh take on metaphysical enlightenment as just an incredible experience/radically new perspective rather than as some pie-in-the-sky panacea that will make all of life glow. Framing the concept like this makes drug induced metaphysical enlightenment a far more cogent idea. The same experience achieved without drugs requires incredible mental discipline that may very well take a lifetime to achieve. It is this classic image of the enlightened individual, whose enduring practices (not purely metaphysical enlightenment alone) have made him or her supremely competent in all areas of life, from which the erroneous concept of enlightenment-as-panacea is derived. I do not however entirely agree with his views on Free Will despite sharing the experience (minus, appropriately, acceptance of determinism; what Hoffman would term a failure), but that's another thread...

 

[stillbeing]

I prefer the non drug ego death which isnt as harsh as a "tryp"

haning had ego death on tryps and trips

having had Satori on a hybrid MDMA and Crystal and LSD mix
and having had Kensho , spontaneous and Totally "zen"

i hold my Kensho as being VASTLY superior in uncountable and ineffable ways.
when every iota of pain and fear evaporates
from your mind and body
and you are not precious litttle YOU anymore
but are just a time-less/time-freed EYE)/ear/etc)
with NO voice in your head, and no feelings, not even happiness or bliss. you
never
wanna
come
back.
How nice for Buddhas and Others
who never do have to "come back"
But at least when we do
--there are still drugs
so we can ( insert something ____________________ )

 

[stillbeing]

ps Zen and the Brain by James Austin says it all best ( as he is a neurologist ) and does so in under 1000 pages. and he has a new book coming out in a couople months as a follow up called Zen Reflections also on MIT press ( like a commmercial isn it ?)