What’s curious though is that whether a Bach, Kepler, Einstein, Planck, the saints and mystics from Augustine to Rumi, Plato or Confucius, none of them needed psychedelics to transcend and develop a higher self, and yet there seems to be a campaign that ignores that reality and presents a new quick shortcut to transcendence.
It’s all very reminiscent of Huxley final novel, The Island. Have you read it?
I know psychedelics can have benefits, but I really have to wonder when I hear a lot of the modern psychedelic prophets tout the benefits without much reference to the darker historical side of the question, and its implications today.
For instance, how aware are we of the ongoing MK-Ultra programs, the newer ones? The “official story” is that MK-Ultra was shut down and that’s the end of the story. But if we look at many of the discussions around psychedelics and their ability to help repattern the mind, it looks like the MK-Ultra program has simply been mainstreamed. Notably, one of MK-Ultra’s greatest goals was the creation of false memories. These could be used to program assassins or to simply repattern someone’s sense of identity ie to “forget” certain things and “remember others.”
Psychedelics played no small part in this. It’s know that psychedelics allow one to take a distance from their memories and past, and become open to new ways of thinking in a very drastic manner. Naturally, this can be used for good or for bad, much like hypnosis. But if it has such power, is there any doubt the first on the case are the intel agencies themselves?
There is a great book by journalist Tom O’Neil, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties.” Among many quotes and new research, he cited pages from journals by clinicians handling “the Family” at the HAFMC.
This quote stands out:
“One of these articles hoped to find out ‘whether a dramatic drug-induced experience’ would have a ‘lasting impact on the individual’s personality.’ Another observed that feelings of ‘frustrated anger’ led people to want to try LSD: ‘The soil from which the ‘flower children’ arise,’ the author wrote, ‘is filled more with anger and aggression, thorns and thistles, rather than passion and petunias.’ Under ‘emotional pressure,’ acid could induce ‘images and sensations of anger or hate magnified into nightmarish proportions.
David Smith had studied these same phenomena, formulating an idea that he called ‘the psychedelic syndrome,’ first articulated in 1967 or early’68.
The gist was that acid, when taken by groups of like-minded people, led to a ‘chronic LSD state’ that reinforced ‘the interpretation of psychedelic reality.’ The more often the same group of “friends” dropped acid, the more they encouraged one another to adopt the worldview they’d discovered together on LSD, thus producing ‘dramatic psychological changes. Usually the psychedelic syndrome was harmless, but regular LSD use could cause ‘the emergence of a dramatic orientation to mysticism.’“
I consider psychedelics to be a powerful agent or tool for self-exploration, but also agree that current discussion of psychedelics in popular culture is very shallow right now. A very wide range of experiences and outcomes are possible, and greatly influenced by the context in which they are used.
Aldous Huxley’s final novel Island is a good example of what the darker inspirations might look like.
He wrote The Island 30 years after Brave New World, but still with the same theme of imagining what the perfect system of control might look like, that is, a “final revolution” in which people “love their servitude.”
Instead a “soma” the Island has “moksha,” a scientifically-grown toad stool that offers one “liberation” and the feeling of having attained one’s higher transcendent self. The utopian Island of Pala doesn’t have traditional families, but community families in which the children can choose to leave and pick a different family if they so desire. There are also no mothers. Mother doesn’t exist as a noun, only a verb. So, we have a global communitarian village of sorts where most people are kept busy exploring their inner world and engaging in tantric sex as a spiritual practice, all from a very young age, having lost interest in any sort of age of abundance tied to industrial society, being wholly content with their “new scarcity.”
Psychedelics is key to creating the illusion of meeting one’s deepest desires and spiritual fulfilment. All the creepy details and Malthusian population control are treated as mere detail.
I once did a deep dive on the subject, which definitely doesn’t seem to be losing its relevance, given the new meta narrative about the West having to leave the “Age of Abundance” and embrace a “New Scarcity.”
Having heard these things, I wondered: how is one to keep a once consumer-based society “happy”—and not revolting—once much of the wealth and industrial sectors that made the abundance possible disappear. That’s where The Island caught my attention.
Huxley seemed to have dedicated an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to achieve this kind of thing many of its solutions and narratives having suddenly picked up speed in the last few years.
Since you mention The Beatles, it's interesting to note what John Lennon reported to Rolling Stone in 1970: "I got the message on acid that I should kill my ego, and I did, y'know. I was nothing, I was shit." It took him years to recover and he seems to have developed symptoms of depersonalisation-derealisation based on descriptions in The Beatles biography by Hunter Davies. Funnily enough, it was a later pair of LSD trips in 1968 that reconvinced him of the reality of the ego.
Someone else worth noting is George Harrison, who was also a heavy LSD user in 1966/7. You can see George's views on the ego in his later song 'I, Me, Mine':
"Having LSD was like someone catapulting me out into space. The LSD experience was the biggest experience that I’d had up until that time… Suddenly I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego, like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel’ or ‘give it to me’ or ‘I am’. It drove me crackers, I hated everything about my ego, it was a flash of everything false and impermanent, which I disliked"
This is great, thanks man. Another testament to just how powerful priming and perceptual frames are for eliciting different types of mystical experience - imagine if they the Beatles had found a Christian mystic up in the mountains of Sardinia or something, and got really into that metaphysics, how different their music might have been. "All You Need Is Grace"/"We all live with our yellow rosaries, yellow rosaries, yellow rosaries..."
Lol. Well, Tom Holland argued in Dominion that Christian themes inevitably made their way into The Beatles' work (having arisen out of Christian England and Catholic Liverpool). e.g. 'The Word' from 1965, which has echoes of the introduction to the Gospel of John ('In the Beginning was The Word') and the first letter of John.
