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The Big & Dandy Ego Death Thread

Ismene said:
Yeah I get the idea but all I can say is I've been extremely high on psychedelic drugs but I've still always had a sense of who I am. If a 65 year old bloke came in while I was peaking on LSD and said "Suck my cock" I'd still have enough sense of identity to tell him to fuck off. Wouldn't you?
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There are definitely times when I was either too out of physical reality to even be aware of other people, and times when I would have stared in puzzlement at what was going on outside of my own head, unable to make sense of words or situations.

I believe that true ego death necessitates no memory of it once you emerge from the state. Ego dissolution is what people are usually referring to I think when they say ego death... where you ego dissolves to the point that you're barely aware of yourself, but are probably aware of yourself as a distant concept that most likely feels illusory and insignificant. But it's that thread of ego that remains that allows you to remember the experience. Ego dissolution is the experience I go for and consider the most valuable, because full ego death isn't easily learned from (except perhaps the experiences leading directly up to it) because there's no memory. If you remember it, your ego did not fully die.

I've had full ego death before from 2C-E, and the experience leading up to that time of death was extremely useful and a landmark experience of my life. But when the death was complete, it was just literally a period of 25 minutes of blank... no memory whatsoever. No memory of time passing. Just like I had fallen into a deep sleep and woken up. I've also had black-outs on 4-AcO-DMT, where I was starting to trip really hard and then all of a sudden it was an hour or so later and I was emerging from the void, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, with no memory of the hour whatsoever.
 
B9 said:
Generally yes I'd have enough sense to tell him to fuck off - there are times when language/everything ceases to make sense & you are kinda "something else" & in that situation I think I'd just be looking blankly puzzled 8(
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I still think you'd fight him off B :D

And for any 65 year olds reading I do not suggest you start hanging round psychonauts on the off chance.
 
Xorkoth said:
I've had full ego death before from 2C-E, and the experience leading up to that time of death was extremely useful and a landmark experience of my life. But when the death was complete, it was just literally a period of 25 minutes of blank... no memory whatsoever. No memory of time passing.
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Must admit I've never had a memory blank on anything except E. With psychedelics I always remember what's happening.

How high a dose are you talking X? I've taken enough to stun a fucking elephant but I've never had these blackout memory things.
 
Xorkoth said:
I believe that true ego death necessitates no memory of it once you emerge from the state. Ego dissolution is what people are usually referring to I think when they say ego death... where you ego dissolves to the point that you're barely aware of yourself, but are probably aware of yourself as a distant concept that most likely feels illusory and insignificant. But it's that thread of ego that remains that allows you to remember the experience. Ego dissolution is the experience I go for and consider the most valuable, because full ego death isn't easily learned from (except perhaps the experiences leading directly up to it) because there's no memory. If you remember it, your ego did not fully die.
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I disagree.

I think the idea that an ego (in terms of self awareness) is necessary to experience at all really gained traction with Descartes (after all, who's aware if nobody is there?) That's why he considered animals automatons. Most animal psychologists believe that most animals have no self awareness, yet I think most of us would agree that there is something that it is "like to be" a bat, for instance. I believe that self awareness is a particular configuration of qualia, a special and fluid patterning of the interiority of being, though that interiority of being persists in other patterns.

I consider a full salvia experience to be "identity substitution" rather than ego death (in that I have an identity and a sense of action and intention, but they are not of the quality that I recognize as my own), and I experience "ego dissolution" to some degree every time I take a psychedelic. I agree that most experiences that people call ego death are in fact strong degrees of ego dissolution.

For me, ego death is distinct and unmistakable. Every experience of what I'm pretty sure is the intended referent of the term "ego death" in it's original conception that I've ever had (4 times) has been of listening to my own internal monologue passively. The content of the monologue makes it clear that the speaker knows that something is radically amiss ("this is it," "just wait, it will stop," "don't think about it," "this can't be"), yet the experience is one of utter passivity, of non-engagement with an ongoing monologue that I recognize as having the qualities of myself but that appears at the time to be a disengaged and independently running pattern. My experiences of ego death have always been preceded by a jarring electric jolt that I imagine to be similar to the onset of a seizure. There are people that believe this experience is the same as the experience of enlightenment, though only in terms of that first breakthrough to a new metaphysical awareness, not in it's aftermath.
 
