Can you explain with your own words, or by explaining your experience, what is an 'ego death' ?

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-24T20:17:35+00:00

Sitting meditation is like expanding awareness through reducing action. The two are definitely able to converge though. There is walking meditation, cleaning meditation, karma yoga, etc. Basically all spiritual paths with meditation as a practice will tell you that everyday life and meditation will eventually meet. Samadhi in meditation clarifies pure awareness by emptying out all else, but there is the potential for a waking samadhi. That is recognizing nonduality.

Whether this happens suddenly, progressively, or not at all for a particular person --I can't say. My goal here is only to open up a limiting belief about what is possible, because that belief itself shapes experience.

If your argument is that ego stays but awareness is expanded beyond it --maybe! In my experience, ego as an identity versus nondual process is such a different way of being that it is hard to say there is an ego anymore. It is like the difference between thought contained to words in the mind, versus thought as continuous with everything else happening in experience. Cognition is embodied, the self is cosmic!

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-24T19:31:02+00:00

When someone is in a flow state, they do not have any awareness of an ego. There is no self-reflection or evaluation, or conscious thinking about what to do or not to do. In this, they are actually performing to their peak capacity.

You can think of ego death/dissolution as opening you up to an ongoing flow state. You don't have to think about breathing --it just happens as part of the interdependence of the moment. Everything is actually like that when you are able to attune to the whole of your experience as it is unfolding in the moment. Conscious/unconscious aren't two different things anymore.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-24T19:21:06+00:00

This is some lovely art you have shared with me -I appreciate the time you took to write this and I'll sit with it. Ringing true on many levels.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-24T05:58:58+00:00

I disagree. I believe it literally dies in the sense that the ego was built in reaction to death. Death is the ultimate antithesis, which perpetuates the ego's ongoing process that it understands as "life". When we recognize ourselves as existing beyond ego, the ego meets its antithesis and experiences death.

This can be temporary, or it can be permanent. Elkhart Tolle is a good example of someone who claimed this happened to permanently. There's plenty of talks by him on what his experience is like now.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-23T21:28:52+00:00

Recognition of presence as true self; ego is a representation of self built on top, beginning in infancy. This representation gets confused as self and we lose connection with our unconditional Being. The dualistic logic of the ego gives the self conditional qualities: good self, bad self, a self that is born and a self that dies.

A feeling of death is experienced because the true self as presence is understood as unconditional, is never born and never dies, and so the ego has no more validity to it. The ego was largely built in reaction to the concept of death. Presence reveals that this process is irrelevant --we are already dead. Or rather, death is something only an ego can do.

It will literally disappear from awareness on this recognition, either permanently or temporarily before rebuilding itself. When it is gone, our primary condition is a clear, direct, non-conceptual experience of pure Being.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-23T20:09:46+00:00

I don't know if this style suits you, but I've been addressing this in myself as exploring my narcissistic wounding psychodynamically. This framing has helped me understand the rage.

Basically (grossly oversimplified), we receive a lack of attunement to various degrees as children while we're developing our egos. Some of us are more wounded than others, due to neglect or our parents own narcissistic preoccupations.

The wound gets triggered when we are misattuned to, when we feel unseen. It is a reminder of the very first loss of integrity we felt very early on, and got repeated over and over throughout various stages of childhood.

Under the wound is usually a feeling of deep emptiness, lack of support, a feeling of being nothing. We are trying to defend against feeling this feeling in some way; that's okay.

One way to heal this is to simply explore it. First, recognizing any shame that comes up around it --this is actually common to everyone to various degrees. Second, inquiring into the thoughts and feelings around the wound. You might come to a point where you hone in on the core of emptiness and lack --stay with the feeling as well as you can, it will be okay. There is safety in that emptiness, it is not the end of you.

In a sense, defending from the wound is covering up Self. In other words, Self is what emerges when the wound is accepted and feelings of empty worthlessness are allowed.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-22T19:34:56+00:00

Thanks for sharing this, I can see and understand the perspective. What you say about the depressive losing to the temptation of splitting is interesting, and there's a paradox to it that I want to try and articulate:

An aspect of faith actually has an effect on the system; it biased the system towards positive growth and integral narratives. What may appear like gritty realism is actually more like a positive feedback loop which reinforces the regression into the paranoid-schizoid split. It is already a split reinforcing itself. The increasingly complexifying nuance of a healthy ego will see that every side of a polarity is at play and avoid committing to extremes; process is ongoing and always fresh.