How could it be otherwise. The Beatles grew up in a culture saturated with Christian ideas and images. Even people who had no Christian churching or never went to Sunday school unconsciously absorbed this all-pervading Christian mind-scape psyche.
Even if that was, and still is (less so) the case doesn't mean that the various Christian ideas/myths and superstitions are or were true.
Indeed they are no longer believable - the presumed "resurrection" of Jesus never happened, could not have happened.
We cant even account for our appearance here in this time and place. Or for the appearance of a single thing. To do so one would have to take into account all of the multiple paradoxes of space-time history and how it coalesced into the present-time configuration which, by the way changes on a moment to moment basis. IT is all a beginingless and endless spontaneously appearing light show
And yet millions of naive Christian true believers believe in "Jesus", whoever and wherever he was. They presume to know what supposedly happened in Palestine 2000 years ago, whenever and wherever that was.
Furthermore none of them have never ever met "Jesus" in a living-breathing-feeling human form and thus benefited from his personal instruction as to how to live the universal non-sectarian Spirit-Breathing Way of Life that Jesus taught and demonstrated while he was alive (end of story. Nor did they participate in his Teaching Demonstration.
I'm not sure I agree it's all a beginning less and endless light display, or how that would be confirmed, but I do agree with your passionate questions about Christianity. Any revival of Christianity occurring in small online circles will always struggle to defeat and resist the religion's huge problems. That said, I think there's something more to the religion than you suggest. You should check out Reinhold Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer for good reasonable analyses.
That would indeed have been interesting, and there were Christian mystics to be met, at that point in time (someone like Bede Griiffiths, down in South India, eg, blending Catholicism, Indian Xity and Hinduism). But in any case, it seems to me not too much of a surprise that Harrison, having been brought up a Catholic, was drawn to the highly devotional Krishna Consciousness organisation. Very different philosophies involved, between these two traditions, but a great deal shared when it comes to people's everyday practice.
Sep 14, 2023·edited Sep 2Liked by Alexander Beiner
This is such an important and nuanced conversation that is required in our current moment. The strengthening of the ego complex (rather than attempts at dissolution) truly does expand our sense of self, bringing in greater flexibility, relatedness, depth. It serves as the fundamental cornerstone for the development of a meaningful path of individuation. Further, death of the ego, the loss of "I", is what leads to psychosis.
Alyssa, I love the framing of "ego complex" as opposed to ego as a discrete thing, and the concept of strengthening it rather than disolving it. Excited to read your post!
In my personal work I've started thinking of my "ego" (if indeed that's the correct term) as the collection-of-selves that I have access to, or that are activated in me, at any given time. And my intuition says I can strengthen that ego complex of "selves" by basically welcoming more and more selves to the complex, with the goal of eventually including all of my infinite selves...which is more like a process-of-self? Tbh, it kinda feels like the microcosmic equivalent of the unity/connection concept...?
I have never actually had any psychedelic experiences, but, boy, am I curious.
Thank you for sharing intuition, i love the flow of it.
How do you feel about changing the word 'self' for 'personality', and the idea of allowing ego to present an appropriate personality in every moment, to relate inner and outer worlds?
I like this phrase ego complex too. I feel that some of the confusion this essay speaks to is that between ego (or ego complex - many parts of the personality that evolve through our relational experience of the world) and Self (the essential, undamaged, unchanging ‘I’ beneath). Connection with Self is connection with divine , or big SELF, and from some perspective can feel like ego ‘death’ from the perspective that for a transient moment we are not identifying with any constructed part of our ego complex. I also agree that the key to using psychedelics (and ecstatic states more broadly) is in order to integrate and strengthen the ego complex. We are actually befriending the ‘ego’ (not purging or killing it) in the hope of a more collaborative and nourishing relational life.
Sep 15, 2023·edited Sep 15, 2023Liked by Alexander Beiner
Thanks for an excellent post. It seems you are putting your finger on a habit of binary thinking seen too often in the West. Would you agree that this form of binary thinking is the sign of an immature culture?
Our over-emphasis on our own individuality, discreteness and separation has generated a whole heap of problems for us, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally. We then swing to the other extreme - no individuality, no boundaries of self etc. The old saying has it that the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea. It seems we just haven't got the traditional wisdom in place to deal with this maturely.
> the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea
I love this. Thank you! And 100% agree on the binary thinking for both self-others and many other debates solar-or-nuclear, vegan-or-meat, conservative-or-liberal. And the lack of spectrums/middle paths as well as the lack of two+ dimensional possibility space where the second leads off into the fog of uncertainty... so many people are so afraid of uncertainty, myself included, although for some domains I now do find uncertainty so relaxing and efficient.
Finding middle-ground might be a mature way to explore, or going all the way in extremes and see what happens ;) maybe you'll find the good in the bad, and vice versa....
Sep 14, 2023·edited Sep 14, 2023Liked by Alexander Beiner
Thank you for this! I'm not smart enough or experienced enough to steel-man your article so please be patient and generous with accommodating my ignorance. I've done about 2000 hours of meditation (Vipassana; S. N. Goenka) now and I've recently had some experiences that, from my perception of your writing, I can't fit into your propositions:
I (and I think most people) are holding onto the illusion that they (I) am immortal, and am too afraid to connect to the reality that I am going to die. If someone sold me an experience where I connect to, realise and accept that I am not permanent, not immortal, and that I will die (which I have experienced through meditation) then my experience of that was one of complete infinite terror... and if they had sold that to me as _just_ an "ego-reframe" rather than the reality of utterly brutal "ego-death" I would want my money back! :)
Perhaps there are ways to have this realisation that are softer, or more gradual but then...
