What do people mean when they talk about having experienced “ego death” on a psychedelic trip? Given widespread assumptions about what it is to be alive or to be dead, it would seem paradoxical for someone to claim to have literally died while on a trip. “And yet here you are,” one might reply. But if someone claims to have experienced ego death rather than simply death, the paradox is resolved by assuming that the ego is something that can die while the person yet lives, all the better for having got rid of that troublesome baggage, the ego. One other way of resolving it would be to assume that, even though the person dies body and soul when the ego dies, he or she can be instantly reborn, or at least quickly enough that no one notices the gap. But then, given the intimate connection, on this supposition, between the life of the ego and the life of the person himself or herself, it seems most likely that the ego would be reborn also. I suppose it could be changed by the experience, though.
In this effort to understand such talk more clearly, it might be worthwhile to invoke a dictionary definition. In Greek and Latin, ego is just the word for “I”. The New Oxford American Dictionary, which I consulted online, distinguishes three senses of “ego” in English:
a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance: a boost to my ego
Psychoanalysis the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity. Compare with id and superego.
Philosophy [in metaphysics] a conscious thinking subject
As experienced from the standpoint of someone who is alive, someone else’s death appears to be the death of his or her ego in all three senses. The conscious thinking subject is gone. There is no more mediation between the conscious and the unconscious, or between the superego and the id. There is just unconsciousness, and the superego and the id are just as absent as the ego. Completely absent also is any manifestation in the dead body of a sense of self-esteem or self-importance.
But what will your own death be like as experienced from your own standpoint? Will it be that you simply won’t have any standpoint? That you will go out of existence? For my own part, I cannot imagine going out of existence, at least not without returning to it. I can imagine my own nonexistence only by taking up what I would have thought of as someone else’s viewpoint, but then it becomes my viewpoint and so I must exist after all.
In the case of a person who is tripping and reports, either during or after the trip, having undergone ego death, it won’t be so clear to an observer whether the person who makes this claim has suffered the death of the ego in all three meanings of the word. There probably won’t be any clear evidence that the person ceased to exist as a conscious, thinking subject during the trip—certainly not in the clear way evidenced by a corpse. On the other hand, it could easily appear that, while peaking, the person’s ego in the psychoanalytic sense has given up the ghost and is no longer busily trying to compromise between the conflicting demands of the superego and the id, and this is what could be meant by the death of the ego when there is still a living, breathing person before us. In such a case, the tripping person might appear to be either a crazy person or a saint or one alternating between those extremes. In some cases, an observer might notice a lack of self-esteem in someone during or after a big psychedelic trip, in others, a lack of self-importance. Either lack could be described as the result of “ego death”, although that language might seem a bit overblown. In the case of lack of self-esteem, this would be an unfortunate result; in the case of lack of self-importance, perhaps a desirable one. Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and that another commandment that is like it is to love your neighbor as yourself. If you lack self-esteem and don’t love yourself, then loving your neighbor as yourself will mean not loving your neighbor, and it is unlikely that that is what Jesus had in mind. But if you are self-important, you will find it difficult not to love yourself more than you love your neighbor, and it is unlikely you will love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. Hence, we feel that it is better to have some self-esteem but to be wary of having too much of a sense of self-importance.
But we don’t have to limit our investigation to what can be observed of the behavior of a tripping person by someone else. We can take a trip ourselves and find out what it is like from the inside. This of course won’t be scientific, in the sense of the statistical generalization of a series of quantitative measurements. And what I have said already, about whether we can observe something that would count as ego death in the behavior or lack of it in dead people or in people who are tripping, isn’t scientific either, but rather more like natural history. But science is not the only way of learning.
Reflecting on memories of the experience of peaking, I think Christian terminology is more accurate than the secular terminology of “ego death”. A trip can be terrifying, in which case one is confronting sin, death, and the Devil. It can also be liberating and joyful, when one realizes that the Holy Spirit has conquered sin, death, and the Devil, come what may. Then it isn’t just “the ego” who dies (only to be reborn to tell about it), it is oneself, body and soul, who dies and is reborn, body and soul. That all happened many years ago, and back then I wouldn’t have used Christian terminology to describe it, but I do now. You can’t change what has already happened, but neither can you stop changing your conception of it in the light of ongoing experience. There is no past that exists separately from the present.
