What is the function of the ego?

[Xorkoth]

^^ Well... it's temporary, isn't it?

When I have experienced ego loss it has come along with being physically incapacitated. But actually, situations like what you describe aren't exactly unheard of.

Anyway I think you're thinking too broadly... you need to make a distinction between ego loss and a trip. Sometimes you experience ego loss, and sometimes you don't. Most often you experience the ego partially dissolving but remaining intact, so of course you don't have a bunch of people on acid letting strangers into their houses. I've only experienced real ego loss - the loss of this frame of reference where I was aware of "me" - a few times, but I've tripped hundreds.

 

[adrian89987]

Yea during ego loss, it wouldn't be possible for me to give away anything let alone a couple words out of my mouth.

 

[psychedelicious]

Ego is what your mind believes that you are, and what it seeks to protect. It is the false "I" behind the being that you are. It is your minds struggle for a sense of self, sense of identity.

When consuming psychedelics at high enough doses I find that rather than acting more "primitive" I find that I can escape the boundaries of my mind and come into a much less "primitive" state and pass into something of a god like frame of mind...

Thoughts are replaced with awareness and quite frequently awe. Beauty and love permeate through out my whole being. I am floating in the cosmos... I am. (Ive really only experienced ego loss of this proportion from smoking DMT, though LSD and RC's have only let me peek through the doors so far)

Nice topic BRob.

TOTAL LOVE

Ego lets us experience the world sensually. Ego manifests Dao or KRISHNA or God or whatever you want to call the all-pervading, all-powerful, all-supporting spirit, letting us perceive a reality with rules and barriers, which a growing mind needs to mature. Left, right, and middle, id, ego, and superego, earth, middle-air, and the highest heavens, action, inaction, and balance... Resolving only to the in-between, the middle way, is ego loss, as far as I have seen...

 

[BristolRob]

The book "Why Freud was wrong" is a worth a read to see where Freud was coming from.

Richard Webster is a sophist. I have read this book and also a lot of Allain Hobson's. It's transparent to me that both have read very little of Freud and have been more than selective in the reading that they have done. It's easy to be defensive with Freud - I went through the same process - it takes a while to appreciate the strength of his metapsychology

I just hope those that are dismissive of Freud's works have actually made a decent effort to read his work (not just interpretations of his work) in order to get a true sense for themselves.

Chapter 7 of the interpretation of dreams in a fair start, but the most comprehensive summary of his work can be found in "an outline of psychoanalysis" (1937) standard edition 23.

His papers on metapsychology still stand head and shoulders above anything else we have as an attempt to formulate a comprehesnsive description of the dynamics of the psyche. It surprises me that not more people interested in psychedelics make an effort to read Freud. It's no triviality that the psychotherapy practiced with LSD in the 50s was almost exclusively psychodynamic in its approach

 

[psychedelicious]

BRob, do you have any suggestions for books or reading concerning Freud and eastern thought or psychedelics?

 

[The_Idler]

Psychodynamic theory is almost entirely bullshit.

 

[psood0nym]

His papers on metapsychology still stand head and shoulders above anything else we have as an attempt to formulate a comprehesnsive description of the dynamics of the psyche. It surprises me that not more people interested in psychedelics make an effort to read Freud. It's no triviality that the psychotherapy practiced with LSD in the 50s was almost exclusively psychodynamic in its approach

Good to see another student of psychology in here. But isn't it to their theoretical comprehensiveness that Freud's theories owe their influence and not their empirical success? I certainly wouldn't dispute that Freud was a brilliant man, or that his psychoanalysis is an immense intellectual achievement, but so far as I'm aware only the work of his psychological defense mechanisms have seen any degree of experimental confirmation (via neuroimaging techniques; of course Freud did think his theories would reduce to brain phenomena, but the point is that other than the mere existence of the aforementioned defense mechanisms, there is no evidence that his theories can go through that reduction while retaining their conceptual structure and interrelationships) Like Aristotle, a genius without equal in human history whose ideas held sway over western thought for a thousand years, the explanatory gravity of Freud's ideas drew many thinkers into its orbit, yet no one believes rocks fall because of their innate natural tendency any more.