Ismene said:
Must admit I've never had a memory blank on anything except E. With psychedelics I always remember what's happening.

How high a dose are you talking X? I've taken enough to stun a fucking elephant but I've never had these blackout memory things.
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I know that wasn't directed at me but I reckon the first time it happened was on a relatively decent dose of LSD @500ug (I was young then & my brain was still vulnerable see :D ).


Second time (briefly) after 500 liberty caps.

2CP @ around 10 mgs

DOM recently put me in ego loss territory, but not quite :)

Maybe experience of the mindstate leading up to these events causes greater awareness & thus recalcitrance to enter the state, whereas when young & innocent you don't sense it coming & you just get whooshed off into outer/inner space :)

A decent dose & I imagine set & setting are the important factors
 
My only experience of ego-death was on 706mg of DXM and 1 "whippet", + 3-4 hours in (not sure though). I saw an orb infinitely bright with the resemblance of its own gravitational pull. It also had "flames" that were licking everything around me pulling it in till I lost all sense of my surroundings. Everything went blue with an infinite line running through the middle of my perspective which at some point turned into one single beautiful point. I felt as though I was dying and at the moment I started to become scared but stopped. The feeling felt so familiar and comforting. I heard a voice then say, "This is it." I felt the only thing to do was to go for it, and if I die there is no problem. Everything came together as one and my memory of the event doesn't exist, as I didn't exist in that moment. I slowly felt myself materialize onto the couch that I was on during the experience and I felt that something big had happened in the world and that this experience I shared with the other people in the room (one who had a very similar experience).

This is coming from 3 months or so after the experience.
 
have experienced this many times

i have experienced many other worldy visionary states, as well as experienced a sence of becoming nothing more than a docile physical object. mushrooms and dmt tend to lend more of a mystical, visionary state of ego loss for me, while acid/RCs tend to create a much more 'sentient molecule' kind of experience, i dont know how to explain that.

quick example before i have to split: one of my most powerful mushroom experiences I led me to believe I was some formless mass of energy that was being transferred between two of these black monolith things with faces that shot this blast of energy back and forth between their mouths (they faced each other). it was understood to me int hat moment that the blast of energy represented some sort of dimension that contained an infinite number of universes, ours within one of them.

a very powerful acid experience one time had me believe that i had become the beach on coney island. there is no emotion, no sense of want or desire, no sense of anything except that for eternity, i would reside as a mass of earth sand and water.

one of these experiences is like a shamanistic voyage, and leaves me with a powerful sense of spiritual connection, something that spans all things simultaneously. the other is more like a point in time, frozen for eternity, like a universe that has reached total entropy loss, emotionless, and simply existing and nothing more. its still quite a spiritual feeling, but i feel they are more or less an inversion of each other (mushrooms vs acid).

can you count a really powerful experience on ketamine ego loss? or is that more like just having half the wiring turned off?
 
Did you ever say anything about it on BL? I feel like I may have read you say that before, and thats probably where it subconsciously came from when I posted that
 
SpanoonapS said:
has anyone experienced what is called "shamanic death" or full ego loss? if so... what was your experience?
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Depends what you call ego loss, my guess is all the people who claim ego-loss didn't hand over all their money and valuables to a complete stranger while they were allegedly "without ego". While they "lose the ego" enough to write about it later, they always seem to have just enough ego left not to give away any money at the time.
 
Ismene said:
Depends what you call ego loss, my guess is all the people who claim ego-loss didn't hand over all their money and valuables to a complete stranger while they were allegedly "without ego". While they "lose the ego" enough to write about it later, they always seem to have just enough ego left not to give away any money at the time.
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If they were capable of talking to another person, I would imagine they hadn't fully experienced it.
 
Raw Evil said:
If they were capable of talking to another person, I would imagine they hadn't fully experienced it.
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Exactly, you wouldn't 'give away money while experiencing ego loss, because you temporarily do not exist as any form of identity for you to associate with anything external.
 
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