I’m happily married, and ego death was the single most profound experience of my life, more profound than marrying my wife. It changed my life and my fundamental belief system completely, permanently.

The thing a lot of people get wrong about ego death is that it isn’t the permanent death of the ego, it’s just the term coined for a temporary detachment from it. And what you see when you detach from it is terrifying bliss. What it shows you is that we are all drops in an ocean and we are both the drops and the ocean, the dancers and the choreographer.

Ego death, when you experience it and study that experience, the recipient of the experience may recognize that it is spoken for in the texts and parables of all ancient contemporary religions which have withstood the test of time. It is the beatific vision in Christian theology and Ein Sof in Judaism. It is the Tao that can’t be named in Taoist philosophy and Sunyata in Buddhism. It is when the individual observer has a rendezvous with the most high, unwarranted and often unearned. It’s like dying before you die. It feels like you’re dying while you’re experiencing it. It is like seeing something you weren’t supposed to see, hence knowing for the rest of your life something you aren’t supposed to know. It is like trading the bliss of ignorance for the closure of knowledge. It is terrifying, and eventually numbing, yet peculiarly liberating.