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Ego death is an experience sometimes undergone by psychonauts, mystics, shamans, monks, psychologists, and others interested in exploring the depths of the mind.
One means of accomplishing ego death is by the ingestion of psychedelics such as ketamine, dimethyltryptamine, psilocybin/psilocin, mescaline, salvinorin A or LSD. Other methods and practices, including prayer, sacred ritual, several days of sleep deprivation, weeks of fasting, or decades of meditation, may lead to the mystical experience of ego death, too. Less frequently, it might also come about spontaneously of its own accord (by the Grace of God, perhaps, or as a symptom of mental illness, or in response to severe trauma).
In some cases, this experience may be in part characterized by the perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment, a sense of loss of "control," or the loss of the accustomed feeling of existing as a personal agent. The intense mystic altered state can produce loose cognitive-association binding. According to egodeath.com, it can be
- "experienced as a sense 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."
In this sense, it should be noted, ego death is a temporary state of mind which can be stabilised and reverted. This is done either by thought-source control for those who have acheived the state without using psychedelics, or by deintoxication for those who have. (It should, in other words, be distinguished from actual death itself).
There are in fact, though, at least as many points of view about the nature of ego death as there are mystics, psychonauts, etc. who have had the experience. (Some may agree, for example, with the poet who said, "after the first death, there is no other.")
Also, ego death in the sense of transending the notion that one even has an "ego" in the first place would be something more consistent with the teachings concerning Moksha (in Hinduism) and Nirvana (in Buddhism).
References
- Grof, S: "LSD Psychotherapy", page 35. Hunter House, 1980
- http://www.egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm#_Toc177337640
- "A refusal to mourn death," by Dylan Thomas (retrieved 21-2-2008)]
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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