| content |
 |
This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. Please help recruit one or improve this article yourself. See the talk page for details. Please consider using {{Expert-subject}} to associate this request with a WikiProject |
 |
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (July 2008) |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007) |
Ego death is an experience sometimes undergone by psychonauts, mystics, shamans, monks, psychologists, and others interested in exploring the depths of the mind.
The practice of ego death as a deliberately sought "mystical experience" in some ways overlaps, but is nevertheless distinct from, traditional teachings concerning enlightenment/"Nirvana" (in Buddhism) or "Moksha" (in Hinduism), which might perhaps be better understood as transcendence of the notion that one even has any actual, non-illusory "ego" with which to experience "death" in the first place.
Contents |
Methods of inducing of the experience
The most direct means of accomplishing the mystical experience of ego death may be through the use of psychedelics[1] such as LSD, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, salvinorin A, muscimol, nitrous oxide, Lysergic acid amide. Many other methods, practices, or experiences may also induce this state, including prayer, sacred ritual, several days of sleep deprivation, several weeks of fasting, or several years of meditation practice. Less frequently, it might also come about spontaneously or "of its own accord" (as a symptom of certain mental illnesses, or in response to severe trauma).
There are a variety of schools of thought about the aim, practice, and interpretation of the ego death experience. According to one system, for example (see egodeath.com) it is to be characterized as the perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment, a sense of the loss of "control," the loss of the accustomed feeling of existing as a "personal agent," loose "cognitive-association binding," and even
...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.[2]
It should also be noted, within the context of this system, that ego death is not actual death itself, but rather a temporary state of mind which can be stabilised and reverted. This can be done either by thought-source control for any who have achieved the state, as well as by deintoxication for those who have reached the state using psychedelics.
However, there are, again, 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, for example, may even go so far as to agree with the poet Dylan Thomas who said, "after the first death, there is no other."[3])
References
- ^ Grof, S: "LSD Psychotherapy", page 35. Hunter House, 1980
- ^ The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death
- ^ "A refusal to mourn death," by Dylan Thomas (retrieved 21-2-2008)]
See also
- Altered states of consciousness.
- Death, Brain death, and Near-death experience.
- Gnosis and Kenosis.
- Ego (philosophy), Ego (spirituality), and Self (spirituality).
- Mysticism
- Psychedelic experience and Entheogenic experience.
External links
