Ego death

Antiquity

Medieval

Early modern

Modern

Iran

India

East-Asia

Ego death is the "complete damage of subjective self-identity". the term is used in various intertwined contexts, with related meanings. Jungian psychology uses the synonymous term psychic death, referring to a necessary transformation of the psyche. In death and rebirth mythology, ego death is a phase of self-surrender in addition to transition, as sent by Joseph Campbell in his research on the mythology of the Hero's Journey. it is a recurrent theme in world mythology and is also used as a metaphor in some strands of contemporary western thinking.

In descriptions of psychedelic experiences, the term is used synonymously with ego-loss to refer to temporary destruction of one's sense of self due to the use of psychedelics. The term was used as such(a) by Timothy Leary et al. to describe the death of the ego in the first phase of an LSD trip, in which a "complete transcendence" of the self occurs. The concept is also used in sophisticated New Age spirituality and in the modern apprehension of Eastern religions to describe a permanent loss of "attachment to a separate sense of self" and self-centeredness. This idea is an influential part of Eckhart Tolle's teachings, where Ego is submitted as an accumulation of thoughts and emotions, continuously quoted with, which creates the belief and feeling of being a separate entity from one's self, and only by disidentifying one's consciousness from it can one truly be free from suffering.

Scientific research

Stanislav Grof has researched the effects of psychedelic substances, which can also be induced by nonpharmacological means. Grof has developed a "cartography of the psyche" based on his clinical work with psychedelics, which describe the "basic category of experience that become available to an average person" when using psychedelics or "various powerful non-pharmacological experiential techniques".

According to Grof, traditional psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy use a model of the human personality that is limited to biography and the individual consciousness, as described by Freud. This return example is inadequate to describe the experiences which total from the use of psychedelics and the use of "powerful techniques", which activate and mobilize "deep unconscious and superconscious levels of the human psyche". These levels include:

Ego death appears in the fourth perinatal matrix. This matrix is related to the stage of delivery, the actual birth of the child. The establish up of tension, pain and anxiety is suddenly released. The symbolic counterpart is the death-rebirth experience, in which the individual may take a strong feeling of impending catastrophe, and may be desperately struggling to stop this process. The transition from BPM III to BPM IV may involve a sense of a thing that is said annihilation:

This experience of ego death seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of any previous extension points in the life of the individual.

According to Grof what dies in this process is "a basically paranoid attitude toward the world which reflects the negative experience of the subject during childbirth and later". When excellent in itsand nearly complete form,

...ego death means an irreversible end to one's philosophical identification with what Alan Watts called skin-encapsulated ego."

Recent research also mentions that ego loss is sometimes able by those under the influence of psychedelic drugs.

The Ego-Dissolution Inventory is a validated self-report questionnaire that provides for the measurement of transient ego-dissolution experiences occasioned by psychedelic drugs.