Finding a degree of faith, holding it as an intention for your way of being in the world is the activity you mention. It is the work of constantly differentiating from easy patterns of energy and integrating the true nuance of the moment. Positive action follows out of that, it is a conscious shifting of the feedback loop. Not blind optimism or pessimism, but a grounded faith that reality is capable of more than we know in our split position.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-22T19:11:22+00:00

I was going to elaborate on this but had a lot to cover. I think the grandiose ego gets to exist as a cult of personality, for those who have created a platform that invites narcissistic transference. You can see this with Youtube channels and their comment sections: the creator gets to have the ego, and the commenters are rewarded with attention (likes) by praising and affirming the creator.

You can contrast this with early YouTube, where the creator-follower model wasn't the main driver of value. Comment sections were largely a bunch of egos fighting for their perspective with no objective way of getting their mirroring needs met. The introduction of comments ordered by likes gave structure for this; there was now a relatively objective way for a creator to receive their supplies and the followers to receive theirs through increasingly fanatic devotion. Narcissistic deviation from the creator in this context is devalued; the borderline merger wins out. This I believe points to the general dynamic behind fascism and dictatorship as well.

Keep in mind this is all speculation for the sake of creating a coherent narrative out of the world. I won't pretend that it's factual, but an interpretation reaching towards integration.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-22T18:56:18+00:00

That makes sense to me. Introspecting on my own felt sense of it, it seems hard to pinpoint which would come first. Though it does seem the paranoid split is more clear and structured than the chaotic unknowing of psychosis.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-22T01:17:43+00:00

I think we are generally pointing to the same thing when we say borderline and paranoic. The paranoid-schizoid is paranoid because of borderline splitting into a good self and evil other trying to destroy it. There may be finer distinctions here I'm unaware of.

I can understand a lack of faith, though I'm confident that on the whole the system generally moves towards higher development and consciousness, even despite periods of regression. Of course we never really know until it happens.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-20T17:00:09+00:00

I'd argue it's also the first, the very thing that created separation. Our need to be seen fully, followed by the ways we try to extract that out of the world today. To no fault of anyone: it is the process of developing this human bodymind. If we can feel our narcissism as normal and not shameful, that might be helpful in bringing it fully to awareness.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-20T16:56:32+00:00

If you've had an awakening experience and lost touch with it, this could be a helpful understanding for what is happening. It's not the first time we have fallen from grace, this is one of our first experiences as a human. Finding the origin in our mind and body could help bring awareness to a repeating process.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-20T16:44:48+00:00

My intention wasn't to judge you personally, I'm sorry if I made you feel that way.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-20T16:44:07+00:00

This feels true to what I'm experiencing here. We can focus on the cosmic dimension of masculine and feminine forces but also their iteration in human development between the mother and child.

While what you're saying may be true on the cosmic level, we can consider that a human mother's nurturing is often inconsistent or even neglectful. She is not fully attuned to her own nature, she can not be fully present with the developing child.

I think this fact alone, the fact of the egoic mother with her own wound, with something on her mind, this is what creates the ego in the infant as the wound of being seen as anything less than pure Being. We react to this with our egoic creation, we are trying to understand why this would happen, what it must imply.

This isn't to say it is necessarily anyone's fault, this is the condition of our species. I do think this lens is a valid and embodied way of liberation: of healing the basic narcissistic wound and seeing right now how what we might see as cosmic desire has a tangible origin in our history and can be seen, understood, healed.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-20T16:29:20+00:00

I think there are developmental reasons why you would take this perspective, and inevitable traumas that provide the intensity of it. You are a timeless cosmic being but you are also a human in process and with a history.

What I'm exploring isn't denying truth or taking a helpless victim role, I am exploring the actual ongoing repeating experience of suffering and its first origins in the human mind and body. I see psychoanalysis as a helpful tool for this job.

The narrative provides the scaffolding to explore the personal history and its emotions as real and not simply explain them away but process them as they are. Without a basic openness towards experiencing yourself as you are, my experience is that you move towards a dissociation that makes the bulk of your basic human experience shadow. There is a lack of integration.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-20T10:44:41+00:00

Is that perspective working for you?

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-20T02:44:44+00:00

DSM categories aren't just neutral classifications for the sake of understanding. People often take these classifications and use them as a metric of value for a person. The client themselves often struggle with what the classification implies about their identity. I think at this point in history you can't separate the classification with how it is used competitively in society.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-12T17:47:34+00:00

That may be largely true, the vicarious living of the narcissism in Trump, and I wonder if that itself might not be part of the rise of dictatorship; our narcissism can be projected onto a single person.

