On killing the ego

[Lazarus]

max freakout.You totally dismissed Zen and Zen ego death and then later in your posts you used this example to vainly try to validate what you say.

"there is a Zen saying: "before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water". If you were a jackass before ego death, in all likelihood you will be a jackass after ego death. Psychedelic mental transformation (ie zen enlightenment) has little if anything to do with mundane ethics and daily life conduct"


You have misunderstood the quote.It means that after an ego death you are still you.Pain is still pain.Love is still love.It doesn't make you better looking or your muscles bigger.You can`t walk on water.But after a real ego death a person is never the same again he is transformed.Its a life changing experience.One sees oneself,ones position in the universe,others,the world,life and what happens in a different way afterwards.

Every person in this topic has shown empathy,tried to understand,questioned themselves,their motives and tried in a very loving respectful way to explain except you.All you have done is to insist that you are right and every single person in this topic is wrong.

You have used the word ego in several ways.One time you tell people that the way they have used it is wrong and then later you used it in the exactly the same way.

Have you ever heard about people giving their lives to save others ? Did you ever read that they had a max freakout and panicked beforehand ?

Have you ever seen a Buddhist monk pour petrol over his head and then set fire to himself without messing his trousers and without a sound ?

Did you ever watch executions ? The vast majority of people don't go screaming.They don't panic.

You talk about enlightenment and that its the same as ego death.You say its a mental transformation.From what you say you are claiming that you have had an ego death,an enlightenment,a psychedelic mental transformation.You think your bad trip/s were ego death/s but you display more ego than all the other people in this topic put together.

Another point that you have missed is that this topic is/has been a sort of group psychology/psychoanalysis session and you put yourself on the hot seat.You have shown that you are a dangerous,egocentric fool.Anyone taking psychoactive drugs with you is in danger of you causing them to have a bad trip.

You are denying and contradicting the good Friday experiment and others like it.You are degrading and denying the things that we psychonauts believe,have experienced and LOVE.

To all readers, DO NOT TRUST MAX. DO NOT TRUST WHAT HE SAYS. DO NOT TAKE DRUGS WITH HIM. IF YOU DO YOU ARE RISKING YOUR SANITYsychedelic drugs can help you change you.Help you understand.The most people don`t have bad trips.They don`t freakout.They are humbled.They learn that they are a part of a whole and one with the universe They experience empathy and return eternally grateful.

max you are a troll.

I am leaving this topic.There is no point in talking to max. MAX IS SICK.

 

[maxfreakout]

I don't really believe in the concept "bad trip".

There is no doubt that there is a phenomenon which people commonly refer to as a 'bad trip', you might not think that the term 'bad trip' is an appropriate description of this phenomenon, but that is an entirely distinct claim from saying that the phenomenon itself doesnt exist. You acknowledge that 'very frightening' trips do exist, because you had one yourself, but this is just the same thing, ie a trip which is too hot to handle, which you react negatively to

A trip is a trip, some trips you learn more then other trips. Often the more difficult ones are the most insightful

l.

Here you are quoting almost word-for-word a comment that i already made earlier in this thread, so we obviously agree on this point, but furthermore it needs to be stressed that while some trips are experienced as pleasant/blissful, others are experienced as frightening and thoroughly unpleasant

However I am not suggesting I can nolonger have "bad trips", ie. experience fear. I merely say I have come to terms with my own death. I still could be shown things I may not directly accept
When approaching ego-death during a trip my ego does resist, but I learned I am NOT my ego, something I believe you refuse to accept according to your replies.

Try to apply this logic to the hungry lion example, if you saw a hungry lion running towards you, would you just 'sit back' and let the lion eat you? No of course not, you would do everything you possibly could to escape and survive, just like any normal person

 

[Henkfloyd]

Sigh.... Ok, here is my last reply to you..

Try to apply this logic to the hungry lion example, if you saw a hungry lion running towards you, would you just 'sit back' and let the lion eat you? No of course not, you would do everything you possibly could to escape and survive, just like any normal person

I do not WANT to die. But say this lion on you approaches me in a cage with no way of getting out. I then will have to accept my fate and probably will do the same when approaching ego-death in trips. I will sit there, stare the big puss in the face and experience whats coming.

