Ego death

• 1. Introduction

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  Ego death is the complete loss of subjective self-identity, and few ideas have been described in such opposite terms. In 1964, Timothy Leary and his colleagues Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert wrote that it leaves "no visions, no sense of self, no thoughts. There are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom." Other people who have come close to the same loss describe running away from it in terror. The phrase now appears in psychology, comparative mythology, drug culture, Buddhism and New Age teaching, and each field gives it a slightly different meaning. How did one phrase come to cover so much ground? What happens inside a brain when the sense of self comes apart? And why do the traditions that seek this loss so often warn their own students about it?

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• 2. A Dozen Names

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  The philosopher and psychologist William James called it self-surrender. Jungian psychology prefers psychic death, a fundamental transformation of the psyche. Each label points at the same event from a different doorway.

  The religious studies scholar Daniel Merkur gave one of the most careful definitions. He described an imageless experience with no sense of personal identity at all. It becomes possible in extremely deep trance, when reality-testing, sense-perception, memory, reason, fantasy and self-representation are all suppressed. Muslim Sufis call this state fana, which means annihilation. Medieval Jewish kabbalists called it the kiss of death.

  Carter Phipps treats ego death and enlightenment as the same thing. For him it is the final end of any need to cling to a separate, self-centered existence.

  Psychologists who study psychedelics chose harsher words. In 1988, Stanislav Grof described a sense of total annihilation, an instant and merciless destruction of every earlier reference point in a person's life. He added that it ends, irreversibly, one's identification with what Alan Watts called the "skin-encapsulated ego".

  In 2008, Johnson, Richards and Griffiths condensed the wording of Leary and Grof into a single definition that stresses the loss is temporary. Two years later the psychologist John Harrison offered the same event in positive terms, as a deep and profound merging with the transcendent other.

  Long before any of these definitions existed, mystics in the Christian tradition were already writing about a self that dies and is replaced.

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• 3. Mystics and Heroes

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  Merkur traces a standard Roman Catholic image back to St. Teresa of Ávila. In it, mystical union means the ego dies and God's consciousness takes its place, while the soul stays the only bearer of the self. The same motif runs back through Marguerite Porete in the 13th century to the Islamic Sufis. Scholars also link psychic death to St. John of the Cross and his Ascent of Mt. Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul.

  In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a study of the Hero's Journey. He found the pattern in many cultures. In traditional societies it matches the wilderness passage, the move from adolescence into adulthood. The journey has three phases: separation, transition and incorporation. The middle phase demands self-surrender and ego death. Campbell summed up the theme this way: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won." The hero then returns with the power to bestow boons on others.

  Underneath this story lies the archetype of death and rebirth, in which a false self is given up so a true self can emerge. Dante's Divine Comedy is a well known example, because its hero descends into the underworld.

  Carl Jung approached the same territory as a clinician. He published The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious in 1933 and Psychology and Alchemy in 1944. In his view, opposing archetypes must be united through a process of conscious suffering, in which consciousness dies and rises again. He named this the transcendent function, and it leads to a more inclusive and synthetic consciousness. He borrowed images from alchemy to describe individuation and the transference that occurs in therapy.

  The authors Ventegodt and Merrick drew a sobering lesson from Jung. They wrote that the unpleasantness of the experience is so strong that a person without the understanding needed for growth may choose death instead of transformation.

  In the 1950s, a new generation of writers began tying these old patterns to a laboratory drug.

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• 4. The Psychedelic Manual

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  Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception in 1954 and helped make psychedelics a subject of public conversation. He paired the drug experience with parallels from eastern religions, laid out in The Perennial Philosophy, which drew on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Alan Watts later reached for Richard Bucke's 1901 book Cosmic Consciousness. Watts described the central core of mystical experience as the insight that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living.

  Through the 1940s and 1950s, LSD stayed in the hands of military and psychiatric researchers. One of them was Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist. He first met psychedelic drugs on a vacation in 1960 and began studying psilocybin in 1961. Huxley advised him to spread the drugs among society's elites, including artists and intellectuals. At the insistence of Allen Ginsberg, Leary and his younger colleague Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, also gave LSD to students.

  In 1962, Leary was fired and Harvard's psychedelic research program was shut down. That same year he founded the Castalia Foundation. In 1963 he and his colleagues launched the journal The Psychedelic Review.