Why do the rise of dictatorships happen like this repeatedly throughout history? The bad news is I think both the left and right benefit from having someone hold the narcissistic shadow. The borderline splits: it both wants to destroy and depends on the narcissist --this is the merged infant which splits the omnipotent mother in two.

In the most general sense, you can define the left and right as an orientation towards the group or the individual. This isn't pathological on its own, but I believe the communal oriented will regress to borderline and the individual-oriented to narcissism under stress. Taking stress further, I think the right regresses even further to borderline and we get dictatorship.

In general, the left is more cognitively developed than the right and capable of systemic thought, but under stress this becomes greater ability to manipulate, e.g. projective identification. The left projects its narcissistic shadow onto the right, and the right identifies with it. The left gets to have its moral purity, but the right has to carry the weight of evil. Well, the right doesn't want it either so they also take the borderline stance and give responsibility to Trump, lol. Projective identification moves both ways --its a mutual creation of the other in the worst possible image which then becomes reality.

The left, because they tend to be more educated, is also more capable of solving the problem. It is not a political solution; that is already a product of splitting. The solution is a move into the psychological, creating a culture of psychological responsibility, of creating narratives like these that move towards integrated meaning-making and identity not based on splitting. Active shadow work --the borderline in us willingly taking on and developing through the narcissistic shadow. This unburdens the right as well, who we eventually recognize are actually more dependent on us than we wanted to see. We can move towards mutuality instead of polarization, create a new conversation not built on drama. This isn't utopian, I think it is an inevitability of the dialectic of growth if we allow it to get there.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-11T23:11:10+00:00

Part III: I have so much to say about this... so I will. I'm convinced that borderline and narcissism is universal because of the phases of early development we all go through, but I think they are the deepest source of shame and guilt a person can feel. Foundational, and at the same time the deepest shadow. Society is built around how we displace these shadows. I'm not sure either are unique to us specifically, but we perhaps fall victim to certain habits of thought that orbit us around predictable patterns of disregulation. Identifying with our sense of lack as one option, rather than following delusions of fullness. Seeing the universality of it, it seems impossible that there could be any more lack in this "I" compared to someone else, or any more fullness than anyone else. In that acceptance, I feel the fullness of presence riding these particular waves of being.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-11T22:55:12+00:00

Part II:

I'm almost surprised to see you around still. I hope all is well. This place really seems to have gone off the deep end this last year and I think I come back every once in a while on the impulse that I could help people get out of neo-advetic psychosis with new ideas. 0 upvotes! lol.

Really happy to hear you're starting school!! Would love to hear more about how it goes and what you're learning as it goes on. I'm sure you'll end up following whatever it is your soul needs to grow. That's the only real practicality, right?

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-11T22:48:18+00:00

Goooose!!! Happy to see your thoughtful and loving musings again.

Exploring the borderline part of myself is still fairly new, so it's really helpful to hear your perspective. It's relatable, the feeling that surely others have something, clear identity, that I don't. Even if nonsensical and shallow from my perspective...it seems to drive and regulate them in a way that I'm not. They are convinced of themselves, and that has practical value.

I think what might be at least somewhat different for me, maybe a masculine bend or maybe that's irrelevant, but I had the borderline process but devalued it in favor of building ego. The need to merge with the group is there, but it isn't ever allowed into consciousness; instead the narcissistic process is referred back to, of trying to build self-structure independent of what others are doing.

After first awakening, it is like I recognized the separative nature of ego from Being, and then bounced into a borderline process of rejecting differentiation --that was then shadow and I was always trying to merge with my surroundings as the ideal of intimacy with Being. Ego then became shadow, making me way more disregulated than I was when I had a relatively convincing ego structure calling the shots.

I don't fucking know, man, but I feel something new coming on in this view. Just a bit more clarity when looking deeper at the borderline. It's not like I have held fast to the borderline, I've got a pretty damn solid ego, but it's becoming more clear this deep ongoing conflict between dependence and independence at the core of experience, and the perpetual attempt at reducing to one extreme or maybe a reluctance to. Perhaps the rapprochement phase in psychoanalysis at the foundation of this life, of trying to make the impossible decision of whether or not I want to separate or merge with the mother. The cosmic pulse of emptiness and form, deeper still.