You really should watch the movie I recommended to you. I think your ego may be too much in denial to understand the message, but maybe it will set off something that makes you realize the truth in the future.

Bye Max, I hope you will be free someday too..

 

[maxfreakout]

max freakout.You totally dismissed Zen and Zen ego death and then later in your posts you used this example to vainly try to validate what you say.

there is no such thing as 'zen ego death' (ie there isnt a certain type of ego death that is specifically 'zen', just ask google)

and it makes no sense to say that i 'dismissed zen', zen is a system of religious philosophy, it is just as valid as all the others

"there is a Zen saying: "before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water". If you were a jackass before ego death, in all likelihood you will be a jackass after ego death. Psychedelic mental transformation (ie zen enlightenment) has little if anything to do with mundane ethics and daily life conduct"
You have misunderstood the quote.It means that after an ego death you are still you.Pain is still pain.Love is still love.It doesn't make you better looking or your muscles bigger.You can`t walk on water.But after a real ego death a person is never the same again he is transformed.Its a life changing experience.One sees oneself,ones position in the universe,others,the world,life and what happens in a different way afterwards.

yes exactly, ego death a pivotal mental transformation, it is the end of the egoic mental model, which heralds the start of the transcendent mental model. You suggested earlier that ego death necessarily causes a transformation of daily ethical conduct, but the quote about chopping wood is pointing out that this is not the case, after enlightenment you carry on behaving moreorless exactly as you did before (but with a transformed mental model)

You have used the word ego in several ways.One time you tell people that the way they have used it is wrong and then later you used it in the exactly the same way.

I have only used the word 'ego' in one very specific way, which i have repeatedly clarified, 'ego' simply means the 'thinker', ie the source of the stream of thoughts
People often confuse the ego of ego death with the Freudian 'ego' in his tripartite psychoanalytic model of the mind. But the 'ego' of ego death just means the same as 'self' or 'I', which is not what Freud had in mind

Have you ever heard about people giving their lives to save others ? Did you ever read that they had a max freakout and panicked beforehand ?

Have you ever seen a Buddhist monk pour petrol over his head and then set fire to himself without messing his trousers and without a sound ?

Did you ever watch executions ? The vast majority of people don't go screaming.They don't panic.

In none of these examples to people go 'willingly' to their death, rather they are forced by extreme circumstances to die. The kind of extreme emotions that would be involved in cases such as these are very similar to the emotions that a person undergoes in the middle of an ego death crisis trip, ie none of these people are happy to die

Anyone taking psychoactive drugs with you is in danger of you causing them to have a bad trip.

Lol i trip with people all the time, have been doing for years, and ive never encountered this problem

You are denying and contradicting the good Friday experiment and others like it.

the Good friday experiment (and the more recent experiment at John Hopkins) concluded that psychedelic drugs cause fullblown mystical/religious experiences, that is one of the most important scientific results and i fully agree with it, the ego death transformation is the same thinig as religious conversion, the discovery of a 'higher power' is more specifically the discovery of a power higher than ego, ego death initiates understand the esoteric meaning of religion

 

[itsscience]

Ok, this is my last crack at this one.

After reading this thread I posted a new topic entitled, "Timothy Leary - Visionary or Fool" and I posted that new thread because after reading max's posts it seemed to me that he (and some others) were placing a huge amount of credence in Leary's writings and even telling people they were wrong because their view didn't match Leary's (or at least didn't match that particular person's interpretation of Leary).

Trips, meditation, religion, mystical experiences are all purely subjective to the person experiencing them (the experiencer) and the actual content of that experience is not important. What is important (and what most on here seem to have grasped) is the way that experience causes you to think and act following that experience. In other words, if that experience makes one a kinder, gentler and more loving being then who cares what he/she actually experienced.

