ego-death? no, ego-exaltation. bliss beyond pain and pleasure...

people often sense inner poverty and seek to be acted on by an outside agency. dmt gets approached like this alot. tales of mystical experiences, a supernatural intervention! something to edify or purify or justify an existence.

personally i do not believe in things. i see dmt as the eye of the needle. if you are able to absorb the terror - to let go of all that which you were not born with - you come through the other side dead sober.

laying in bed, drifting off to sleep, watching my mind twirl and fracture, the debate continues; ego, i, me, self, personhood, perspective, kia, soul, etcetera. who is talking? me. who's that? i. i. i. i. yes, my fiends and selves, i am irrevocably me.

i consider ego and soul to be synonymous. upon death, your soul dissipates, your flesh doesn't even notice.

i've been approached by 'entities', i mocked them, laughed at my own inventiveness, and they vanished and as ever here i was, inside myself, the calm center of a brain struck by a chemical, the observer of neural annihilation, unmoved by the disturbance. if god himself came down i'd laugh him to oblivion as well.

i prefer to look at dmt as a blast furnace for the mind. impurities can not be sustained. but do stay awake for it. don't black out; the pain will clean you out, sterilize you. leave you so, so, exquisitely empty.

what did you EXPECT a drug to do? change your life? save your soul? convince you? and the resulting confusion. the suffering is delightful, all for nothing, oh void do we come unto you, to partake of your mystery, to see such sights, such kaleidoscopic sadism of imagination ... amen.

Last night I realized why I have such a love affair with psychedelics. They're the only thing I've consumed that's made me question my consumption. Not just of psychedelics, but my consumption in general.

I smoked for many many years. Every time I took a psychedelic I questioned this habit and considered quitting. Every time I've taken a psychedelic I've realized how often I eat even when I'm not hungry. They seem to have the ability to temporarily rewire the brain, to short circuit our reward/dopamine cycle and allow us to interrupt it and look at our behavior rationally.

So yes, in my opinion, psychedelics can be a tool for growth and personal understanding. But they're a tool I agree. It is the individual that makes these choices. But a tool that helps you to reach self-actualization.

As to entities, mystical stuff, etc. etc. Who really knows. I try to keep an open mind about these things, maybe I just like a little mystery in life. But I've also come to the understanding that it's *my* moral compass I need to follow. That I need to take personal responsibility for myself and my actions. That I need to make myself happy rather then making some unseen being (God) happy. If there really is a God, some divine creator of all of this, I think we can judge by his actions and (apparent) indifference that this is what he really wants from us. Like any father, he wants his children to grow up to be free-willed and independent beings. So these ideas, at least in my mind, aren't mutually exclusive.

But isn't this just growing up? AKA personal growth?

In some cultures things like psychedelics were used just for this purpose. Trials of manhood etc. This is something we don't really have in western culture. And again, something that I see as being a valuable tool for self discovery and understanding of the human condition.

Speaking as a father, these things I've learned are not about the ego. The ego is the child inside all of us. That loud voice that says 'me' 'me' 'me', 'mine' 'mine' 'mine'. When we grow up that voice becomes quieter and the voice of reason takes over. Asks how we can be better. How we can grow, as a species. How we can take better care of our children, teach them to be adults, how to take care of themselves, and how to respect other human beings.

Thank you.

Thank you.

i think the ego matures and broadens its domain as we grow.



i'd group these all as egotistical and selfish in motivation. i do not think that the question is, ego, yes or no? but, ego, no or which? ego can be, will be, whatever you want it to be. the problem a serial killer has, is, he wants to be a serial killer. a good father wants to be a good father. both would cease to be that if they lost their ego. various experiences could make them reverse roles.

i see ego as ones ability to say, "THIS IS WHO I AM" and stick to their guns, internally. it's seen most strongly in those that are most active, regardless if they are kind or wicked.



whose? i'm sure we are calling separate things by the same name. my experiences with ego death showed me how 'i' am merely an object, no different then a chair or pencil, my eyes uncannily lit by an electrochemical furnace that creates animation, or life. and without ego, it seems ones moral compass would be the same as any reptiles.

ego unifies all of the unspeakable madness of organic existence into a face, a name, a logo, a consistency with which to confront complexity. perhaps you see why i treat ego as soul. i would say your moral compass and your ego are simultaneous products of your existence.

and i have very little but disdain for those who make their living off of spiritual merchandise, and teach to abandon ego. (why not abandon your kidneys or tendons?) there are masses of people who flock to them for assistance in escaping themselves and their desire, to be shed of the burden of individual life, which is alone-ness in a way that has nothing to do with isolation. their eyes look hollow of joy and sorrow and bliss and pain, gone inside. life is not for everyone.

so, all that i call ego, what do you name it?

I'm not saying the ego is a bad thing. I think it's actually quite important for the survival of both the individual and the species.

So I guess the best thing I can do is define the word ego, at least for myself.

To me the ego is that voice inside my head. The one that tells me that something is good or bad. It seeks out good things and seeks to remove the bad. It thrives on definitions because without these definitions it has no idea what good and bad are. The ego serves a purpose, as I said above, it's important for us to see injury and pain as bad, hunger as bad, food as good, etc. etc. These things have helped our species to survive for thousands of years.

