A common phrase you might hear when people talk about taking psychedelics is the term ego death. But what exactly is ego death and why should you care?
A Personal Ego Death Experience
The first time I experienced an ego death was during my senior year of college. I took about 200 micrograms of LSD with a couple of friends on a cold Saturday afternoon. After we took it, I started feeling the effects a bit faster than I remembered it happening in the past. I asked if they were feeling anything yet and they were not. This didn’t make me worried though because I took a higher dose than they all did. I had tripped a couple of times already before this, but I still didn’t know much about psychedelics in general or what an ego death even was.
The next thing I remember was sitting in the living room with my friends when everything around me started melting. The walls, the windows, the furniture; everything appeared to be melting. I didn’t say anything to my friends because I didn’t want them to worry about me, but I was definitely starting to get a little nervous. Even though I didn’t fully know I was supposed to do this, something inside of me told me to lean into this feeling to see where it leads, and that’s exactly what I did.
My surroundings were still melting, and at the same time they were turning into vivid, geometric patterns. This caused me to start questioning not only what I was seeing, but also question myself and reality as a whole. Are these sights real? Am I real? What does it even mean to be real? Does being real even matter? I could feel my sense of self slipping further and further away from me. Childhood traumas I thought I buried started bubbling up to the surface of my mind. I asked myself why I felt the need to bury them in the first place and whether or not this served me any good.
While this may sound scary to someone who’s never experienced ego death before, I felt intense happiness and joy (and probably a couple of tears too) as this was all going on in my head. Up until this point, my ego had been telling me that I needed to care about every little thing that happened to me. Every interaction, every failure, every time something didn’t go my way. Without my ego controlling me, it felt like I was reborn. I felt one with my surroundings. My friends, the house I was in, the city outside, they were all part of me, and I was part of them as well. There was an overwhelming sense of unity with everyone and everything on Earth.
This went on for what felt like hours, but was realistically only about 45 minutes to an hour. My friends could tell I was going through something deep and continued to go about their time without interrupting me, but would look over to check on me and make sure I was okay (another reason why set and setting are so important).
Everything we experience is part of life: the good, the bad, and everything in between. We can’t control what happens to us, but we can always control how we react. The only thing that truly matters are the people around me and how they make me feel. Since this experience, I make a conscious effort to pay attention to my emotions and try to understand why I feel what I feel. As simple as this sounds, it’s helped me do more of what makes me feel good and less of what makes me feel bad, which was something I never noticed or thought about in the past.
This whole story is just one example of how an ego death experience can be a good thing in someone’s life. However, it’s still a very intense and sometimes scary experience that can quickly turn into a bad trip if you’re not properly prepared.
What is the Ego?
In the simplest of explanations, the ego is our sense of self. From a young age, we start to develop a sense of who we are and what we believe. This affects how we perceive the world around us.
I don’t want you to get the idea that the ego is the enemy, because it certainly isn’t. However, as we get older and more information gets filtered through the lens of our ego, we start to become biased towards what does and doesn’t fit the narrative of our own self image. Oftentimes we are completely unaware of these biases, which makes it difficult to correct or even acknowledge them.
What is Ego Death?
Ego death is precisely what it sounds like, which is the temporary death of our ego. Many researchers actually prefer the term “ego dissolution” because it describes more accurately what’s going on. Without our sense of self, we see the world through an unbiased lense. This makes it easier to question preconceived notions and beliefs we hold so close to us.
If you’re anything like me, you might come out of this experience with some profound realizations about your life and a new sense of purpose you can work towards.
How to Induce Ego Death
The most common way to induce ego death is through the use of psychedelics such as LSD, shrooms, DMT, or mescaline. That being said, psychedelics are not the ONLY way. People have reported ego death experiences through meditation, breathwork, or near death experiences (I don’t recommend this one).
If you’ve ever experienced ego death feel free to leave a comment or tell me about it in the contact page!