It would seem there are many paths to enlightment but focusing on how one walks that path is far less important than the ultimate destination. I think (but I do not know) that if Leary or anyone else attained some sort of enlightment, no one else can replicate what they did to reach enlightment because enlightment is already there within us and we all have our own unique, internal path to it.

Just as no one person is qualified to say one religion is right and the others are wrong, no one person is qualified to say "your definition of ego death is wrong" or "your ego death is my ego death".

We are all of us on this site because we are searching for something "other" which we all intutively know is there but not one of us, max, is entitled, qualified or authorised to tell the others that they are wrong, you can be guided to find your own path but only you can walk it and only you can know it.

Good luck my friends.

 

[Icelus]

If you ever thought you were dead (or permanently insane, or stuck forever in limbo, or whatever) during a trip, then you have experienced ego death, that is all there is to it, it is really perfectly simple to comprehend. People complicate the issue unnecesarily by failing to recognise that the term ‘ego death’ has a simple, straightforward meaning, i.e. mentally ‘dying’ in the intense altered state of consciousness.

A few times i thought i died during a trip. A few times i thought i was permanently insane during a trip. The only thing which could think those kind of things was my ego. So i'm sure about one thing, i didn't experience an ego death in those trips. Maybe i experienced my ego dying or fading, but i never experienced it BEING death. When your ego is death it seems to me there is nothing left to experience anything with. If there is still an experience when your ego really dies, then it seems to me there is at least nothing left which can have thoughts like "i'm dying" or "i'm permanently insane", or nothing which can have any thoughts at all.

If you or anyone else wants to define ego death as the feeling or sensation of loosing your ego instead of your ego being death, fine. But in that case it's a confusing name.

 

[Jeniger]

[youtube]5hW6Dm_m5t4[/youtube]
So you start to have this dissociative experience, where all that you become is awareness, is a point of awareness. That's all that's left.I remember the first time this happened to me, as professor went, and middle-class boy went, and pilot went, and all of my games were like going off in the distance.I got this terrible panic because indeed, I was going to cease to exist.And I got the panic which is the panic that precedes the psychological death. Because indeed, Richard Alpert was dying at that point. And the panic was, "No, stop, stop! I've got to hold on to something so I'll know who I am." And Timothy, the wise old Timothy always says things like, "Trust your nervous system."

Its all so simple

 

[sopor]

i would only like to connect some dots
i read some things on neurology, there was this guy, don't remember his name, that was saying that thought patterns are conditioned by the structure (memory) of cells in the brain and that stem cells have none of that memory which makes them able to take any form of a cell near to it. blank cells without preloaded connections. some drugs are supposed to stimulate blank stem cell growth, making the brain more flexible, more independent of pre-existing thought patterns (ego). could make sense?

 

[IJesusChrist]

That seems very far-fetched.

The ability for psychodelics (you specified none) to create new brain cells - if that were the case, the government would have made them legal years ago for the advancement of the anti-aging drug.

If you could cite that as a reliable source, the man you are citing may hold the key to making these legal. The fear of aging is at the backs of everyone's mind. Even the brain-dead politician.

 

[Icelus]

Does psilocybin promote neurogenesis?
June 26th, 2008 by fernando

New Psilocybin Neurogenesis Study Begins at the University of South Florida

Researchers Juan Sanchez-Ramos PhD, MD and Briony Catlow MS at the University of South Florida in Tampa have just started an exciting new study to see if psilocybin can help promote the birth and development of new brain cells (neurogenesis) in an area of the adult brain called the hippocampus, which is associated with learning and memory. The psilocybin that is being used in this study is coming from an unused portion of a gram of psilocybin that MAPS purchased several years ago for $12,250 and then donated to the University of Arizona for Dr. Francisco Moreno’s psilocybin/OCD study.