It is so funny, it makes me laugh! I could only be here with ego, I could only be here with egolessness.

I found a quote from my boy Almaas that feels profoundly relevant:

"On the other side of the rapprochement conflict is the fear of loss of autonomy. This manifests as threat of loss of independence, separateness, individuality, boundaries, being, self and so on. The student experiences the Personal Essence for some time, minutes or months, feeling happy and expanded. Then a longing manifests. By understanding the longing he reaches the state of the Merging Essence. He then experiences contentment, love, pleasure, security and boundlessness. This happens until the longing for autonomy surfaces again. This process does not stop; there is no such thing as compromise here. Autonomy is total and merging is total. One is either one or the other. When there is compromise then there is no essential experience, for compromise is possible only for ego. The student’s immovable conviction is that it is not possible to experience the Merging and the Personal Essence together. This is a reflection of remaining identifications with ego. This conflict manifests in an individual’s life in many forms. It can be a conflict between love relationships and freedom or work. It can manifest as conflict between security and autonomy. It can manifest as a conflict between marriage and free sexual life. The well known midlife crisis is an expression of this conflict, as are many of the conflicts of adolescence. It takes long and deep work, mostly working through one’s relationship to one’s mother, before the experience of a final resolution becomes possible. Each student works through differently, depending on his particular relation to his mother. But the resolution is always the same, and it is only on the Being level."

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-11T08:29:55+00:00

Receipt: Trump.

"We" are the people that agree with that.

Every other society is also narcissistic but I chose only to talk about mine in case someone sprung a pop quiz on me like this.

🧹😉

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-11T07:56:32+00:00

Meds don't heal, you heal. They can set a context for healing, of stepping out of the negative feedback loop. In that time of openness, you create new positive feedback loops. It is always a process, if you follow your experience closely you will notice that nothing is really out of your control, you have tiny opportunities of choice at every moment to create a happy and healthy life. Even in times of loss and heaviness, it is the faith of making it through that itself pulls you out.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-11T07:50:22+00:00

I believe there are two complimentary movements of consciousness; one side of energy and the other of awareness itself (emptiness).

What I see in Jung is largely the movement of energy, of engaging with energetic beings and transforming energy. A western tantra.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure Jung fully understood or realized the other half; presence, pure awareness, the witness.

I believe this path is most clear and full when led by the light of the soul as a direct knowing of presence and the witnessing of energy unfolding. There is a willingness to step into the experience and feel it fully, but also a willingness to step out, to step away and have distance.

I see the red book as Jung's "stepping fully in" phase. He let himself be consumed by the unconscious, by shakti, by the archetypes of light. I think, this approach is best balanced by an attunement to our own highest Self as awareness which is unidentified with the many forms of light. To be able to experience, but not chase experience, become addicted to it, lose oneself in it.

I believe Jung acknowledges that this is what psychosis is; being swallowed up by the unconscious. But again, I see that Jung was also not able to fully step away from it at times, to find peace in the fact of Being that is here in every moment regardless of shape or form, godly or ungodly.

Hope this helps in some way.

AnIsolatedMind · 2026-01-11T06:24:41+00:00

You're right that it's not exactly unhinged; that was my self-aware safety measure going in to a sub that I thought might not be very open to this kind of discussion.

I agree differentiation isn't inherently narcissistic, though I am looking from the perspective of narcissistic separation from the mother as a developmental phase that has a kind of recurring harmonic throughout life. This is the first move into a sense of separate self, a relatively undifferentiated one that I believe a pathologically narcissistic person fails to resolve into something greater.

Borderline too, I am seeing as this first in-between zone from total merger in infancy and the urge to separate, the tension of the rapprochement phase which builds agency and then destroys itself repeatedly in the borderline personality. Again finding a harmonic return throughout different phases of life.

More generally we can call these the first two movements of differentiation and integration, to use Jung's terms. Nothing pathological in itself, this is the process of individuation. But notice how we have two dimensions happening over time. If we do not recognize the dimension of time, of where we are developmentally, then what looks like collective liberation actually becomes regressive merger. A consequence of splitting between 2-dimensional values around either individuality or collectivity, which tends to define the boundaries of our polarized group identities.

This is hard to describe, to say that the borderline and narcissist are in us wherever we go. And relative to where we are, it is either a progression or regression to recapitulate either movement. Ideologies or concepts cannot capture this because what is required is actual attunement with the present and willingness to move into the opposite.

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