its a term used abundantly on the nexus and i dont actually know what it means. i have a guess but the context it is used by posters varies greatly and makes it hard to pin point what exactly is ego death. I've seen it used to describe a positive experience or something to be achieved but mostly its used to describe negative or bad trips. so im confused.

i put ego death into the search and got the new york public library in return. after 3 pages of looooong ass posts about random topics with just a quick use of the word so it wasn't very helpful. its also not in the lexicon which maybe we should add it.

anyways cheers thanks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death

It's when there is no longer "I", when you and the rest of the universe are one thing. You lose the concept of being separate from everything else.

Precisely. There is no difference seen between subjects and objects. One often either feels intense dissociation from the body, is unaware of it, or has been assumed into the whole of an object/space/reality and their awareness resides therein, not experiencing self in a usual way. No I, no self, but still apparently existing. But what is existing? Nothing you will find. Which can be scary. It often seems funny in light of the absurdity of the situation, nothing experiencing what appears to be something.

ahhh i see. this happened on my first breakthrough and a few good ones since. i described it to my friend as such

"not only was i not aware of having a physical body but i wasnt even aware i was an entity at all until my way back i was pure energy and the concept of people seemed so strange and ill logical it implied the need for intelligent design"

does that sound like ego death?

This is the place.
All springs from here.
It's were everything flows.
Where Thoughts do not exist
only laughter
total absurdity
trying to get around it, but who trys?
An animal without a sense of self-awareness?
Like a machine this thing which is you tries to get his head around whats happening
but its absurd
you cannot be you withouth thought!

Finally home. Game over. That's it.
What was before means nothing
What a relief!

Simple, concise description.

NICE!!!!

That is ironic isn't it....



WS

heh ya, it's like a Möbius strip/fractal with zero sides observing itself in a timeless infinitive dimensioned/attributed space. Discreet segments of awareness can exist in superposition that can be subjectively segregated from the whole consciousness. Probably as a means to more efficiently explore the nature of no self.

I agree that ego-death is when there is no more "I". The thoughts, feelings, and memories that make "you" who "you" are, cease to exist.. But there very nature of ego-death makes it very hard to describe with words.

My first LSD trip resulted in an ego-death experience.. And after I came to, I had NO idea what had just happened.. After doing some browsing through erowid to try to figure out what the hell had just happened to me.. I came across Tim Leary's paper on using LSD to imprint the Tibetan-Buddhist experience, and it was only through reading that that I understood what had just happened to me.

There is a part in the paper where he describes some symptoms that people who are not fully prepared for the experience may experience.. These are what hooked my attention and led me to a more thorough understanding that ego-death was indeed what I had just experienced.

" If the person fails to recognize the onset of ego-loss, he may complain of strange bodily symptoms that show he has not reached a liberated state:

Bodily pressure
Clammy coldness followed by feverish heat
Body disintegrating or blown to atoms
Pressure on head and ears
Tingling in extremities
Feelings of body melting or flowing like wax
Nausea
Trembling or shaking, beginning in pelvic region and spreading up torso."

The paper was very helpful to me, and you can find it here

Hope that helps!

= consciousness?


WS

There is not one single way of experiencing ego-death. Whenever you have an experience where that thing you normally consider to be 'i' seems to have somehow vanished, you experience ego death.

That could mean that there no longer is an 'i', but it could also mean that there is an 'i', but that it can no longer be experienced in a coherent way or even that there is an 'i', that can be experienced coherently, but that it appears to be not the 'i' you always thought it was.

You can experience ego-death a thousand ways...meditation, drugs, falling in love, growing old and grey....

Complete and total awareness of your spiritual form and complete denial of your physical existence. Sometimes i get so far out there i forget i'm the individual camdemonium, i guess that's my best guess at ego-death; it really has to be experienced to be explained though, its one of those concepts you just can't describe to people IMO.

Actually, it's not as much about the self as well as the self-image.
ego-death is the destruction of the self-image.

but don't worry, it usually grows back faster than you would want.

Yeah... I have to respectfully disagree with almost everything you're saying, Polytrip. I think if you believe that ego death can be experienced by falling in love, then you probably haven't experienced it (ego death, that is... not love - which ain't so bad in it's own right).

Ego death is a COMPLETE destruction of ALL existing reference points - not a lack of coherence or radically altered perspective on the self-image. It is the TOTAL annhilation of the "I", the COMPLETE dissolution into the experience, the transendance of one's individual existence and rebirth AS THE EXPERIENCE ITSELF. The "I" is just shattered; nothing remains, except for the infinite landscape.

That's my definition anyway, for whatever it's worth. It's a fairly impossible concept to fathom until you experience it first hand.

What you describe is one way of experiencing ego death. My definition of the phenomenon is just broader than yours.

It's probably my affinity with budhism that makes me want to define ego-death in a broader sense.

I’ve had several kinds of experience that I’d call ego death.

Salvia often produces profound amnesia – no memories of who I am, where I was just a moment ago, or even what I am (there was a period where I routinely became inanimate objects). Yet there is still an “I”. The “I” has radically changed (for example, I once became a circus tent), yet an awareness of self remains.

Twice when using DMT I became an alien being. In both cases, there were memories, there was an identity, there was an “I”, but the “I” was someone/something else. The memories and identity were not “mine”. It was only after I came back to this reality that I became aware that there had been a “shift” in identity.

Several times when using DMT “I” was annihilated. It isn’t possible to fully experience this kind of ego death – I can experience the “dying”, but not the death. I experience my ego fading away, and then some time later I re-emerge, but there are never any memories of the period in between (if indeed there is an in-between period).

So is ego death the forgetting of a particular “I”? Or is it the replacement of one “I” with another? Or is it annihilation of everything, including consciousness?

Good point gilbran2, maybe true ego death can only be attained when we leave these physical bodies for good (death) and return to the source.

Is it possible to have a total annihilation of the “I” and continue to be conscious? I don’t see how. As long as there is consciousness then there is “I”. “I” is the consciousness. Consciousness becomes the self-image. In this sense, it seems to me that there is always an “I” as long as there is consciousness.

This doesn’t mean that “I” can’t be extinguished. As I wrote in my last post, I’ve had experiences where I felt myself being slowly crushed out of existence (once, I literally felt bodily pressure as if I was being flattened). And then there was nothing (I presume, since “I” wasn’t there to experience it – “I” was not conscious). My next recollection was one that included conscious awareness of “I”.

So if we define ego death too narrowly, it becomes an abstraction – something we can talk about but never experience.

To me it is just an experience that humbles you to your core, and is a lasting effect.

I know what you mean. I've experienced what I believe to be ego death on a few occasions, but it's no more than a blur. It's incredibly intense leading up to it, and then there's a blur of memory that bring back intense emotions and such, but I can't actually remember those moments. When the "I" is back all I can think of is how intense that was. Ego death seems to me as a moment of pure experience, where all that is is experience. No understanding, no distinguishing, just a moment of being. This seems to be the only thing that can happen without the ego. Pure unfiltered experience. With no references (which are provided by the ego) it's an extremely hard thing to encode to memory, so you don't remember much after it's done.