The official title of the new study is “ Effects of Psilocybin and other Selective Serotonin Agonists on Hippocampal-Dependent Learning and Neurogenesis.” It is based on the findings of several researchers who have shown that hippocampal-mediated learning and memory is related to the generation of new neurons in the adult brain. In experiments with laboratory animals, inhibition of neurogenesis with a toxic drug resulted in deficits in specific forms of memory. This provides evidence for the notion that promoting neurogenesis might improve some aspects of memory and cognition. The proposition that psilocybin impacts cognition, and stimulates hippocampal neurogenesis, is based on the evidence that psilocybin mimics the neurotransmitter serotonin, which–when acting on specific serotonin receptor subtypes (most likely the Serotonin 2A receptor)–is involved in the regulation of neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Were looking forward to hearing about the results from this fascinating study.

http://www.psychointegrator.com/?p=3

http://vimeo.com/15961451

This video is from the Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century, a conference in San Jose, California, April 15-18 2010, organized by MAPS - the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in collaboration with: the Heffter Research Institute, The Council on Spiritual Practices, & the Beckley Foundation

Aberrations in brain 5-HT neurotransmission have been implicated in psychiatric disorders including anxiety, depression and de?cits in learning and memory. Many of these disorders are treated with drugs which promote the availability of 5-HT in the synapse. However, it is not clear which of the 5-HT receptors are involved in behavioral improvements and neurogenesis. The delay in the appearance of anti-depressant effects of SSRIs corresponds to the time required to generate new neurons. The current study evaluated the effects of the acute and chronic administration of 5HT2A agonists psilocybin and 251-NBMeO and the 5HT2A/C antagonist ketanserin on hippocampal neurogenesis. Chronic administration of psilocybin increased the number of new neurons in the dentate gyrus while the antagonist suppressed hippocampal neurogenesis, suggesting that the 5HT2A receptor appears to be involved in the regulation of hippocampal neurogenesis. Another goal of the study was to investigate the effects of psilocybin, a 5HT2A receptor agonist on hippocampal-dependent learning. All mice developed contextual and cued fear conditioning; however, mice treated with psilocybin extinguished the cued fear conditioning more rapidly than saline treated mice. Interestingly, mice given the 5HT2A/C receptor antagonist ketanserin showed less of cued fear response than saline and psilocybin treated mice. Future studies should examine the temporal effects of acute and chronic psilocybin administration on hippocampal-dependent learning tasks.

 

[Icelus]

Cannabinoids promote embryonic and adult hippocampus neurogenesis and produce anxiolytic- and antidepressant-like effects

Wen Jiang, Yun Zhang, Lan Xiao, Jamie Van Cleemput, Shao-Ping Ji, Guang Bai, Xia Zhang
Published in Volume 115, Issue 11
J Clin Invest. 2005; 115(11):3104 doi:10.1172/JCI25509

The hippocampal dentate gyrus in the adult mammalian brain contains neural stem/progenitor cells (NS/PCs) capable of generating new neurons, i.e., neurogenesis. Most drugs of abuse examined to date decrease adult hippocampal neurogenesis, but the effects of cannabis (marijuana or cannabinoids) on hippocampal neurogenesis remain unknown. This study aimed at investigating the potential regulatory capacity of the potent synthetic cannabinoid HU210 on hippocampal neurogenesis and its possible correlation with behavioral change. We show that both embryonic and adult rat hippocampal NS/PCs are immunoreactive for CB1 cannabinoid receptors, indicating that cannabinoids could act on CB1 receptors to regulate neurogenesis. This hypothesis is supported by further findings that HU210 promotes proliferation, but not differentiation, of cultured embryonic hippocampal NS/PCs likely via a sequential activation of CB1 receptors, Gi/o proteins, and ERK signaling. Chronic, but not acute, HU210 treatment promoted neurogenesis in the hippocampal dentate gyrus of adult rats and exerted anxiolytic- and antidepressant-like effects. X-irradiation of the hippocampus blocked both the neurogenic and behavioral effects of chronic HU210 treatment, suggesting that chronic HU210 treatment produces anxiolytic- and antidepressant-like effects likely via promotion of hippocampal neurogenesis.

http://www.jci.org/articles/view/25509/pdf

 

[IJesusChrist]

interesting, i;ll search some medical journals soon to see if I can find any conclusions, and actual reportable data.