> so that life becomes a dance, a joy, an adventure.
...if death also becomes a dance, a joy, an adventure, then I agree with your propositions. But for most people death is not that, when it comes, if they remain conscious, they will quite literally s**t themselves with fear assuming they haven't been nil by mouth for the last day or more.
> But you can’t dissolve or die, until you actually die.
I agree that your body can't die until, er, you actually die. But from my experience I believe you can prematurely kill your illusory sense of immortal self; that illusory sense of immortal self can "die" before your body dies. And that "die" doesn't even need air quotes because it feels so extreme and so pronounced that it's nothing other than the emotional content of death experienced before the bodily reality of death.
Just some thoughts. Would be happy to discuss in more detail. Thank you for your articles.
Interesting, thanks! What if that ego reframe was as effective in helping people come to terms with mortality? I’ve also had experiences that feel like death spiritually, and one’s that felt like I was actually going to die, and they were quite different. The latter was terrifying and made me learning to die well is a skill / trait rather than something we can gain from a one off experience (even though that can help / open the door)
Yes if the ego reframe was as effective in helping people come to terms with mortality I'm all for it! :) From your comment it sounds like your spiritual deaths (ego-reframings?) were very positive and powerful but were not helpful with coming to terms with your mortality? And that the "actually going to die [at some future point]" were the experiences that engaged with your mortality?
I think ego-reframings are great for many things including reducing suffering of self and others... "life becomes a dance, a joy, an adventure" as you put it. I'm just hesitant to cast ego-death in too binary a "it's not good" frame because I fear that the sleeping anxiety of death is so pernicious in so many people in so many subtle ways (I think it may also have powerful positive sides to it too in terms of drive / motivation to keep going and get stuff done). And I agree that poorly framed ego-death experiences are vastly more harmful.
I have enjoying an embodiment practice that allows for the direct experience of the non dual nature of being. I was attracted to it because it does not ask or want you to go through an ego death. In fact, the more one can directly experience being embodied, the more one can experience being the fabric of consciousness. Judith Blackstone, PhD developed the Realization Process. Her writing is simple and direct. It used to be hard for me to get out of my head and go directly to experience. Now I get to live in the experience of existence while people discuss it.
Sep 15, 2023·edited Sep 15, 2023Liked by Alexander Beiner
I read your essays for the captions alone. Hilarious.
My take on the ego, is that it emerges, naturally, as part of the process of our evolution into human form. It's evolution, the birth of our character, our story, our identity and whole way of Being, is invariably founded in a moment of 'trauma,' which can range from the apparently innocuous, to the more malign. Whatever the case, it is a point of differentiation when we begin to see ourselves as separate entities - and our identity is built on a decision we make at that point about ourselves, or about life.
Ostensibly, this process is one of 'heartbreak,' where we encounter an experience of hurt or pain, which we would prefer not to experience again. Indeed, the formation of our identity is predicated on this. Invariably it is founded on a belief about ourselves, or of life, or both, which we then spend our lives trying to disprove. A thankless task, and one we would rather not be faced with.
For many of us, our desire to be 'free of ego,' is an extension of this pursuit - a desire to steer clear of our earthly concerns, rather to return to a sense of deep connection and alignment, without having to trouble ourselves with the challenges we face in this domain, as Human Beings.
It explains the whole phenomena of spiritual bypassing, and the preponderance of spiritual gurus who provide access to spiritual enlightenment, while falling prey to their own (unresolved) human shadows. People would rather make contact with the divine, and identify with this, than the flawed character and story they'd prefer not to go to the roots of.
The path, as I see it, is along the lines of what you propose. That our invitation is to shift our relationship with the ego, and our understanding of it. Not get rid of it, per se, but to be less identified with it - but also accepting of how we cannot be human, nor operate in this earthly domain, WITHOUT it.
TO accept that we are BOTH our ego, and not our ego - that the I we observe ourselves from comes from a deeper realm. Transcendent experiences can give us direct access to the self beyond the I, and to the unified field of conscioussness we are all part of. But it is in the earthly domain that the work needs to take place, and our ego that will invariably provide the map for aspects of ourselves which require observation, clearing, and integrating.
Thanks for a very interesting article. Coincidentally, I was chatting to my wife about this yesterday: she was saying "The problem with Eastern philosophies is that they say you need to kill your ego" *or rather, something in Turkish to that extent)and I was like "No, that's a Western interpretation of Eastern philosophies." But the important thing was the point she made about Sufism: there is a state of ego-dissolution (fenafillah in Turkish, fana fi-Allah in Arabic), which you might experience either as complete nothingness (hiçlik makamı in Turkish) or conversely as complete identification with God (enel Hakk / anal Haq). However - and this is what so many people miss - that is not the final goal; it's a half-way point, and it's very dangerous to get stuck there (as Mansoor Hallaj found out). From there, you have to go back to the self (nefs / nafs), but it's a transformed self. Now that is very similar to what you mention about combining the Eastern enlightenment and Western resurrection narratives, but in a therapeutic rather than a pathological way. Incidentally, you also see it in Zen; e.g., the end of the Ten Bulls poem.
I'm a pre-publication hardback buyer, appreciating your good mind and jealous of you being in a such a radical program, although I come from the days when there were no programs and thanks to psychedelics and ecstasy I still got my life turned around. You enter a realm that has its way! Check me out to see if you like what I'm saying about turning the world around. Love to be thinking with you. I've got a dossier of what we-the-people can do to get us operating from a higher state of consciousness and see if that's interesting to you..
Physics deals with the relationship between observed things. People deal with relationships between their spirits and the world. The equations of physics are pretty damn good. There will never be equations for spirits.
