Why is Ego Death Therapeutic?

The experience of ego death

You’re lost in a kaleidoscopic swirl of brilliant colours and patterns.  You lose touch with where your body ends and the world begins.  You can no longer form coherent thoughts.  Then, suddenly, you give up the struggle. A moment later, you’re gone.  All that remains is...everything.  Reality doesn’t stop. The sensations, the colours, the patterns, they all continue to unfold, illuminated by the light of consciousness.  You disappeared and existence remained.  There is no trace of division or suffering, just a perfect, blissful wholeness.

The origins of the ego death concept

Ego death is a widely-reported experience that can occur when one takes a psychedelic.  It involves the complete loss of one’s psychological sense of self.  The term was introduced into the psychedelic discourse in 1964, in a book called “The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead”.  It’s authors were Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, later to be known as Ram Dass.  In the book, they describe ego death as a state of "complete transcendence--beyond words, beyond space-time, beyond self. There are no visions, no sense of self, no thoughts. There are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom".

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, on which The Psychedelic Experience is based, was written to help people navigate the death process.  As a Tibetan Buddhist text, it deals with that particular religion’s belief systems around rebirth.  It informs the reader that once one dies, they pass into the bardō, another realm which one enters after death and exits when one undergoes rebirth.  In The Psychedelic Experience, Leary and co. present this death-rebirth process and the intermediate journey in the bardō as a metaphor for a psychedelic journey involving ego-death.  They attempted to repackage the teachings around what to expect and how to act during the real death process and apply it to the different aspects of ego-death that can occur during the psychedelic experience.

Measuring Ego death scientifically

The concept of ego-death had staying power in the psychedelic underground, and became part of mainstream science when clinical research with psychedelics resumed.  In recent years, scientists have constructed scales that they use to attempt to measure the presence and intensity of an ego-death experience.  One of the most widely used is called called the Ego Dissolution Inventory (EDI).  Ego death goes by many names--ego-loss, ego-disintegration, ego-dissolution--all of which point to the same core experience but can emphasize different aspects.  Ego dissolution as a term is arguably better suited to a measure of the levels of ego loss, as opposed to the all-or-nothing character of death.  The EDI requires participants to respond to the following eight statements with how strongly they reflect the nature of their experience:   

I experienced a dissolution of my “self” or ego

I felt at one with the universe

I felt a sense of union with others

I experienced a decrease in my sense of self-importance

I experienced a disintegration of my “self” or ego

I felt far less absorbed by my own issues and concerns

I lost all sense of ego

All notion of self and identity dissolved away.  

With such a scale, scientists can now attempt to quantify your ineffable subjective experience. Some find this innovation exciting, others see it as a fool’s errand.  Despite the impossibility of truly capturing the experience, such a scale makes it possible to bring these experiences in the lab and to study them scientifically.

Different types of self

Given that the self is a psychological construct, rather than a solid thing, it makes sense that it is complex and multifaceted.  A core aspect of the idea of self is of ownership of the body, making the perception of one’s body through the senses a crucial part of selfhood.  Researchers have called this the multisensory or embodied self.  Then there’s the voice in your head, the story telling part of yourself that weaves together the past into a compelling story and tells tales of what you will do in the future.  This has been called the narrative self.  Some researchers have proposed that ego-death may not affect each of these aspects if self equally [cite].  What’s more, different kinds of ego death might be accessed through different methods, such as meditation or psychedelics.

Connectedness and ego death

If one thinks of reality as a network, it’s possible to see what we are from two perspectives.  From the perspective of the nodes, there are separate individuals that happen to be connected.  From the God’s eye view, there’s just the network--the nodes wouldn't exist without it.  During an experience of ego death, one can lose perspective of the individual and perceive the interconnected structure of the whole.  A loss of ego therefore results in an increase in a sense of connectedness. If the ego is only partially dissolved, this can take the form of a self that is more connected to the world around it, to others and even to parts of itself.  Psychedelic researcher Rosiland Watts has argued that this increased connectedness is largely responsible for much of the psychedelic healing that can be occasioned by states of ego loss.

Separation; the mechanism of suffering

The Buddha taught that suffering arises because we don’t see reality clearly.  As a result, we cling to it being a certain way that it is not, and we are pained by the deluded task that we have set ourselves.  We construct images of things being a certain way, for all time, and we suffer when they inevitably change.  At the center of this unhappy process is an image of ourselves, set apart from the world. It’s just an image, but we take it to be real, we take ourselves to be truly apart from reality and proceed to engage in an egoic struggle with it.  If one lets go of the clinging to divisions of this kind, one can see through the illusion of separation, the illusion of being as separate self, and one can transcend suffering.  This is what can happen during ego death.

Trauma, anxiety, depression

In order to survive generation after generation, life had to engage in attempted separation with the rest of the world--that’s what it is to be alive.  As a result, we developed psychological capacities to move on a spectrum from feeling very safe and connected to the rest of the world through to feeling afraid and disconnected.  Fear signals that it is not safe to be open to the world, resulting in us closing off from it in an attempt to self-protect.  This increases the sense of separation, the sense of self and, as a result, feelings of suffering.  Traumatic situations and experiences push us further and further down this path, leaving us with chronic experiences of anxiety or depressed hopelessness.

Self transcendence and our natural healing intelligence

Experiences of self-transcendence can lead to temporary states in which there is no suffering.  This can happen by cutting through the psychological concept of self through which suffering is typically mediated.  While such ego-death experiences do not last forever, they can also unlock long term healing and growth.  Life has a natural homeostatic or balancing tendency.  If you cut yourself your body knows how to heal itself.  This is a core feature of the physical body but also of the mind.  Once one experiences self-transcendence in a safe environment, one often becomes more connected to the world.  This opens up a process that can disrupt unhealthy psychological barriers with the outside world and open up a process of finding healing balance with one’s environment.

Healing through ego-death

Your sense of self exists in order to keep you safe.  It makes you feel separate from the world and stops you from behaving in ways that would jeopardize your survival.  When it becomes overactive, however, it can imprison us, keeping us stuck in painful separation from the rest of the world.  This can lead to anxious stress, depression or mechanisms for coping with the emotional pain, such as addiction.  States of ego-death can result in blissful experiences in which this suffering is suspended for a time.  This can show people that they need not be stuck forever in the psychological prison that they had created, there is another way to be in the world.  By breaking down the barriers of separation, ego death can also allow us to tap into our natural healing intelligence, and bring us into a healthier relationship with the rest of reality.