Ego and Ego Death

The ultimate guide to your ego and psychedelic-induced ego death.

I don’t remember when it hit me that I was dying. I couldn’t sit up, or even lift my head. A being was burying me under ground, and I couldn’t do anything to fight it. It felt horrible, like the worst kind of torture imaginable. I looked to my left, where a turbulent stream was separating me from my mother. I begged for help, but she kept staring at me blankly. The being buried me deeper, again and again, until I was so far underground that my body was completely suffocated by the weight of the soil. I felt like I was experiencing despair and helplessness in their purest, most lethal form, as the only person around, my mother, was watching it all unfold, so cruelly impassive.

The feelings kept getting worse, as the visuals changed and I found myself in complete darkness. Blue vein-like lights started appearing and formed an enormous being that was looking down on me with disgust, laughing at me and pretending to wank in my face. The humiliation was unbearable, and I felt like I was dying all over again.

My chest was heavy and burning with what felt like a big tumour that was keeping me from breathing. Before I could understand what it was, a huge bird-like creature swept down over my body, scooped the big red oval tumour out of me, and flew off with it. I was dying again, my body turning into ash, why a voice inside my head asked “Was that my ego? Did that bird take my soul?”.

What I describe above was my first experience of ego death, on what is conventionally seen as a low dose of 15mg of psilocybin. It may sound brutal (and it was), but what followed was the beautiful mystical experience I described in the previous edition, and a lasting feeling of equanimity regarding some unresolved childhood trauma that, in many ways, had defined me for most of my life.

Ego death is one of the most powerful experiences you can have on psychedelics (or meditation, although it takes longer to get there). If you asked Stan Grof, he’d tell you the main point of the psychedelic experience is to “create optimal conditions for the subject to experience ego death and the subsequent transcendence into the so-called psychedelic peak experience.”

But ego and ego death are often misunderstood, and I’ve certainly seen folks so keen to “kill” their egos without even knowing what they want dead, and how to put themselves back together after that. So, before we go into what ego death feels like and why you’d look for such an experience, let’s first acquaint ourselves better with our favourite enemy, the ego.