Having had a few mystical experiences under the influence of psychedelics and also experienced many a spiritual narcissist (sigh), I appreciate this new reframe of the role of the ego in expanding our consciousness, our awareness of self, and our relation(s) in this world. I cannot wait to dive into your book. Thank you for the thought provoking article!
I reacted strongly to your basic thesis and took notes for my rebuttal as I read the article LOL. I realized this morning that I was somewhat triggered your argument; at age 18 I experienced multiple ego dissolutions using LSD and my "new identity" is very much resting on my interpretations of ego death, rebirth, non-dualism, my conversation to Buddhism and my understanding of Transformation. I see the irony of that, but I share it as a nod to my strong reaction and the time I put into capturing my feedback to the essay. I hope you find some of it interesting, entertaining and/or educational. So here we go!
‘We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.’
—Confucius
- The self as a process: yes! I am not a “thing” I am an “unfolding.”
- I love the beginning of the essay when you speak into everything being relational. Hell yes.
- However, you don’t have a proper understanding of the Void.
- What the person you quote describes as the “void” is actually Absolute Consciousness, not the Void. This is the "positive" (light) aspect of Reality. The Void is beyond the beyond.
- There are multiple types of samadhi. With the Void or the “absolute” type of samadhi: there is no awareness, no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. No color, sound, taste, touch, phenomena. (taken from the Heart Sutra).
- So you are correct, there would be no memory of such an experience. There is only a fleeting glimpse of one entering or one exiting this type of samadhi. This is the actual Void. No awareness, no I, no consciousness, no experience at all. (Much has been written about it being "the pregnant all" "full of potential" where everything comes from. See the Tao Te Ching for many descriptions of its indescribable nature.
- Ego loss is no good if you want to cross the street, hold a conversation, or do your job. We need our egos to function. Yes. However, "me first" all the time is no way to be in relationship (and ultimately doesn't create well-being) so learning how to "work with" the ego harmoniously is important.
- So the real question is, why is ego dissolution emphasized in Eastern religion (you keep insisting these are somehow western expressions, but ego dissolution is emphasized in all mystic traditions and is central to Buddhism). What is the purpose, benefit or ‘need’ for ego dissolution?
- My answer to that is: ego-dissolution can support with creating integration, wholeness and perspective changes that can enhance our lived experience, understanding and add to our well-being and wisdom. Ego dissolution can help create an altruistic mindset and a desire for service, harmonious relationships and equality in society.
- Anyone who has had a full ego death will tell you there is nothing on the other side. There is no there there. “Reach that end, and you will see, the start is where the end should be, such a simple thing: just you and me.” (I’m quoting my own song lyrics here, my apologies, but it fits). This is also what you circle back around to at the end of the essay. Yes, It’s all relational.
- Western mysticism includes Sufism where one frequently merges or dissolves into the divine, or the “beloved.” Western mysticism is not all about prophetic and purpose. You use a terrible simplification in discussing this.
- Yes, dissociation is similar to ego death but to bring psychosis into the conversation is bizarre to me. If similar (or equivalent), the effects are temporary. I definitely side with Grof on this. Having a completely dissociative experience can be healing and reveal to us a deeper reality. It is a holotropic state and can be extremely valuable.
- Your conclusion that this approach is somehow a blend of Eastern and Western metaphysics *may* apply to some people, but Buddhism revolves around ego-death and rebirth, so I'm not clear why you think this is some metaphysical Frankenstein. We don’t need Western metaphysics for this conversation at all. Additionally, it is intrinsic to all transformational processes. The Butterfly being the classic metaphor: caterpillar must completely dissolve (and essentially die) for the Butterfly to be born. That is transformation in in a nutshell.
- Spiritual “masters” are not abusing their students because of these metaphysical contradictions. That is a silly (and simplistic) argument. Those transgressions are about our intrinsically flawed humanity, and are about power and the limitations of “enlightenment.” Do you really think Trungpa Rinpoche was confused by these supposed Western/Eastern contradictions? LOL There is something much deeper (and more humanly frail) going on with these situations. That argument is total bunk.
- 100% agree it’s about relating and being with each other.
- This is why teaching of “oneness”, interconnectedness and the metaphor of Indra’s net come out of the East, it’s the actual purpose of ego dissolution: to stop seeing the self as a separate and distinct “Thing” when we are actually co-arising and inter-dependent with Reality.
- 100% agree that looking at the ego as needing to be “purged” is a big mistake and my view simply a “beginners” misstep on the path. Common, and from what I’ve seen, usually corrected fairly quickly.
- That said, “thinking” frequently gets in the way of experiencing reality “as it really is” and the ego is constantly churning out crap to distract us and separate us from our experience. So quieting the mind and practicing presence is essential.
- I love that it comes down to us being a process. 100% true. We (and Reality) are verbs, not nouns.
“I am your lover, come to my side, I will open the gate to your love.
Come settle with me, let us be neighbors to the stars.
You have been hiding so long, endlessly drifting in the sea of my love.
Even so, you have always been connected to me.
Concealed, revealed, in the unknown, in the un-manifest.
I am life itself. You have been a prisoner of a little pond,
I am the ocean and its turbulent flood. Come merge with me,
leave this world of ignorance. Be with me, I will open the gate to your love.”
Maybe this idealization of an "ego dissolution" is because the ego gets a negative rap these days (perhaps because of its association with egoism, etc.)?
After all, another way to think about ego is that it's the human personality (as opposed to our spirit/soul, etc.). And few people would aspire to a "personality dissolution."
What’s curious though is that whether a Bach, Kepler, Einstein, Planck, the saints and mystics from Augustine to Rumi, Plato or Confucius, none of them needed psychedelics to transcend and develop a higher self, and yet there seems to be a campaign that ignores that reality and presents a new quick shortcut to transcendence.