It is the fluidity and comprehensiveness of psychoanalysis, its wiggle room, its ability to superimpose itself over rather than directly refer to phenomena, that allows it to accomodate such a range of human behavior. Because of this it can really only interpret behavior after the fact. Adler's individual psychology, which explained human behavior largely in terms of feelings of inferiority, likewise has explanatory power, but even astrology can make similar claims. What good is an organizing principle that doesn't do any work of its own? Where is the history of successful specific novel predictions in psychoanalysis? Where is the 'eclipse experiment' or an accounting of the 'precession of the perihelion of Mercury' that helped confirm relativity, for Freud? The human mind is nowhere near as clean as the cosmos, and seeking a nomothetical understanding of it is perhaps naive at this stage of the game, but we must expect some successful predictions and independent confirmations of psychological theories or simply throw our hands up and say it's too complex to even bother with for now. There is certainly little statistical difference in the degree to which the application of different schools of psychological thought have actually helped people clinically (eg. cognitive psychology has only a slightly better track record at dealing with depression than others), which suggests none have really gotten closer to any universal truths of human behavior or thought whose understanding would be expected to translate to a major benefit in the traditional doctor/patient relationship.

When every clinical observation is interpreted in the light of the theory that emerged from prior observations new observations can hardly count as confirming evidence, yet this is the process so many psychologists have adopted to confirm their theories. If Freud was capturing something deep about the human mind, it isn't refined enough to be fruitful in any predictive scientific sense, and in applying it to psychedelic experience we run the risk of cementing incongruent, purely theoretical artifacts into our explanatory models of an already abstruse phenomena. Arguably that risk will always be present when we want to talk beyond behaviorism and fMRI data, but at least our modern folk psychological vocabulary has the benefit over psychoanalysis of being somewhat intuitive. Certainly the modern view of the unconscious mind emerging from experimental cognitive neuroscience, which does make successful predictions, albeit modest ones, or the subjective experiences of most forum members here of ego dissolution/death, bears little resemblance to the old Freudian conceptions.

 

[MasterOfDeception]

Is there a difference between 'ego' and 'self' for you?

 

[BristolRob]

BRob, do you have any suggestions for books or reading concerning Freud and eastern thought or psychedelics?

Regards Eastern thought and psychodynamic psychology - Jung is much more relevant than Freud, although there are definite over-laps in Freud's work as well e.g., "the nirvana prinicple" and the idea that the organism strives towards reunion - it having been progressively torn from unions e.g., with the womb, the breast, the primary attachment figure etc, and the primary narcisissm these unions engender

There is a book called "Psychology and the East" by Jung. I've read a lot of Jung but this book is still on my shelf waiting to be read. "Modern man in search of soul", "on the nature of the psyche" and "the undiscovered self" are especially great works of Jung.

Regards Freud. He's still the master IMO, even though I've probably read as much Jung as Freud. Freudian metapsychology is more applicable to modern neuroscience IMO. I would read the Ego and the Id and Beyond the pleasure principle for work that has Eastern overlaps but for the best summary of Freud's metapsychology I would consider standard edition 23 which includes "an Outline of Psycho-analysis" - probably the most complete summary of Freud's work. His paper's on metapsychology are still amazing though - "mourning and melancholia" e.g., is simply a beautiful piece of writing - especially if you have any personal experience of depression. "on narcissism" is also beautiful. You can find these in standard edition 14 - probably my most re-read Freud book

 

[BristolRob]

Is there a difference between 'ego' and 'self' for you?

For me there is certainly.

 

[MasterOfDeception]

For me there is certainly.

Explain that difference

A model could be that the Self is something much more purer and innate, it's about the characterists,insticts and tends we have, while the ego is more about society's conditioning,memories,etc...But in the end both of these blend together so they are practically indistinguishable.