What's unhealthy, and why I believe we've seen so much 'hate' for the ego and thus people making a killing off 'self help and spiritual books' is when people identify with this voice in their heads. When we begin to believe that the thoughts in our head are more *us* then everything else that makes us up. I see these thoughts, my ego if you will, as a tool. I can use it for rational thought, to weigh the pros and cons of the situation. But when I get tied up in my ego and begin to identify with it and thus my own definitions of myself, I begin to foster close-mindedness, selfishness, and irrationality.

Now we may just be getting lost in semantics here. Fraud defined the ego one way, Eastern Philosophy another. My approach is really my own from my personal experience with... well my own ego. So it may be that we we're simply using different words for different things.

Anyway, as to your specific questions.

I think intuition, feeling if you will, and rational thought are both important. In other words listening to your gut instead of just your head and incorporating that into your behavior. There's many biological drives and queues which I believe many of us ignore because we're way to caught up in that inner voice. Conversely we also listen to much to these biological drives sometimes, over eating, over consumption, etc. etc. And then we use the ego later on to justify these actions.

What it boils down too, at least for me, is balance. The ego (by my definition) is no more me then my little toe is. It's part of me and worthy of my attention yes, but it's not the whole story.

*And sorry if this comes off as a bit scattered or I didn't fully answer your questions. It's been a busy day for me and I was interrupted a couple of times while typing this up and at this point I'm just going to hit post to get it out.*

thank you

Its also OK to change....This is who I am 'TODAY' Maturity/Grow/Change...
Tomorrow.............who knows.

Its a certain type of security we seek to say 'forever'
Compensating for an inner sense of insignificance perhaps.
IMO, It all gravitates back to Eating shitting and sleeping.....and how to live an efficiant mortal & happy life.... No?

Love and Peas
G

alright. i agree with that in general. it'd help to understand that i come from a childhood and youth of ego-destruction and christian fundamentalism, so satanism is a stop on the way to balance, so to speak.

i look at the inner dialogue as separate from the ego - perhaps its only my personal experience that the inner voice seeks and destroys ego, and that my most sharp and human moments, my most egotistical and charismatic moments, occur through complete inner emptiness and silence, like the vacuum of space. i'm not all figured out and stuff. i hear tons of voices, i don't consider any of it to be 'me' though they are 'mine'. voices of people i know, mentors, archetypes, ancestors, media and data, computation, gibberish sometimes. normally i ignore it unless i notice something interesting, it is tiring to deliberately speak into my mind, its like a press release full of bloodthirsty, malicious reporters. intermittently i crush, encourage, experiment with or engage the voices in my head. its fascinating how i just speak in your head, and without any action on my part, multiple voices individually respond just like a person would and what they say may surprise me or i may disagree, and we can hold full conversations , they even seem to have separate memories... it makes perfect sense to me how some people wind up in the looney bin after thinking about thinking and the voices. i laugh and marvel, my name is Legion, for We are Many. others have mental breakdowns, it sure can be stressful.

a good metaphor would be my ego is the representative and chairman, and the inner community is the board or council or congress.

i understand identity is a costume. death will rip us naked for the communion of Rot. so until i die... i am me, myselves, us and i, individuated, separate from my environment.

my personal error has always been rooted in cold, indifferent rationalism and doubt carried as far as self abnegation and destruction. so, you can see my 'drift'...

what we've both expressed seems to be what we've decided is our best course of action at this time



i'd go as far as to say its not ok not to change. when you get bored with a personality, toss it out and fashion a new one. i see ego as the defining creative act of sentience, because there really is nothing like a "self" in you... just drives, thoughts, emotions, chaos... to look into the abyss and say, Let There Be Light!

Yeah, I'm sure the inner dialogue is different for everyone.

Some people may be more emotionally driven, some more intellect. Me I fall into the later category and I've found that I tend to ignore this whole other part of myself, especially my intuition, and over identity with my thoughts. This leads to sometimes acting with nothing but cold (ir)rationalism.

My personal goal is to strike a better balance between the two. I think we're born with a whole set of tools I've been ignoring. Social queues, biological queues, that feeling in my gut, etc.

But anyway, I agree about the destruction of the ego thing. A lot of 'spiritual teachers' have turned this into an enterprise, and while I think there's value in doing self inventory, I believe many of them don't practice what they preach, no matter how they appear outwardly to the world, and are really just in it to make a quick buck.

i'm as certain of that as anything. we have been aberrated. the real path is a stripping away of tacked on rubbish, not finding more - distill yourself, not dilute. sanitation, sanity, implies free of foreign matter. in-sanity is filthy and polluted mentality. educated and trained to ignore what we know, condemned as heretics for honesty. suicides in droves, mass mental disorder, addiction driving nations, self destruction is rapidly becoming the last means of salvation. damnation for the brave.

its possible to smell a woman in heat from 50 feet. predict someones exact intentions as soon as they form. humans are the #2 animal in terms of ability to cover distances on foot. if you learn your flesh, know the world through your body, find and fan your primal flame, people start thinking you have supernatural abilities.

I like it =]