It’s all very reminiscent of Huxley final novel, The Island. Have you read it?
I know psychedelics can have benefits, but I really have to wonder when I hear a lot of the modern psychedelic prophets tout the benefits without much reference to the darker historical side of the question, and its implications today.
For instance, how aware are we of the ongoing MK-Ultra programs, the newer ones? The “official story” is that MK-Ultra was shut down and that’s the end of the story. But if we look at many of the discussions around psychedelics and their ability to help repattern the mind, it looks like the MK-Ultra program has simply been mainstreamed. Notably, one of MK-Ultra’s greatest goals was the creation of false memories. These could be used to program assassins or to simply repattern someone’s sense of identity ie to “forget” certain things and “remember others.”
Psychedelics played no small part in this. It’s know that psychedelics allow one to take a distance from their memories and past, and become open to new ways of thinking in a very drastic manner. Naturally, this can be used for good or for bad, much like hypnosis. But if it has such power, is there any doubt the first on the case are the intel agencies themselves?
There is a great book by journalist Tom O’Neil, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties.” Among many quotes and new research, he cited pages from journals by clinicians handling “the Family” at the HAFMC.
This quote stands out:
“One of these articles hoped to find out ‘whether a dramatic drug-induced experience’ would have a ‘lasting impact on the individual’s personality.’ Another observed that feelings of ‘frustrated anger’ led people to want to try LSD: ‘The soil from which the ‘flower children’ arise,’ the author wrote, ‘is filled more with anger and aggression, thorns and thistles, rather than passion and petunias.’ Under ‘emotional pressure,’ acid could induce ‘images and sensations of anger or hate magnified into nightmarish proportions.
David Smith had studied these same phenomena, formulating an idea that he called ‘the psychedelic syndrome,’ first articulated in 1967 or early’68.
The gist was that acid, when taken by groups of like-minded people, led to a ‘chronic LSD state’ that reinforced ‘the interpretation of psychedelic reality.’ The more often the same group of “friends” dropped acid, the more they encouraged one another to adopt the worldview they’d discovered together on LSD, thus producing ‘dramatic psychological changes. Usually the psychedelic syndrome was harmless, but regular LSD use could cause ‘the emergence of a dramatic orientation to mysticism.’“
I consider psychedelics to be a powerful agent or tool for self-exploration, but also agree that current discussion of psychedelics in popular culture is very shallow right now. A very wide range of experiences and outcomes are possible, and greatly influenced by the context in which they are used.
Aldous Huxley’s final novel Island is a good example of what the darker inspirations might look like.
He wrote The Island 30 years after Brave New World, but still with the same theme of imagining what the perfect system of control might look like, that is, a “final revolution” in which people “love their servitude.”
Instead a “soma” the Island has “moksha,” a scientifically-grown toad stool that offers one “liberation” and the feeling of having attained one’s higher transcendent self. The utopian Island of Pala doesn’t have traditional families, but community families in which the children can choose to leave and pick a different family if they so desire. There are also no mothers. Mother doesn’t exist as a noun, only a verb. So, we have a global communitarian village of sorts where most people are kept busy exploring their inner world and engaging in tantric sex as a spiritual practice, all from a very young age, having lost interest in any sort of age of abundance tied to industrial society, being wholly content with their “new scarcity.”
Psychedelics is key to creating the illusion of meeting one’s deepest desires and spiritual fulfilment. All the creepy details and Malthusian population control are treated as mere detail.
I once did a deep dive on the subject, which definitely doesn’t seem to be losing its relevance, given the new meta narrative about the West having to leave the “Age of Abundance” and embrace a “New Scarcity.”
Having heard these things, I wondered: how is one to keep a once consumer-based society “happy”—and not revolting—once much of the wealth and industrial sectors that made the abundance possible disappear. That’s where The Island caught my attention.
Huxley seemed to have dedicated an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to achieve this kind of thing many of its solutions and narratives having suddenly picked up speed in the last few years.
https://davidgosselin.substack.com/p/escaping-huxleys-island-psychedelics
Since you mention The Beatles, it's interesting to note what John Lennon reported to Rolling Stone in 1970: "I got the message on acid that I should kill my ego, and I did, y'know. I was nothing, I was shit." It took him years to recover and he seems to have developed symptoms of depersonalisation-derealisation based on descriptions in The Beatles biography by Hunter Davies. Funnily enough, it was a later pair of LSD trips in 1968 that reconvinced him of the reality of the ego.
Someone else worth noting is George Harrison, who was also a heavy LSD user in 1966/7. You can see George's views on the ego in his later song 'I, Me, Mine':
"Having LSD was like someone catapulting me out into space. The LSD experience was the biggest experience that I’d had up until that time… Suddenly I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego, like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel’ or ‘give it to me’ or ‘I am’. It drove me crackers, I hated everything about my ego, it was a flash of everything false and impermanent, which I disliked"
This is great, thanks man. Another testament to just how powerful priming and perceptual frames are for eliciting different types of mystical experience - imagine if they the Beatles had found a Christian mystic up in the mountains of Sardinia or something, and got really into that metaphysics, how different their music might have been. "All You Need Is Grace"/"We all live with our yellow rosaries, yellow rosaries, yellow rosaries..."
Lol. Well, Tom Holland argued in Dominion that Christian themes inevitably made their way into The Beatles' work (having arisen out of Christian England and Catholic Liverpool). e.g. 'The Word' from 1965, which has echoes of the introduction to the Gospel of John ('In the Beginning was The Word') and the first letter of John.
