An interesting thread!
This is the first chance I've had to read through it properly. There are a lot of good responses here already but I can't resist adding a few things. These threads are like crack to me - describing the indescribable, experiencing the unknowable, contradicting yourself from one sentence to the next.... mindfuck without the drugs!
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PrimalSoup wrote: But yeah, generally, at 10 g PE you'll black out and not remember the ego death if it happens. So not much value there in just going too large, why I shoot for just this side of the black abyss in dosing.
...it's an absence of an observer all together, the original state of cosmic consciousness or original mind...
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Deemstar wrote: 5-7 G’s should suffice, there is such thing as a shroom blackouts after the 10g mark.
I’ve experienced other realms on big doses, some of them mystical, to freakishly hellish shit.
Two good points made in these comments -
1) You can overshoot the dose required for 'ego death' and either black out completely or get the feeling that you somehow 'missed' your own trip in a maze of endless mindfuck, or end up having a very disorienting, dissociative experience. These can be powerful experiences but they miss the core of what you are looking for. For example I had one trip where I took a bit too much - the door of my room started shimmering like a portal, I remember thinking "oh fuck" and then spending most of the trip zoning in and out of consciousness with the general impression that I was being eaten by psychedelic creatures inside my dreams.
2) The process of ego dissolution is not an end in itself. The value of reaching this state during a trip is that it enables you to experience this "cosmic consciousness" that Primal mentions, a state of mind that rises up when your day-to-day consciousness fades out. It's something transcendent and blissful that feels like a universal ocean of consciousness has opened up to you.
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I've seen a guy on YouTube FREAKING OUT and referring to himself in the third person 'is he going to die?!' and I would assume in him losing his ego and therefore his identity he would refer to himself in the third person.
It sounds like you are fairly relaxed at high doses so it might not play out this way for you in terms of getting 'the fear' as the trip builds towards ego death, but I'll try to describe why someone might freak out:
The come-up of an 'ego death' trip can feel as though you are being gradually drawn towards an irresistible, sinister force that is taking over your mind as the trip builds. It can be like being slowly drawn into a black hole at the center of the trip. Reality is breaking down, the idea of being a person with a life seems like a dim memory, and your conscious experience itself is being crushed as the trip gives you less and less room to exist in. This can certainly feel as though you are going to die, and you may have become pretty unhinged and dissociated by this point so referring to yourself in the third person wouldn't be too much of a surprise.
Someone already described something similar to this:
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CountHTML wrote: As you dose higher, you encroach closer and closer to the edge of inevitability. If you have dosed enough to reach this, you either die or have a bad trip. Sometimes, if you dose high enough, the bad trip is merely a stop on the way to annihilation.
When I started tripping and increasing the dose from trip to trip, it was like getting closer and closer to the edge of something and wanting to look down. And at some point you go over the edge...
  
Ego death can feel like an inevitability at a certain dose, you can feel yourself getting drawn in, that you will have to "die" to get through the trip. You can try to resist it, in which case you will either go down fighting (because the trip is too strong to resist), or you will spend the whole trip fighting against your own mind. A lot of 'bad trip' reports basically sound like the person spent the whole trip resisting this kind of onslaught - the ironic thing is that what they are resisting is actually a blissful release from the intensity!
The actual peak experience of "ego death" itself is a kind of oblivion into which an overwhelming feeling of liberation and bliss pours. At this point you have ditched any sense of personal entity or identity and you are not personally 'there' to worry about anything or verbalize your thoughts. It's like reaching a peaceful sanctuary at the center of your mind just at the moment when you thought you were gone for good.
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Have you guys experienced ego death for extended periods then? What's it like?
In my own trips, just before this point would be the moment of surrender - either the trip is so harsh that you reach a point where death would feel preferable and you think "fuck it, this can't get any worse", or maybe you are able to relax and let the trip take over your mind as the intensity becomes overwhelming.