Such an experience is unforgettable. It wasn’t at all like the loosening and falling away into unconsciousness that I recall from being anaesthetized for surgery. Or rather it was like it in only one way: I was unmistakably not in control. I was being bombarded with a rain of miraculous events, a flood of light and sound and feeling and thoughts (but no time to stop and say what they were), which was absolutely overpowering. There was nothing to do but to accept it. It came in a series of discrete steps, from one upper limit of beauty and truth to another one even higher and deeper, the new upper limit, to another, until the whole thing came to a stop. And then started up again, only now just slightly less, a little softer, and I felt a little less overwhelmed and that must have been the moment–although I didn’t yet realize it–that I first began to come down. “But how was that anything like death?” you may well ask. It was when the whole thing stopped momentarily. At that moment I didn’t think or experience anything. All the power was suddenly turned down and off, and there was no time. It wasn’t until time started back up again, accompanied by a whooshing sound as of machinery powering back up, that it seemed as though no time had passed, and I had the thought that I had just died and been reborn.
On another trip, equally unforgettable, in what I hoped was the coming down phase, I was lying in bed in the dark with my eyes closed, wishing for peace from ugly thoughts and images. I was seeing garish, cartoon-like visions of demons and ugly, evil, frightening things: bloody knives and fangs, vomit, shit, pus, corpses, evil acts of cruelty, the Devil himself; and I thought, “It’s a good thing that I don’t believe in Satan, because if I did, I might think that he was here, ordering me about and preparing to take me to Hell.” But that thought didn’t help much, because the next thing that happened was that my heart started beating very rapidly and I was afraid I was going to die at any minute. I got out of bed and starting pacing around, trying everything I could think of to calm myself. There was no breakthrough, only endurance, with the same awful feeling of being in a state of panic coming back a wave at a time over the following days and weeks, with gradually increasing time between the waves and gradually decreasing intensity. On that trip, I didn’t think I had died and been reborn. Rather I had survived an ordeal. At the time, it didn’t seem that any good came of it that was worth the price. In retrospect it cured me of a certain false confidence.
I’m sharing these memories and reflections in order to suggest that it might be better to confess that a psychedelic trip can be a confrontation with God and with sin, death, and the Devil rather than to use the terminology of “ego death”, which sounds more secular, psychological, milder and less scary.
But if the Holy Spirit has conquered sin, death, and the Devil, why do we have to keep bothering about them? They are conquered in the end, which is what one knows deep down while peaking, and the conviction remains, but may weaken over time, and life, even though it is new life, goes on, and in this life we are all sinners, we all die, and through these means, the Devil is always desperately trying to undermine our confidence–and his dread–that he is inevitably defeated and we are reborn into new life. God is that being than which none greater can be conceived. Think of everything you love, everything desirable, everything admirable and noble, everything you could possibly want there to be at the bottom of all things and imagine there is a being who embodies all those things, is the spirit of all those things, causes all those things. Sin is forgetting that this is what God is and consequently failing to love Him with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength and failing to love your neighbor as yourself.
We don’t need to be God for everything to be fundamentally all right. We just need to be in the right relationship to God. More than anything else, psychedelic experience has convinced me that it is possible to achieve that. But I am a sinner. I don’t stay in the right relationship to God and taking more trips eventually doesn’t help any more. That is where going to church and reading and studying the Bible with others comes in. This is where Jesus comes in. Or at least that is where they eventually came in for me. It is also possible, I am aware, to be a practicing Christian during the period of first experiencing psychedelics and for the whole time that they still work. And it may be possible that taking trips never stops working or that it starts working again. That is fine too. I’m not trying to dictate to anybody, just sharing my thoughts.