 

[mutnat]

Well this discussion again...

Look here,
a pretty decent discussion, started from me {mutant} starting from denial of god [with obvious connection with psych.XP], and eventually leading to matters of ego/self.

My opinions, even if I didn't quite read all the thread, are somewhat the following:

1) there is problem of definition of ego, ego-loss, ego-death etc. Each one in such discussions speaks for different concepts as 'ego'. Some don't like the concept of ego so they proudly shout they killed ego [well done pioneer, so whose body is that? ] while others use the same term to describe moments of extreme lucidity, epiphany, uniteness with the whole etc.

2) there is no ego-less state, no ego-death. As I understand the concept of 'ego', as a big and conscious egoist I am, and as , I believe, is the original intent of the word, ego is the thing that makes the world go round, humans breed, evolve etc. Ego is the most important single thing on the earth. I know that psychedelic theists dislike ego - their problem, because they can't really get rid of it. Well, maybe they can, by burning out or should I say 'converting' their brains in a douche of psychedelics. But I strongly believe that even then, there is no ego-loss, just ego-lessening , a philosophy / religion of denial of ego.

Ego-death is a stupid [ehm.. OK, naive] term coined by psychedelic enthusiasts to cover the gap of the big wow of extreme psychedelic experiences.

People want to have extreme experiences in extreme doses ['heroic' dosologic attitudes like that McKenna advertised] and still have terms and language and shit.

In my opinion, too large dose = too much overload. People who desperately try to validate every experience they have in terms of modern language, in terms of how the ego-death is the right way, how you should have the big dose so as the curtains fall and reality prooves itself non-existent etc, largely loose the big picture, not understanding that their ego is still there, but largely changed, propably too alienated to recognise itself.

Reality is always there, but if you fuck up your brain with too much shit, then no sane man will take your word very easily that reality doesn't exist.

 

[mutnat]

note: sorry for the harsh tone, I do want to discuss, so I provoke and maybe speak a bit... hmmmm.. less polite than most people do in forums.... I wait for your answers, angry, religious, whatever

peace & evolution

 

[Ismene]

His papers on metapsychology still stand head and shoulders above anything else we have as an attempt to formulate a comprehesnsive description of the dynamics of the psyche. It surprises me that not more people interested in psychedelics make an effort to read Freud. It's no triviality that the psychotherapy practiced with LSD in the 50s was almost exclusively psychodynamic in its approach

But wasn't psychotherapy in the 50's so wretchedly cruel and medieval that they were giving schizophrenia patients LSD for 70 days in a row? And also routinely using electro-shock therapy?

I also question what help talking therapies have with people on LSD. I think it's entirely the wrong approach to take to someone on LSD. When the cosmos is opening like a flower in front of you, do you really feel like talking about your troubled days at school when you were 5?

 

[Xorkoth]

1) there is problem of definition of ego, ego-loss, ego-death etc. Each one in such discussions speaks for different concepts as 'ego'. Some don't like the concept of ego so they proudly shout they killed ego [well done pioneer, so whose body is that? ] while others use the same term to describe moments of extreme lucidity, epiphany, uniteness with the whole etc

...

Ego-death is a stupid [ehm.. OK, naive] term coined by psychedelic enthusiasts to cover the gap of the big wow of extreme psychedelic experiences.

...

People want to have extreme experiences in extreme doses ['heroic' dosologic attitudes like that McKenna advertised] and still have terms and language and shit.

Agreed for the most part... the definitions used for ego death are varied and different people mean different things when they say it. And certainly there are a lot of people taking huge doses and explaining the extreme effects as ego death.

2) there is no ego-less state, no ego-death. As I understand the concept of 'ego', as a big and conscious egoist I am, and as , I believe, is the original intent of the word, ego is the thing that makes the world go round, humans breed, evolve etc. Ego is the most important single thing on the earth. I know that psychedelic theists dislike ego - their problem, because they can't really get rid of it. Well, maybe they can, by burning out or should I say 'converting' their brains in a douche of psychedelics. But I strongly believe that even then, there is no ego-loss, just ego-lessening , a philosophy / religion of denial of ego.