'Say the word and you'll be free
Say the word and be like me [yuck]
Say the word I'm thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?
It's so fine, it's sunshine
It's the word, love'
How could it be otherwise. The Beatles grew up in a culture saturated with Christian ideas and images. Even people who had no Christian churching or never went to Sunday school unconsciously absorbed this all-pervading Christian mind-scape psyche.
Even if that was, and still is (less so) the case doesn't mean that the various Christian ideas/myths and superstitions are or were true.
Indeed they are no longer believable - the presumed "resurrection" of Jesus never happened, could not have happened.
We cant even account for our appearance here in this time and place. Or for the appearance of a single thing. To do so one would have to take into account all of the multiple paradoxes of space-time history and how it coalesced into the present-time configuration which, by the way changes on a moment to moment basis. IT is all a beginingless and endless spontaneously appearing light show
And yet millions of naive Christian true believers believe in "Jesus", whoever and wherever he was. They presume to know what supposedly happened in Palestine 2000 years ago, whenever and wherever that was.
Furthermore none of them have never ever met "Jesus" in a living-breathing-feeling human form and thus benefited from his personal instruction as to how to live the universal non-sectarian Spirit-Breathing Way of Life that Jesus taught and demonstrated while he was alive (end of story. Nor did they participate in his Teaching Demonstration.
I'm not sure I agree it's all a beginning less and endless light display, or how that would be confirmed, but I do agree with your passionate questions about Christianity. Any revival of Christianity occurring in small online circles will always struggle to defeat and resist the religion's huge problems. That said, I think there's something more to the religion than you suggest. You should check out Reinhold Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer for good reasonable analyses.
That would indeed have been interesting, and there were Christian mystics to be met, at that point in time (someone like Bede Griiffiths, down in South India, eg, blending Catholicism, Indian Xity and Hinduism). But in any case, it seems to me not too much of a surprise that Harrison, having been brought up a Catholic, was drawn to the highly devotional Krishna Consciousness organisation. Very different philosophies involved, between these two traditions, but a great deal shared when it comes to people's everyday practice.
This is such an important and nuanced conversation that is required in our current moment. The strengthening of the ego complex (rather than attempts at dissolution) truly does expand our sense of self, bringing in greater flexibility, relatedness, depth. It serves as the fundamental cornerstone for the development of a meaningful path of individuation. Further, death of the ego, the loss of "I", is what leads to psychosis.
Alyssa, I love the framing of "ego complex" as opposed to ego as a discrete thing, and the concept of strengthening it rather than disolving it. Excited to read your post!
In my personal work I've started thinking of my "ego" (if indeed that's the correct term) as the collection-of-selves that I have access to, or that are activated in me, at any given time. And my intuition says I can strengthen that ego complex of "selves" by basically welcoming more and more selves to the complex, with the goal of eventually including all of my infinite selves...which is more like a process-of-self? Tbh, it kinda feels like the microcosmic equivalent of the unity/connection concept...?
I have never actually had any psychedelic experiences, but, boy, am I curious.
Thank you for sharing intuition, i love the flow of it.
How do you feel about changing the word 'self' for 'personality', and the idea of allowing ego to present an appropriate personality in every moment, to relate inner and outer worlds?
I like this phrase ego complex too. I feel that some of the confusion this essay speaks to is that between ego (or ego complex - many parts of the personality that evolve through our relational experience of the world) and Self (the essential, undamaged, unchanging ‘I’ beneath). Connection with Self is connection with divine , or big SELF, and from some perspective can feel like ego ‘death’ from the perspective that for a transient moment we are not identifying with any constructed part of our ego complex. I also agree that the key to using psychedelics (and ecstatic states more broadly) is in order to integrate and strengthen the ego complex. We are actually befriending the ‘ego’ (not purging or killing it) in the hope of a more collaborative and nourishing relational life.
Thanks for an excellent post. It seems you are putting your finger on a habit of binary thinking seen too often in the West. Would you agree that this form of binary thinking is the sign of an immature culture?
Our over-emphasis on our own individuality, discreteness and separation has generated a whole heap of problems for us, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally. We then swing to the other extreme - no individuality, no boundaries of self etc. The old saying has it that the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea. It seems we just haven't got the traditional wisdom in place to deal with this maturely.
> the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea
I love this. Thank you! And 100% agree on the binary thinking for both self-others and many other debates solar-or-nuclear, vegan-or-meat, conservative-or-liberal. And the lack of spectrums/middle paths as well as the lack of two+ dimensional possibility space where the second leads off into the fog of uncertainty... so many people are so afraid of uncertainty, myself included, although for some domains I now do find uncertainty so relaxing and efficient.
Maybe wisdom cannot be traditional.
Finding middle-ground might be a mature way to explore, or going all the way in extremes and see what happens ;) maybe you'll find the good in the bad, and vice versa....
Thank you for this! I'm not smart enough or experienced enough to steel-man your article so please be patient and generous with accommodating my ignorance. I've done about 2000 hours of meditation (Vipassana; S. N. Goenka) now and I've recently had some experiences that, from my perception of your writing, I can't fit into your propositions:
I (and I think most people) are holding onto the illusion that they (I) am immortal, and am too afraid to connect to the reality that I am going to die. If someone sold me an experience where I connect to, realise and accept that I am not permanent, not immortal, and that I will die (which I have experienced through meditation) then my experience of that was one of complete infinite terror... and if they had sold that to me as _just_ an "ego-reframe" rather than the reality of utterly brutal "ego-death" I would want my money back! :)
Perhaps there are ways to have this realisation that are softer, or more gradual but then...
> so that life becomes a dance, a joy, an adventure.