  Following Huxley's advice, Leary then wrote a guidebook. The Psychedelic Experience appeared in 1964, written with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert. It was loosely based on Walter Evans-Wentz's translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Huxley had introduced to Leary. The authors called that text a key to the innermost recesses of the human mind. They read LSD as a stripping away of ego-defenses, and they matched its stages to the stages of death and rebirth in the Tibetan book.

  The guide names three stages, each called a Bardo. The Chikhai Bardo is ego loss, a "complete transcendence" of the self and the game. The Chonyid Bardo is the period of hallucinations. The Sidpa Bardo is the return to routine reality and the self. The authors argued that an initiate must first die symbolically to the past and to the old ego before taking a place in a new spiritual life.

  Also in 1964, the researcher Randolf Alnaes described a "death crisis" that can arise during an LSD session. First, bodily symptoms lead up to the loss of ego feeling. Next, the observing self separates from the body, which is seen undergoing death or something like it. Last comes rebirth, a return to ordinary thinking that brings a tremendous sense of relief and may lead to insight.

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• 5. Chemistry and Circuits

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  Acute psychosis, the auras that precede temporal lobe seizures, and spiritual or mystical experiences can all dissolve the sense of self. So can psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, ketamine and salvia divinorum. Researchers favor psychedelics for this work because they allow far tighter control over experimental conditions. The drug-induced states can also be treated as models of psychotic experience, which makes them useful for studying psychiatric disorders.

  Most of these drugs act on the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. Ketamine is the exception, because it blocks the glutamate NMDA receptor. Even so, every route to ego dissolution seems to involve an indirect rise in glutamate. When serotonin drugs stimulate 5-HT2A, they set off a glutamate surge, mostly in layer V pyramidal neurons that carry those receptors. After psilocybin, ego death was linked to higher glutamate in the medial prefrontal cortex and relatively lower glutamate in the hippocampus.

  Ketamine reaches the same result by a different path. It blocks NMDA receptors on inhibitory GABA interneurons, which frees the glutamate-releasing pyramidal cells from their brake. The overall effect is more glutamate. Researchers note this resembles the NMDA receptor hypofunction hypothesis of schizophrenia.

  The medial temporal lobe is a likely site for disturbances of the self. It had already been tied to visual hallucinations and to depersonalisation. During drug-induced ego death its activity rises, while its connection to the default mode network falls. Ego death caused by LSD, by contrast, was associated with an overall increase in functional connectivity.

  These studies matter beyond drug research, because they help show which brain processes build the sense of self in the first place.

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• 6. The Great Death

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  After the psychedelic boom, writers began using the phrase ego death for the eastern notions of enlightenment, called bodhi, and of liberation, called moksha.

  Zen practice is said to lead to ego death. Some traditions call it the great death, to set it apart from the small death of the body. According to Jin Y. Park, this ends the automatic quest to understand the self as a thing instead of a process. She describes meditation as learning to die by learning to forget the sense of self. In her words, when consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, "I become nothing, and discover that I am everything."

  The teacher John Welwood says egolessness is common. It shows up in the unnoticed gaps between thoughts. Anxiety about existence arises when a person sees that the feeling of "I" is only a perception. Welwood argued that only egoless awareness lets us face and accept death in all its forms. David Loy goes further, suggesting our fear of egolessness may be stronger than our fear of death itself.

  Egolessness is not the same as anatta, the Buddhist doctrine of non-self. Egolessness is a personal experience. Anatta is a teaching shared across Buddhism, holding that a person has no permanent essence. The Buddha repeatedly warned against identifying with the five aggregates: form, feeling, thought, inclination and sensory consciousness. He called them illusory, impermanent and painful, and said they belonged to Mara the Evil One.

  The Taoist internal martial artist Bruce Frantzis tells of a night in Hong Kong when he was learning the old Yang style of Tai Chi Chuan. He was practicing on a quiet terrace on the Peak, long after midnight. The moon and sky seemed to press down on every inch of his skin, and his body and mind dropped into a bottomless stillness. Then an overwhelming, formless fear spread through every cell. He knew that if he kept going, nothing of him would remain within seconds. He stopped, ran down the hill and prayed for the terror to leave. Frantzis calls this fear ru ding, and he believes the ego panics because awareness of connection to everything threatens its sense of separation.

