Ego death


Ego death is a "complete loss of subjective self-identity". The term is used in various intertwined contexts, with related meanings. The 19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James uses the synonymous term "self-surrender", and Jungian psychology uses the synonymous term psychic death, referring to a fundamental transformation of the psyche. In death and rebirth mythology, ego death is a phase of self-surrender and transition, as described later 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 drugs, the term is used synonymously with ego loss to refer to loss of one's sense of self due to the use of drugs. The term was used as such 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 contemporary New Age spirituality and in the modern understanding of eastern religions to describe a permanent loss of "attachment to a separate sense of self" and self-centeredness. This conception is an influential part of Eckhart Tolle's teachings, where Ego is presented as an accumulation of thoughts and emotions, continuously identified with, which creates the idea 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.

Definitions

Ego death and the related term "ego loss" have been defined in the context of mysticism by the religious studies scholar Daniel Merkur as "an imageless experience in which there is no sense of personal identity. It is the experience that remains possible in a state of extremely deep trance when the ego-functions of reality-testing, sense-perception, memory, reason, fantasy and self-representation are repressed Muslim Sufis call it fana, and medieval Jewish kabbalists termed it 'the kiss of death.
Carter Phipps equates enlightenment and ego death, which he defines as "the renunciation, rejection and, ultimately, the death of the need to hold on to a separate, self-centered existence".
In Jungian psychology, Ventegodt and Merrick define ego death as "a fundamental transformation of the psyche". Such a shift in personality has been labeled an "ego death" in Buddhism, or a psychic death by Jung.
In comparative mythology, ego death is the second phase of Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey, which includes a phase of separation, transition, and incorporation. The second phase is a phase of self-surrender and ego death, after which the hero returns to enrich the world with their discoveries.
In psychedelic culture, Leary, Metzner, and Alpert define ego death. They define ego loss as "... complete transcendence − beyond words, beyond spacetime, beyond self. There are no visions, no sense of self, no thoughts. There are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom".
Several psychologists working on psychedelics have defined ego death. Alnaes defines ego death as "oss of ego-feeling". Stanislav Grof defines it as "a sense of total annihilation This experience of "ego death" seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of the individual go death means an irreversible end to one's philosophical identification with what Alan Watts called "skin-encapsulated ego". Johnson, Richards, and Griffiths, paraphrasing Leary et al. and Grof define ego death as "temporarily experienc a complete loss of subjective self-identity." The psychologist John Harrison defines "emporary ego death loss of the separate self or, in the affirmative, a deep and profound merging with the transcendent other."

Conceptual development

The concept of "ego death" developed along a number of intertwined strands of thought, including especially the following: romantic movements and subcultures; Theosophy; anthropological research on rites de passage and shamanism; William James' self-surrender; Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology; Jungian psychology; the psychedelic scene of the 1960s; and transpersonal psychology.

Western mysticism

According to Merkur,

Jungian psychology

According to Ventegodt and Merrick, the Jungian term "psychic death" is a synonym for "ego death":
Ventegodt and Merrick refer to Jung's publications The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, first published in 1933, and Psychology and Alchemy, first published in 1944.
In Jungian psychology, a unification of archetypal opposites has to be reached, during a process of conscious suffering, in which consciousness "dies" and resurrects. Jung called this process "the transcendent function", which leads to a "more inclusive and synthetic consciousness".
Jung used analogies with alchemy to describe the individuation process, and the transference-processes which occur during therapy.
According to Leeming et al., from a religious point of view, psychic death is related to St. John of the Cross' Ascent of Mt. Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul.

Mythology – ''The Hero with a Thousand Faces''

In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a study on the archetype of the Hero's Journey. It describes a common theme found in many cultures worldwide, and is also described in many contemporary theories on personal transformation. In traditional cultures it describes the "wilderness passage", the transition from adolescence into adulthood. It typically includes a phase of separation, transition, and incorporation. The second phase is a phase of self-surrender and ego death, whereafter the hero returns to enrich the world with his discoveries. Campbell describes the basic theme as follows:
This journey is based on the archetype of death and rebirth, in which the "false self" is surrendered and the "true self" emerges. A well known example is Dante's Divine Comedy, in which the hero descends into the underworld.

Psychedelics

Concepts and ideas from mysticism and bohemianism were inherited by the Beat Generation. When Aldous Huxley helped popularize the use of psychedelics, starting with The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, he also promoted a set of analogies with eastern religions, as described in The Perennial Philosophy. This book helped inspire the 1960s belief in a revolution in western consciousness and included the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a source. Similarly, Alan Watts, in his opening statement on mystical experiences in This Is It, draws parallels with Richard Bucke's 1901 book Cosmic Consciousness, describing the "central core" of the experience as
This interest in mysticism helped shape the emerging research and popular conversation around psychedelics in the 1960s. In 1964 William S. Burroughs drew a distinction between "sedative" and "conscious-expanding" drugs. In the 1940s and 1950s the use of LSD was restricted to military and psychiatric researchers. One of those researchers was Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist who first encountered psychedelic drugs while on vacation in 1960, and started to research the effects of psilocybin in 1961. He sought advice from Aldous Huxley, who advised him to propagate psychedelic drugs among society's elites, including artists and intellectuals. On insistence of Allen Ginsberg, Leary, together with his younger colleague Richard Alpert also made LSD available to students. In 1962 Leary was fired, and Harvard's psychedelic research program was shut down. In 1962 Leary founded the Castalia Foundation, and in 1963 he and his colleagues founded the journal The Psychedelic Review.
Following Huxley's advice, Leary wrote a manual for LSD-usage. The Psychedelic Experience, published in 1964, is a guide for LSD-trips, written by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, loosely based on Walter Evans-Wentz's translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Aldous Huxley introduced the Tibetan Book of the Dead to Timothy Leary. According to Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is
They construed the effect of LSD as a "stripping away" of ego-defenses, finding parallels between the stages of death and rebirth in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the stages of psychological "death" and "rebirth" which Leary had identified during his research.
According to Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, it is....
Also in 1964 Randolf Alnaes published "Therapeutic applications of the change in consciousness produced by psycholytica." Alnaes notes that patients may become involved in existential problems as a consequence of the LSD experience. Psycholytic drugs may facilitate insight. With a short psychological treatment, patients may benefit from changes brought about by the effects of the experience.
One of the LSD experiences may be the death crisis. Alnaes discerns three stages in this kind of experience:
  1. Psychosomatic symptoms lead up to the "loss of ego feeling ";
  2. A sense of separation of the observing subject from the body. The body is beheld to undergo death or an associated event;
  3. "Rebirth", the return to normal, conscious mentation, "characteristically involving a tremendous sense of relief, which is cathartic in nature and may lead to insight".

    Timothy Leary's description of "ego-death"

In The Psychedelic Experience, three stages are discerned:
  1. Chikhai Bardo: ego loss, a "complete transcendence" of the self and game;
  2. Chonyid Bardo: The Period of Hallucinations;
  3. Sidpa Bardo: the return to routine game reality and the self.
Each Bardo is described in the first part of The Psychedelic Experience. In the second part, instructions are given which can be read to the "voyager". The instructions for the First Bardo state: