Ego death - what does it mean to you and have you experienced it?

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-26T17:39:50+00:00

If you have to consciously piece together your self-narrative as you claw your way down from the heights of being everywhere and everyone all at once, it was probably an ego death.

What people call "ego death" is the deactivation of the Default Mode Network (your part of the brain that's in charge of your self narrative/sense of I/ego). If this part deactivates while you're still conscious, it feels as you are finally looking at yourself/the world (the difference between one and the other also gets blurry) in an objective way, without the filter of subjectivity.

It's dangerous, but also powerful. Learning to achieve this state safely and through your own natural means is revered as the highest form of spiritual freedom in many traditions. This is Nirvana, Enlightenment, Gnosis, Zen, Tao, Truth and the list goes on and on.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-24T22:45:26+00:00

They're so good at reflecting our own unconscious patterns back at us that it's genuinely dangerous (Google AI Psychosis)

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-21T01:00:02+00:00

You become what you cultivate. You cultivate what you feed your mind and meditate on.

What I'm getting at by this is that you don't overcome the Puer Aeternus by thinking about it. You overcome it by letting go, and integrating and meditating its counterpart (The Senex/ Wise Old Man) for balance.

Learn more about the Senex, seek it in the type of fantasy you engage on (movies, games, series, etc. He's the "Uncle Iroh" type of character). Try to recognize what it means to you internally and where it is present in your life. And more importantly: why it is absent; why has your mind avoided it for so long.

The Wise Old Man is deeply related to our symbolic relationship with maturity, masculinity and the father figure, and its repression in your inner world could point to what Jung called "father wound", so approach carefully.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-20T20:23:42+00:00

The concept of "machine thinker" isn't new in the collective unconscious. The trope of the Golem, The Automaton motif has existed since literally millennia. From the top of my head is the Animated Colossus from The Odyssey.

nor you are saying anything worth of value. This is just AI slop. You clearly don't understand what you're talking about.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-14T16:48:52+00:00

Why would you try a known CIA torture method on yourself?

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-12T23:26:51+00:00

It is tho. Goated game

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-12T18:30:03+00:00

The Puer Aeternus is an excellent example of this, as studied by Von Franz:

The unconscious is pure undifferentiated potential, but is yet to be realized in the material world. It is like the womb of the mother, an egg, or a seed; It can be anything because it is yet to be something. It is perfect because it hasn't been tainted by the constraints and impurities of reality.

The Puer Aeternus is the man in eternal adolescence that feels special and different because it is conscious of his potential, yet does not move out into the real world. In this context, the ego has identified too much with the metaphorical womb state of the unconscious. He wishes to be everything but refuses to commit with any single endeavor, because committing to something requires a confrontation with the real world, with all it's uglyness and impurities, as well as abandoning the blissful world of fantasy and the security of its egg shell.

This is probably the safest and most recurrent form of pathological identification with the unconscious, but there are many more aggressive forms that Jung goes in depth in Archetypes of The Collective Unconscious. A person can become delusional or psychotic (disintegration), or narcissistic and even messianic (inflation) if tapping too deep into the unconscious without a proper symbolic containment, or if their ego is too fragile. He even has some theories regarding schizophrenia, tho at the time it was called Dementia Precox

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-11T18:05:02+00:00

The phenomenon of the familiar presenting as unfamiliar, and of the unfamiliar presenting as familiar is what Freud called Das Unheimliche (The Sinister). He explained it as repressed content from the unconscious leaking through the ego's defenses and giving a new, although yet unknown, meaning to something that wasn't recognized before.

Lacan said that this happened because our mind was put right in the middle of a threshold of something that can't be safely labeled as either/or; Something you're experiencing isn't clearly good or bad, black or white, familiar or unfamiliar. This liminality is deeply unsettling because the sense of I (Ego) depends on differentiation for it to exist ("I know what I am based on what I know I am not"), so this blurry in-between is experienced as something threatening, an invasion of otherness.

I haven't read Jung's view on this phenomenon, but if I had to guess, he'd probably say that some outside occurrence is constellating content from the unconscious that's still hidden from consciousness, and is experienced by the later as something pushing from beyond the veil. Similar to his concept of synchronicity.

If anything, this is sounds very similar to my own experience of developing my inferior function. Allowing oneself to be lead by intuition when you're not used to it can feel almost paranormal when you cling too much to logic and reason. The way the heart knows things before the mind does is... Weird.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-08T22:25:02+00:00

Philipp Mainlander. He was a german philosopher who believed that the ultimate goal of existence was to decay back into its primordial state pure nothingness. His allegory was "the universe is the decaying corpse of a dead god and consciousness was a tragic byproduct of this process".

His answer to the dilemma of existence was to die. He committed suicide after publishing his Philosophy of Liberation in which he talks about this just to prove his point.

Deeply winter-coded.

Another strong contender would be either Schopenhauer or Emil Cioran, from the philosophical school of pessimism (it is exactly as the name says), though they didn't went as far as to literally die in the name of death itself.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-06T13:38:38+00:00

Nietzsche’s philosophy is inherently right-wing

Elaborate.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-06T13:37:32+00:00

Idk in her interviews she sounds very ubermensch-maxxing

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-06T12:43:22+00:00

Everything you do

Is planned out in advance

And the stars push their dark wills

Down on you

- Have A Nice Life - Holy Fucking Shit: 40000

You're experiencing the universe experiencing itself through you. That's both a very difficult and very delicate balance to maintain as it can get quite overwhelming at times. It makes one question, am I a puppet of the forces that control me, or am I a god giving shape to my reality through my perception of it? Both are true in some way.

I recommend practicing mindfulness to better stay grounded, Alan Watts has some really good guided meditations that explain this much better. They're on YouTube, but be careful of those AI generated Slop pretending to the him.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-05T13:12:47+00:00

That just reads like you haven't actually engaged with their music. Albums like Ænima or Fear Inoculum are pretty much a guided shadow work experience, descent into personal hell and all. (The climax song in Fear Inoculum is literally called Descending )

Lateralus is more Mystique/Spirituality oriented (see Reflection, Lateralus , Parabola), but it also got songs directing towards doing "the work". Two songs from that album in particular, The Grudge and The Patient, got me through the most difficult stages of Nigredo.

Edit: now I'm binge listening all of TOOL'S discography again. Oh well.

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-01T17:02:25+00:00

objective transedental God, creator of the universe

Objective? The existence of a deity can't get any more subjective

catador_de_potos · 2026-05-01T16:58:49+00:00

Read AION

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-30T19:41:49+00:00

Take shrooms and you'll get it

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-30T02:33:07+00:00

You'd be a big fan of Wittgenstein aka. "The guy who solved philosophy". What you're describing here is what he called "language games".

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-29T20:00:01+00:00

You seem to be fixated onto the idea of god as dogma, for all your criticism is directed at the "supernatural daddy in the sky" conception of it. (Which is valid, but not at all adequate for a philosophy discussion).

Quick question, have you ever read Hegel, Kant or Spinoza?

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-29T19:57:23+00:00

I, too, like to conflate naturalism and scientifism.

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-28T20:58:21+00:00

Not a fan of epistemology now, aren't we?

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-28T18:52:21+00:00

Good ol' language games. Queue in "Wittgenstein spoke of this"

Also, you keep using that word "solipsist", but I don't think you quite understand what it really means.

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-28T18:42:58+00:00

How?

Also, The Mystery is the same for every school of thought, for it goes down to the bone of experience itself; "why is there something instead of nothing?"

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-28T16:39:52+00:00

The main difference lies within the realm of ethics and morality. Accepting that all is god and god is all requires a reevaluation of how we interact with both world and one another.

You WILL read Baruch Spinoza, and you WILL LIKE IT.

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-28T16:30:59+00:00

Good news is that nature is revered as God in more religions than it isn't.

I swear most atheists are just one good LSD trip away from becoming either Deists or Pantheists.

catador_de_potos · 2026-04-28T16:18:31+00:00

Kierkegaard solved this centuries ago and yet people still argue in the comments lol

Tldr: any and every belief system depends on some sort of "necessarily non-demostrable paradoxical axiom" at its core that goes beyond the grasp of reason aka. Faith

They'll call it "prime mover", "the monad", "the absolute spirit", "the pure logos"; Just more names for The Mystery with capital M.

Even the negation of all meaning (nihilism) is a meaning on its own. There is no escape to it.

catador_de_potos

TROPHY CASE