If full ego death occurred, there would be no memory of the state. This is why I believe that ego submission is only ever achieved, although the submission can be so great that the ego becomes unnoticed or obsolete. I guess I am guilty of using the term ego death to describe this state (only when describing the state of near-total submission however). I will try to keep this distinction in the future because I agree that it muddies things up.

In my opinion, too large dose = too much overload. People who desperately try to validate every experience they have in terms of modern language, in terms of how the ego-death is the right way, how you should have the big dose so as the curtains fall and reality prooves itself non-existent etc, largely loose the big picture, not understanding that their ego is still there, but largely changed, propably too alienated to recognise itself.

You must remember that a transcendental experience is not necessarily tied to dosage. My most complete ego submission to date was with a half eighth of mushrooms, hardly a heroic dose. It's about the circumstances at the time. I feel like you're minimizing the experience of ego submission and its potential importance. I also feel like you're painting a picture of people who use the term ego death as reckless, drug-crazed, deluded crazies, when most often it seems to me that the ones who have such experiences are actually taking great care to be responsible and thoughtful about their use (at least at first - some later fall into the trap of overusing psychedelics chasing "enlightenment", as I did). I agree that the ego is very important to survival as a physical organism; however, do you agree that there can be some value in temporarily bypassing it to see from a different perspective? The ego is also responsible for wars and violence and unfairness to others, which is a very real problem in our world (and always has been).

I am curious - have you ever had a transcendental experience with psychedelics or have your experiences been purely recreational/other?

Reality is always there, but if you fuck up your brain with too much shit, then no sane man will take your word very easily that reality doesn't exist.

Agreed, but that's why you should always work to integrate your experiences and not really talk about them too much until you've had time to reflect in sobriety, and also choose who to talk to them about. What is sane anyway? The accepted model of mental reference does not necessarily equal the "right" frame of reference. In the end what matters is your happiness and your ability to provide happiness to others and make the world a better place. However you get to that place is up to you. Psychedelics have helped me and they help others... whether my insights have been an illusion or if there is a grain of truth in them, in the end they have helped me to become a more well-rounded and loving person, so does it matter? They have allowed me to push my sense of self and self-importance, which I call my ego, aside for long enough to truly see beyond myself for a time. It may just be a matter of semantics, then... call it ego death, ego submission, or call it whatever you will. It is hard to refute the claims of thousands of people who have had such perceived benefits from a psychedelic experience. And indeed, it would be foolish to discount such a prevalence of reports... doing so, I feel, would show an unwillingness to see beyond one's own point of view.

 

[*Love*Lite*]

to me, if you characterise your state as 'i am' you have not achieved ego loss. there's no 'i' in ego loss

related reading:

Which drugs work best to induce ego loss, and how to they differ?
Ego Loss?
Ego Loss Forever
What does ego loss mean to you?

alasdair

No, there is no "I" in egoless existence, I was simply stating the essence of "being" as "i am"

 

[grimble crumble]

to keep you working your 9 to 5 8)

 

[adrian89987]

^ haha for real

 

[mutnat]

Xorkoth, thanks for your post, I am glad for your answer, almost relieved, kind of makes me feel alright expressing my opinion, because I know that rationalistic views / thoughts are not very popular in psychedelic communities, especially in regards with the substances themselves, their effects & explanations....

Sometimes truth or decent approaches towards it can smash ones construction of ethics & thought ~ or just negatived for fear of what could be revealed. Just like psychedelics

If full ego death occurred, there would be no memory of the state. This is why I believe that ego submission is only ever achieved, although the submission can be so great that the ego becomes unnoticed or obsolete.

&

I also feel like you're painting a picture of people who use the term ego death as reckless, drug-crazed, deluded crazies, when most often it seems to me that the ones who have such experiences are actually taking great care to be responsible and thoughtful about their use (at least at first - some later fall into the trap of overusing psychedelics chasing "enlightenment", as I did).