 

[Schwanke668]

Pardon if I am derailing or possibly re-railing in a bizarre way but i am curious about this Ego Death thing and am wondering if I am experiencing it commonly these days and not knowing it.

I read the first couple pages of this thread, several in the middle and the last one or two and I think I seem to agree with the idea that an ego death is more the case of a combination of the panic of 'ceasing to return to normalcy' and the experience of 'coming to grips with that fear'. I know I have experienced both of those several times back in college during my chemical psychedelic days, particularly I remember specifically standing in one place 'realizing' that I might never be sober again. At first i was filled with panic and then the panic faded and I realized the worst that would happen is I would die.

I think one of the core components to dealing with ego death and its panic is whether or not you truly have fear of dying. I have no fear of dying. I have no fear of not existing. I have reason to believe that I have 'ceased to exist' several times however of course I cannot prove that to anyone. I only know that I have peace with both the prospect and the thought in my own mind of having done it.

So then my question would be. If you remove the panic/fear aspect of the ego death (as you would only have it if you feared death in my opinion) how then do you define ego death after that? From what I was reading in those posts and what I experience now i would say that my multiple experiences of being carried up into heaven may constituate a form of ego death in a literal sense as I was absent from my body though some would argue that a key component on ego death is the idea of removing the 'decisions' from the experience and leaving only the 'awareness'. If that is the case then I probably did not experience ego death on those occasions as I clearly and distinctly remember being coherent in heaven.

But then I wonder if the purpose of understanding ego death is to understand a mental state in which the decision processes of the mind/brain disengage and we exist in a purely observant state then I do experience that on a regular basis as I often find myself reaching a 'zen like' sate of self awareness where I simply 'exist' from moment to moment and allow reality to happen around me. I move and flow and find myself making all the right decisions without ever having actually decided on any of them. Its only after I exit this state do I look back and go 'cool, i made all the right decisions'.

These states usually only last for 20 minutes to half an hour maybe an hour at the most but they are rather frequent and increasing in frequency as I spend more time meditating on existence.

Just curious on peoples comments on this and if it adds anything to the general discussion topic of the original post. I probably should have chimed in about 20 posts ago but I wasnt here 20 posts ago so that wasnt possible at the time.

Thanks!

 

[goatchild]

browsing forums like these, one often reads about killing the ego, smashing it, maiming it, crucify it or what have you.

why? what is it that wants to kill the ego? what shines forth when the ego disappeared spontaneously during a psychedelic experience? isn't this that shines forth nothing but pure love and peace? sorry if that sounds cliché but it seems to fit. love and peace don't kill or smash, however "bad" someting might be, there just is no need to.

why not just bypass the ego? surrender the identification with it and let it babble on, it will get silent when one pulls away the interest in it. one might think that one isn't interested in the ego, but one obviously is. when one goes deep inside one finds that one is secretely enamored with it.
this gets me to the point I was talking about in another thread, the morbid enjoyment of resentment, anger, vanity, EGOTISM etc. anything negative, really. these ego juices are what it lives off. emotions are juiced out, and for what? hollow and unsubstantial enjoyment.

the ego is what brought us to where we are now, without it, we wouldn't have survived when we still were animals. notice the animal qualities of the ego. the people in the subway and the cities seem to FIGHT for survival, all the fucking time. look at the boss howling at his employees, which in turn pull up their shoulders and get away with a whine. look at yourself, there are people you take/took a masochist stance at, and people you take/took a sadist stance at. Bottom dogs and Top dogs, some are higher in the pecking order, some lower. territoriality did make sense evolutionary, otherwise it wouldn't be here.

compassionate understanding is where it's at!
all you need is love, love does not come from the ego. the ego fears it actually, but in the end it is all it wants. if you understand the nature of love you understand the nature of god.

Well put.

I feel that the Ego needs not to be killed but be embraced by the unconscious.

We have our unconscious, and from it's depths rises unconditional Love, Understanding and Creativity. But before these feelings and inspiration might reach our conscious self, there must happen an agreement with the Ego.