...if death also becomes a dance, a joy, an adventure, then I agree with your propositions. But for most people death is not that, when it comes, if they remain conscious, they will quite literally s**t themselves with fear assuming they haven't been nil by mouth for the last day or more.
> But you can’t dissolve or die, until you actually die.
I agree that your body can't die until, er, you actually die. But from my experience I believe you can prematurely kill your illusory sense of immortal self; that illusory sense of immortal self can "die" before your body dies. And that "die" doesn't even need air quotes because it feels so extreme and so pronounced that it's nothing other than the emotional content of death experienced before the bodily reality of death.
Just some thoughts. Would be happy to discuss in more detail. Thank you for your articles.
Interesting, thanks! What if that ego reframe was as effective in helping people come to terms with mortality? I’ve also had experiences that feel like death spiritually, and one’s that felt like I was actually going to die, and they were quite different. The latter was terrifying and made me learning to die well is a skill / trait rather than something we can gain from a one off experience (even though that can help / open the door)
Yes if the ego reframe was as effective in helping people come to terms with mortality I'm all for it! :) From your comment it sounds like your spiritual deaths (ego-reframings?) were very positive and powerful but were not helpful with coming to terms with your mortality? And that the "actually going to die [at some future point]" were the experiences that engaged with your mortality?
I think ego-reframings are great for many things including reducing suffering of self and others... "life becomes a dance, a joy, an adventure" as you put it. I'm just hesitant to cast ego-death in too binary a "it's not good" frame because I fear that the sleeping anxiety of death is so pernicious in so many people in so many subtle ways (I think it may also have powerful positive sides to it too in terms of drive / motivation to keep going and get stuff done). And I agree that poorly framed ego-death experiences are vastly more harmful.
Yeah, see the "sleeping anxiety" of dying every night... it is simple hey?
I have enjoying an embodiment practice that allows for the direct experience of the non dual nature of being. I was attracted to it because it does not ask or want you to go through an ego death. In fact, the more one can directly experience being embodied, the more one can experience being the fabric of consciousness. Judith Blackstone, PhD developed the Realization Process. Her writing is simple and direct. It used to be hard for me to get out of my head and go directly to experience. Now I get to live in the experience of existence while people discuss it.
I read your essays for the captions alone. Hilarious.
My take on the ego, is that it emerges, naturally, as part of the process of our evolution into human form. It's evolution, the birth of our character, our story, our identity and whole way of Being, is invariably founded in a moment of 'trauma,' which can range from the apparently innocuous, to the more malign. Whatever the case, it is a point of differentiation when we begin to see ourselves as separate entities - and our identity is built on a decision we make at that point about ourselves, or about life.
Ostensibly, this process is one of 'heartbreak,' where we encounter an experience of hurt or pain, which we would prefer not to experience again. Indeed, the formation of our identity is predicated on this. Invariably it is founded on a belief about ourselves, or of life, or both, which we then spend our lives trying to disprove. A thankless task, and one we would rather not be faced with.
For many of us, our desire to be 'free of ego,' is an extension of this pursuit - a desire to steer clear of our earthly concerns, rather to return to a sense of deep connection and alignment, without having to trouble ourselves with the challenges we face in this domain, as Human Beings.
It explains the whole phenomena of spiritual bypassing, and the preponderance of spiritual gurus who provide access to spiritual enlightenment, while falling prey to their own (unresolved) human shadows. People would rather make contact with the divine, and identify with this, than the flawed character and story they'd prefer not to go to the roots of.
The path, as I see it, is along the lines of what you propose. That our invitation is to shift our relationship with the ego, and our understanding of it. Not get rid of it, per se, but to be less identified with it - but also accepting of how we cannot be human, nor operate in this earthly domain, WITHOUT it.
TO accept that we are BOTH our ego, and not our ego - that the I we observe ourselves from comes from a deeper realm. Transcendent experiences can give us direct access to the self beyond the I, and to the unified field of conscioussness we are all part of. But it is in the earthly domain that the work needs to take place, and our ego that will invariably provide the map for aspects of ourselves which require observation, clearing, and integrating.
Love your insight and the way you relate ego and pain.
'The self' can also observe 'the i".
yes!
Thanks for a very interesting article. Coincidentally, I was chatting to my wife about this yesterday: she was saying "The problem with Eastern philosophies is that they say you need to kill your ego" *or rather, something in Turkish to that extent)and I was like "No, that's a Western interpretation of Eastern philosophies." But the important thing was the point she made about Sufism: there is a state of ego-dissolution (fenafillah in Turkish, fana fi-Allah in Arabic), which you might experience either as complete nothingness (hiçlik makamı in Turkish) or conversely as complete identification with God (enel Hakk / anal Haq). However - and this is what so many people miss - that is not the final goal; it's a half-way point, and it's very dangerous to get stuck there (as Mansoor Hallaj found out). From there, you have to go back to the self (nefs / nafs), but it's a transformed self. Now that is very similar to what you mention about combining the Eastern enlightenment and Western resurrection narratives, but in a therapeutic rather than a pathological way. Incidentally, you also see it in Zen; e.g., the end of the Ten Bulls poem.
I'm a pre-publication hardback buyer, appreciating your good mind and jealous of you being in a such a radical program, although I come from the days when there were no programs and thanks to psychedelics and ecstasy I still got my life turned around. You enter a realm that has its way! Check me out to see if you like what I'm saying about turning the world around. Love to be thinking with you. I've got a dossier of what we-the-people can do to get us operating from a higher state of consciousness and see if that's interesting to you..
Physics deals with the relationship between observed things. People deal with relationships between their spirits and the world. The equations of physics are pretty damn good. There will never be equations for spirits.