Let me rejoin, maybe rephrase what I initially said, since I was clearly understood, with good signal to noise ratio, to my delight...

The term 'ego-death' isn't unseemly. Main reason? Fear & death, two of the most ancient concepts of man, crucial to his psyche, critically connected with ego. Fear of death = Religion, awe .... control, belief = relief End of story? not quite!

Of course your term ego-submission is much much better, but in a way it cannot really describe the feeling / place / space intense experiences give. No words really can. But my post ain't really about terminology. Semantics? Hmmm, not quite... We indeed would have to make a new language [which is actually one of McKenna's quite OK ideas] if we had to describe some common spaces/feels in psychedelia.

So, these being said, I didn't intend to present psychedelic enthusiasts who speak with passion about their "ego-death" experience as "reckless, drug-crazed, deluded crazies" , not at all.

I just believe that overemphasizing on certain crucial moments of people's experiences, and then trying too hard to form some kind of archaic / ultimate truth in such common motives in those experiences becomes a bit ridiculous, sometimes.

My main 'point' / purpose is to defend ego and state you cannot kill it. The 'ego-death experience' or moments of 'ego-death', can of course be of different types and each one can perceive them differently. It is , at least partly, a misconception , because ego never dies, unless you die , and it is popularised & commonly used in vain, thus destroying words and language.

But it's because the ego [and all the concepts it includes] is our main structure of being, people seem to overemphasize in experiences that by-pass it, make them forget about it, loose self-awareness. It's certainly a strong space/feel to suddenly loose the point of view of the one that feels, and suddenly become the feeling.

Or, expressed differently, these common motives, at least for me are just the begining, not the end of the research. They are stuff to amaze and to push us further into searching the mechanism. Those common motives are stuff to make us think more, not to make us feel we reached nirvana, at least IMO.

So what i oppose is any dogmatic truth, any religious-like belief , created from overwhelming experiences that tries to present itself like an ultimate truth. It's no ultimate truth. It's each persons take/view. If there's some kind of ultimate truth in every one, let me state my own absoluteness: that is the EGO of each one of us and what to do with it!

Psychedelic philosophy suffers from the following status: the scientists working around psychedelics cannot or don't wanna do many speculations, they're not really allowed to do so, and if they do it, they do it carefully, because they have to stay in the scientific arena and its ways. On the other side, most of the people in the community who do philosophise or pseudo-philosophise, are believers, advocates, so their 'philosophy' has evolved into a religion-like mysticism, a psychedelic masturbation - this kind-of speculation within a pre-defined range is not really philosophy, it's rather something like conscription. Leary and Mckenna and maybe Lilly are largely responsible for this.

The tricky part here is that the motives I spoke about earlier are impressively common, but they're not the same for everyone, so I have to somewhat generalise.

For example i would consider an intense salvia experience closer to 'death' [partial or complete loss of self/ego/awareness] as well as all strong dissociatives experiences, than moments I would call epiphanies, common with classic psychedelics. But this is a parallel, quite big discussion, huh? [= classics VS dissociatives]

Admittely I haven't ever had a 'big' dose of any classic psychedelic, even though I regard a microdot XP [which led to an unhappy ending due to awful set+setting] a pretty decent dose. Will say more about my experiences next.

You must remember that a transcendental experience is not necessarily tied to dosage. My most complete ego submission to date was with a half eighth of mushrooms, hardly a heroic dose. It's about the circumstances at the time. I feel like you're minimizing the experience of ego submission and its potential importance.

Please explain this 'half-eighth' thing in grams, I always fall into that and don't understand the quantities

I by-pass the transcendental thing for now [look below for that], and will say I agree, and that's the reason I am generally against the 'blind' heroic doses ["coz McKenna says so"].

