Ego Dissolution

Ego dissolution — synonymous in the literature with ego death, ego loss and William James' term self-surrender — is the phenomenological experience of a 'complete loss of subjective self-identity.' It is one of the most-reported and most-discussed states in the psychedelic and contemplative literatures, and one of the few whose recurrence across otherwise unrelated traditions is striking enough to suggest a shared underlying phenomenon.

In Jungian psychology the same state is called psychic death — a fundamental transformation of the psyche in which the previous self-organisation dissolves and a wider, less defended one can emerge. In comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell placed the same transition at the pivot of the Hero's Journey: the point of self-surrender and passage through which the hero is remade before returning. It is a recurrent theme in world religious literature, from the fana of Sufi mysticism to the śūnyatā of Mahāyāna Buddhism to the 'dark night of the soul' of Christian mysticism.

In drug-experience research the terminology first entered wide use through Timothy Leary and colleagues, who used ego death to describe the first phase of an LSD trip — a 'complete transcendence' of the self in which the ordinary sense of being a bounded, temporally continuous someone lets go. Contemporary psychedelic science tends to prefer ego dissolution as the neutral clinical term, and correlates it with measurable disruption to the default-mode network — the brain circuitry associated with self-referential thought and autobiographical continuity.

Experientially the state is often described as a sudden, sometimes vertiginous transition: the boundary between self and world softens and then dissolves; personal history feels contingent rather than defining; and the sense of being the one to whom this is happening is replaced by a much wider and more spacious awareness. It is variously reported as ecstatic (union, cosmic love), terrifying (annihilation, the sense of dying without a body to die from), or matter-of-fact (a simple recognition that the self was never as continuous as it had seemed).

Contemporary spirituality has adopted the term to describe permanent shifts in perspective — the loss of 'attachment to a separate sense of self' central to many meditation traditions — as well as the temporary chemical version. Both usages point at the same underlying axis: what happens to experience when the identifying grip of the ego lets go.

Source:
Wikipedia — Ego death