The Ego is something related intimately with the conscious self. It FEARS the depths and infinity of the unconscious, the UNKNOWN, so it will always deny it and act like an animal fighting for survival within ourselves and outside ourselves. The Ego impedes the expression of true creativity (which stems from infinity, or unconscious) by blocking this flow of creative energy.

The secret is not to kill the Ego. Because we must have an Ego. The secret is to convince the Ego to let itself be embraced by the powerful flow of creative force and Love that stems from the depths.

How to convince the Ego? Drugs might be something that will release some of that fear, meditation, thinking and analyzing yourself seriously. Asking yourself all the time: Who am I? Why am I doing this? what should I be doing? what do I really want?

The answer probably will be "I want to Love, to feel Loved, and to do what I really always wanted to do, to be creative.". But that's exactly what the unconscious is trying to tell you and will allow you to do and feel with everything else and everything.

The Ego sees the Unconscious as this infinite black Ocean, something really scary (to most people). The truth is you can take a dive, everything will be alright. Really. And you can finally have peace and Love others and they will Love you back and that's what it's really all about in the End. To Love, to Understand and to Create.

Peace

 

[maxfreakout]

A few times i thought i died during a trip.

This ^ is precisely what the experience of ego death essentially consists of, 'ego' is the 'thinker', so 'ego death' is just 'thinking that one has died'. It is a fairly common experience when people trip hard, to start thinking that you have died and will never return to ordinary consciousness

this experience raises an obvious conundrum, - ie how can you possibly think you have died? If you had died, surely you wouldnt still be thinking? In this way, the experience of ego death changes our preconceived notions of what 'death' actually means

The only thing which could think those kind of things was my ego. So i'm sure about one thing, i didn't experience an ego death in those trips. Maybe i experienced my ego dying or fading, but i never experienced it BEING death. When your ego is death it seems to me there is nothing left to experience anything with. If there is still an experience when your ego really dies, then it seems to me there is at least nothing left which can have thoughts like "i'm dying" or "i'm permanently insane", or nothing which can have any thoughts at all.

Ego death isnt actual death, rather it is a powerful altered state experience which is *mistaken* for actual death, by the ego.
Ego is the thinker behind the thoughts, in the ego death experience, the thinker thinks (ie it believes, it becomes convinced) that it has died, but this thought/belief/conviction is actually false, you dont really die when you trip hard, you just form the belief (mistakenly) that you have died.

Therefore it doesnt make sense to say "i thought i experienced ego death but i was still thinking so i couldnt really have been dead" - because that is the whole point of the experience in the first place, ego death is believing that you have died with absolute conviction, but being wrong, the false belief that one has died is disproved when the trip ends, and the ego turns out to have been mistaken

 

[ophiuchus]

The ability for psychodelics (you specified none) to create new brain cells - if that were the case, the government would have made them legal years ago for the advancement of the anti-aging drug.

you have got to be shitting me if you seriously think that the government, who population controls with things like genocide and war, would ever, ever release a drug that's going to keep old people on social security and welfare, two of the most broken federal aid systems we have. they know we are overpopulated, they would most definitely keep anything like that for themselves at this point in history. anything else is not in best interest...

 

[ophiuchus]

this experience raises an obvious conundrum, - ie how can you possibly think you have died? If you had died, surely you wouldnt still be thinking? In this way, the experience of ego death changes our preconceived notions of what 'death' actually means

you're making this way harder than it has to be... time is a process, in a conventional sense, yeah? meaninga before a during and an after. an ego death is an event. the ego death comes upon you, hits you, then leaves. so, your thinking your gonna die, your thinking your gonna die, op boom climax/peak/you die/dont think, then you merge back slowly with your thoughts and process what happened. thats why people get so confused when it happens to them. cause they literally didn't know it actually hit them till they can think about it afterward. the same as being knocked out

 

[IJesusChrist]

all in favor of brutally massacring this thread until no remnants of it remain?

I

 

[ararat]

too late.