Having had a few mystical experiences under the influence of psychedelics and also experienced many a spiritual narcissist (sigh), I appreciate this new reframe of the role of the ego in expanding our consciousness, our awareness of self, and our relation(s) in this world. I cannot wait to dive into your book. Thank you for the thought provoking article!
Thanks. I got the Kindle and audible companion for under nine bucks.
I reacted strongly to your basic thesis and took notes for my rebuttal as I read the article LOL. I realized this morning that I was somewhat triggered your argument; at age 18 I experienced multiple ego dissolutions using LSD and my "new identity" is very much resting on my interpretations of ego death, rebirth, non-dualism, my conversation to Buddhism and my understanding of Transformation. I see the irony of that, but I share it as a nod to my strong reaction and the time I put into capturing my feedback to the essay. I hope you find some of it interesting, entertaining and/or educational. So here we go!
‘We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.’
—Confucius
- The self as a process: yes! I am not a “thing” I am an “unfolding.”
- I love the beginning of the essay when you speak into everything being relational. Hell yes.
- However, you don’t have a proper understanding of the Void.
- What the person you quote describes as the “void” is actually Absolute Consciousness, not the Void. This is the "positive" (light) aspect of Reality. The Void is beyond the beyond.
- There are multiple types of samadhi. With the Void or the “absolute” type of samadhi: there is no awareness, no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. No color, sound, taste, touch, phenomena. (taken from the Heart Sutra).
- So you are correct, there would be no memory of such an experience. There is only a fleeting glimpse of one entering or one exiting this type of samadhi. This is the actual Void. No awareness, no I, no consciousness, no experience at all. (Much has been written about it being "the pregnant all" "full of potential" where everything comes from. See the Tao Te Ching for many descriptions of its indescribable nature.
- Ego loss is no good if you want to cross the street, hold a conversation, or do your job. We need our egos to function. Yes. However, "me first" all the time is no way to be in relationship (and ultimately doesn't create well-being) so learning how to "work with" the ego harmoniously is important.
- So the real question is, why is ego dissolution emphasized in Eastern religion (you keep insisting these are somehow western expressions, but ego dissolution is emphasized in all mystic traditions and is central to Buddhism). What is the purpose, benefit or ‘need’ for ego dissolution?
- My answer to that is: ego-dissolution can support with creating integration, wholeness and perspective changes that can enhance our lived experience, understanding and add to our well-being and wisdom. Ego dissolution can help create an altruistic mindset and a desire for service, harmonious relationships and equality in society.
- Anyone who has had a full ego death will tell you there is nothing on the other side. There is no there there. “Reach that end, and you will see, the start is where the end should be, such a simple thing: just you and me.” (I’m quoting my own song lyrics here, my apologies, but it fits). This is also what you circle back around to at the end of the essay. Yes, It’s all relational.
- Western mysticism includes Sufism where one frequently merges or dissolves into the divine, or the “beloved.” Western mysticism is not all about prophetic and purpose. You use a terrible simplification in discussing this.
- Yes, dissociation is similar to ego death but to bring psychosis into the conversation is bizarre to me. If similar (or equivalent), the effects are temporary. I definitely side with Grof on this. Having a completely dissociative experience can be healing and reveal to us a deeper reality. It is a holotropic state and can be extremely valuable.
- Your conclusion that this approach is somehow a blend of Eastern and Western metaphysics *may* apply to some people, but Buddhism revolves around ego-death and rebirth, so I'm not clear why you think this is some metaphysical Frankenstein. We don’t need Western metaphysics for this conversation at all. Additionally, it is intrinsic to all transformational processes. The Butterfly being the classic metaphor: caterpillar must completely dissolve (and essentially die) for the Butterfly to be born. That is transformation in in a nutshell.
- Spiritual “masters” are not abusing their students because of these metaphysical contradictions. That is a silly (and simplistic) argument. Those transgressions are about our intrinsically flawed humanity, and are about power and the limitations of “enlightenment.” Do you really think Trungpa Rinpoche was confused by these supposed Western/Eastern contradictions? LOL There is something much deeper (and more humanly frail) going on with these situations. That argument is total bunk.
- 100% agree it’s about relating and being with each other.
- This is why teaching of “oneness”, interconnectedness and the metaphor of Indra’s net come out of the East, it’s the actual purpose of ego dissolution: to stop seeing the self as a separate and distinct “Thing” when we are actually co-arising and inter-dependent with Reality.
- 100% agree that looking at the ego as needing to be “purged” is a big mistake and my view simply a “beginners” misstep on the path. Common, and from what I’ve seen, usually corrected fairly quickly.
- That said, “thinking” frequently gets in the way of experiencing reality “as it really is” and the ego is constantly churning out crap to distract us and separate us from our experience. So quieting the mind and practicing presence is essential.
- I love that it comes down to us being a process. 100% true. We (and Reality) are verbs, not nouns.
“I am your lover, come to my side, I will open the gate to your love.
Come settle with me, let us be neighbors to the stars.
You have been hiding so long, endlessly drifting in the sea of my love.
Even so, you have always been connected to me.
Concealed, revealed, in the unknown, in the un-manifest.
I am life itself. You have been a prisoner of a little pond,
I am the ocean and its turbulent flood. Come merge with me,
leave this world of ignorance. Be with me, I will open the gate to your love.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi
Take a look here for some excerpts on ego from Meher Baba's works.
https://www.avatarmeherbaba.org/erics/ego.html
what is "our essence" in your opinion?
Maybe this idealization of an "ego dissolution" is because the ego gets a negative rap these days (perhaps because of its association with egoism, etc.)?
After all, another way to think about ego is that it's the human personality (as opposed to our spirit/soul, etc.). And few people would aspire to a "personality dissolution."