  The mystic Bernadette Roberts drew a finer line between "no ego" and "no self". She defined ego as the immature self before its self-center falls away. No ego comes first, before the unitive state. No self comes only when the unitive state itself falls away. Jeff Shore describes that as the permanent ceasing, once and for all, of the entire mechanism of reflective self-consciousness. Roberts saw both stages in the Buddha and in Christ. The falling away appears in the Buddha starving himself before his enlightenment and in the dying Jesus on the cross. The state of no self appears in the serene, enlightened Buddha and in the resurrected Christ.

  A Course in Miracles takes the most absolute view. It states that "the ego's death is your life" and treats the ego as an illusion that never truly existed.

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• 7. Coming Back

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  Nick Bromell describes ego death as a tempering but frightening experience, one that may lead a person to accept that there is no real self. Grof observed that death crises can recur across a series of psychedelic sessions until they stop causing panic. A deliberate effort not to panic may even produce a pseudohallucinatory sense of transcending physical death. Merkur put it plainly: repeated confrontation with the death crisis leads finally to accepting personal mortality without further illusions, and the crisis is then met with equanimity.

  The contemplative traditions are less hopeful about a single peak experience. Both Vedanta and Zen warn that insight into the emptiness of the self is not enough, and that further practice is needed. Jacobs cautions that Advaita Vedanta takes years of committed work to cut through the "occlusion" of vasanas, samskaras, bodily sheaths and vrittis. He also names the granthi, a knot that ties together identification between Self and mind.

  Zen training does not end with kensho, the insight into one's true nature. The master Hakuin said the main aim of what he called post-satori practice was to cultivate the Mind of Enlightenment. This practice is known as gogo no shugyo, or kojo, which means going beyond. Yamada Koun gave a test for it: "if you cannot weep with a person who is crying, there is no kensho."

  The American Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young has described what can go wrong. He calls it the Dark Night, or falling into the Pit of the Void. It is a real and irreversible insight into Emptiness and No Self. The trouble is that the person reads it as a bad trip. Instead of feeling empowered, they feel the opposite. In his words, it is "Enlightenment's Evil Twin."

  Willoughby Britton now studies these difficult periods in a research program named The Dark Night of the Soul. She has searched texts from many traditions for descriptions of hard stretches on the spiritual path. She has also interviewed meditators about the difficult side of their practice.

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• 8. The Doubters

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  John Lennon read The Psychedelic Experience and was strongly affected by it. He wrote "Tomorrow Never Knows" after reading the book, as a guide for his LSD trips. He took about a thousand acid trips, yet they only worsened his personal difficulties, and he eventually quit the drug. George Harrison and Paul McCartney likewise decided that LSD had produced no worthwhile changes.

  Leary's brand of LSD spirituality never quite caught on, even in the 1960s. Many hippies reported states of diminished consciousness and called them ego death, though these did not match Leary's description. Panic attacks were occasionally given the same label.

  Bromell argued that ego death confirms a radical pluralism most people sense in youth but prefer to escape, by believing in a stable self and a fixed reality. He tied this to a changed attitude among 1960s youngsters, who rejected their parents' way of life as deceitful and false.

  The link between ego death and LSD has always been disputed. Hunter S. Thompson tried LSD and saw a self-centered core in Leary's work. Thompson noted that Leary put himself at the center of his texts, as "an exemplary ego, not a dissolved one". Merkur observes that taking LSD together with Leary's manual often led not to ego death but to horrifying bad trips.

  The Sōtō Zen teacher Brad Warner has repeatedly attacked the idea that psychedelics lead to enlightenment. He once read most of The Psychedelic Experience at a campsite during the Starwood gathering, surrounded by people he thought were deluding themselves. He called it a deeply mistaken reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Warner pointed to casualties of the era, naming Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Syd Barrett, John Entwistle and Kurt Cobain.

  Religious studies scholars dispute the claim that ego death forms a common basis for religion, yet the claim has lost none of its popularity. Scholars have also criticized the effort by Leary and Alpert to tie ego death and psychedelics to Tibetan Buddhism. John Myrdhin Reynolds argues that Evans-Wentz did not know Tibetan Buddhism well. In Reynolds's judgment, Evans-Wentz's view was "fundamentally neither Tibetan nor Buddhist, but Theosophical and Vedantist". That reading, he says, led Leary and Jung into misunderstandings about Dzogchen. Even so, Reynolds confirms that the nonsubstantiality of the ego is the ultimate goal of the Hinayana system.

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