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Ego death or Ego disintegration is an experience sometimes undergone by psychonauts, mystics, shamans, monks, psychologists, and many others exploring the depths of the mind.
It can be brought on by the ingestion of psychedelics such as dimethyltryptamine, psilocybin/psilocin, mescaline, salvinorin A or LSD. Days of sleep deprivation, weeks of fasting, or decades of meditation can also lead to ego death during a mystical experience.
It is characterized by the perceived loss of boundaries between the self encased in skin and possessing a physical body and environment as a whole, a sense of loss of control, and the loss of the accustomed feeling of existing as a personal agent. The intense mystic altered state, producing loose cognitive-association binding, which then produces an experience of being controlled by frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing, ever-existing future. Experiencing this model of control and time initially destabilizes self-control power, and amounts to the death of the self that was conceived of as an autonomous control-agent. Self-control stability is restored upon transforming one's mental model to take into account the dependence of personal control on a hidden, separate thought-source, such as Necessity or a divine level that transcends Necessity.
This concept of disintegration and Oneness with the universe is part of the spiritual aspiration called Moksha in Hinduism and Nirvana in Buddhism.
References
- Grof, S: "LSD Psychotherapy", page 35. Hunter House, 1980
- http://www.egodeath.com/
See also
- Collective Unconscious
- Cosmic consciousness
- Higher Consciousness
- Stanislav Grof
- Ego (spirituality)
- Self (spirituality)
- Near-death experience
- Entheogen
- Nirvana
- Alan Watts
- Kensho
External links
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