My first experience with LSD, some 8 years ago, half a blotter, gave me an epiphany I will always remember boldly - it's the thing those who won't ever try such substances in their lives won't ever understand. Alcohol can give you a blissful euphoria and blissful thinking, easily a psychedelic state....

but with psychedelics you might just feel the extreme bliss without being able to particularise ~ so, in a way you can call it transcendental [will say more about this below].

I don't know how a huge dose of psychedelics would feel, it doesn't draw me. Psychedelics are not for satiety IMO and I have yet to experience tryptamines [DMT, psilocybin, ayahuasca] ...

I agree that the ego is very important to survival as a physical organism; however, do you agree that there can be some value in temporarily bypassing it to see from a different perspective? The ego is also responsible for wars and violence and unfairness to others, which is a very real problem in our world (and always has been).

I guess you understand by now, that I do indeed find value in the states of psychedelic experiences. Indeed that most important part they play in ones evolving IMO is that they render you capable [but do not force you to] of seeing things from other point-of-views. .

It's not necessarily switching off of the ego, but maybe also allowing one to see the big picture all at once [perhaps its a combo of somewhat switching off the ego-point of view + simultaneously inducing a glorious bliss/joy/completeness.]

The ego is indeed responsible for war, violence etc - that's the way it always was, i don't think it can be otherwise, no pessimism here, only a cynic spreaking his opinion. Life is a struggle. Oppositions everywhere. Ever seen an animal documentary and getting the feeling that were just it, animals? I get that all teh time. Actually, I usually see people and they remind me of animals
The analogies are countless.

Anyway. Nature is beautiful, despite all its violence. There's no equality or equal rights in nature. {note that this comes from a guy with a very leftish/autonomous liberal background ~ Max Stirner anyone? ~ not a fucking insensitive right-wing piece of shit}

I am curious - have you ever had a transcendental experience with psychedelics or have your experiences been purely recreational/other?

My first experience with LSD showed me it's something very special, that in no way could be compared to model recreational/euphoric drugs like coke, even though I, as well as lots of people, had euphoric states in their experiences.

I also had a couple of hasty, shitty prepared experiences in the mid-time, because I was drifted, or I forgot my first experience and conclusions... But, for sure, I am somewhat the exact opposite of your typical recreational user. Transcendental, only in the way I said earlier. I am an radical atheist. No religious exprience ever. My last trip with LSA, last summer was definately psychoanalytical.

Lastly, I knew someone would comment on the 'sane' thing. You really think it's important or indicative? No it's not.

If illusions make someone happy, it's fucking great. Like you said, all that matters is a well-balanced and happy individual. That's why I hate religion, not religious people, i oppose to psychedelic theism, not the psychedelic theist

It's true that psychedelics have vast positive possibilities. I wouldn't propose the right way to ingest or have an experience. And of course who am I to tell one's exprerience was not real or anything. So what? Does this mean that I should listen to all the heap of anonymous advertisers of stupid , no-control psychedelic use in silence? I mean, look at your forums, there are a lot of druggies...

And when it comes to explaining the whole thing, and learning about the man, then, I will have to reject machine elves and the like. Does the illusion make you happy? Cool. It's still an illusion, don't come to me to say it's the real deal, it's only a personal thing. If you're trying to say reality doesn't exist, I might feel like confronting you. You find something nasty in that?

I am an intelligent cynic, a rationalist, an atheist with an inflated ego. What do you expect?

 

[OrneTTe]

^^^

Maybe I am wrong, but from your description, it doesn't seem like you have even come close to what we are talking about, ego death, submission, whatever. 1/2 hit of some blotter and some LSA. You haven't even tried any tryptamines, and mushrooms and DMT are some of the major catalysts for this state. I think maybe you should get some more experience under your belt before you talk about experiences that you have not yet had. When you lose all concept of who you are and are only the observer without any of the constraints that you as yourself put on, this is what we are talking about. I think ego-loss is a decent description of this. Take a blast of 5-meo-dmt. You will die, and with it your ego. And you say that we cannot explain the psychedelic state with our language and using phrases like ego-loss is irresponsible. So what are we to do then, not talk about it, not try to discuss it?