There's a kind of oblivion almost like 'falling asleep' into the trip, where your internal train of thought ceases and you let go. It's a bit like falling asleep while awake - odd but not amazing in and of itself. The interesting thing is what now rises up to fill the gap vacated by the cessation of the internal chatter of your mind:
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MadValley wrote: You are asking for a description of something that can't be described in words. "Oneness" comes closest for me but that doesn't describe the scope or the scale. Primal's cosmic consciousness or original mind would also work as place holders.
That would be the kind of thing I am talking about. A vast, boundless, oceanic, universe-spanning flood of consciousness, as though the universe is a vast conscious entity that you have now merged with. A transcendent feeling of peace, bliss, liberation, as though you have crossed over into another realm of consciousness in which everything is one. It sounds a bit far-fetched. It is far-fetched. But it can and does happen...
For me I don't think this 'pure' state of ego death typically ever lasted very long (a few minutes max) before I 'woke up' or 'came back' and started thinking again, but the feeling of bliss and the awareness of this realm of consciousness doesn't immediately disappear. In my own trips it gave a feeling of immense revelation, that I had experienced something truly unbelievable and unexpected.
At this point of the trip, because the dose is large, you can be experiencing a manic, delusional phase where you can't stop trying to interpret what has happened. You've died, you've become God, there are aliens controlling the matrix..... the trip can quickly shift towards grandiose delusions which are quite the opposite of the core experience of an ineffable, egoless, boundless consciousness.
Even so, it's as if the boundaries of what you thought constituted a trip, the limits of consciousness, have shifted somewhat. Revelations, transcendent visions of dimensions beyond death... it can be quite hard to make sense of it all when you finally come down.
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bodhisatta wrote: No one's become some spiritually enlightened individual completely devoid of ego. Not even close ever. What do people who typically are thought of as egoless and enlightened have in common? Not using drugs at all and an extreme amount of introspection and hard work absolutely without mind altering substance.
There was quite a lot of argument about enlightenment vs psychedelics in this thread. My own view is that it would be silly to expect a permanent state of enlightenment to result from a trip, but it doesn't mean the experience is worthless. The 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' seems to be focused on giving a set of meditation exercises that will allow its practitioners to recognize the "inner radiance" that occurs naturally during actual death. This will allow them to achieve an enlightenment at the moment of death which would be a much more difficult proposition to achieve during life, even a life as a Tibetan monk.
To compare this with tripping, the trip might put you in an 'intermediate state' where you also have some awareness of this 'inner radiance', but it would be better to think of it as a kind of humble psychedelic meditation exercise rather than a shortcut to instant enlightenment.
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Well I ate 7 grams penis envy and whilst I was tripping extremely heavily and felt infinity and deep life affirmation, and was laughing so hard my stomach muscles hurt later that day...no ego death!
One of my only issues with psychedelic use is the degree to which they appear to encourage magical thinking in people that are unable to critically analyse the experience rationally.
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Ok so last night I ate 8 grams penis envy and totally tripped my tits off and still no ego death.
Totally beautiful experience and again experienced infinity and total life affirmation and gratitude. Felt so much clarity and it was visually stunning. Moments that lasted forever. Time was infinite, space was infinite, I was infinite. The trip just never seemed to end. It was wonderful. The colours were so neon and incredible and flowed so naturally and comfortably.
My only issue was that at this dose the nausea was quite unbearable right the way through the trip. Usually it dissipates once I hit the peak. But the nausea lasted right into the come down.
I want to take the dose up to 9 and 10 grams but how am I to do that when the nausea was so unbearable?
I would try it as a tea but doesn't that shave an hour or two off the trip? I don't want that. If anything I'd like it to last longer (I have the MAOI moclobemide which I will use to increase intensity and length but I can't use it until I'm off this damn tramadol)
So in the meantime...any tips?
It's hard to know what to suggest considering the doses you are taking are already large, you talk about experiences of 'infinity', and you are not 'resisting' the process of ego death by the sounds of it.
Your descriptions imply there is already a fair bit of ego dissolution going on but presumably you feel there is a missing 'wow' factor of the trip entering this fabled void of ego death and taking you to some ineffable realm of reality that makes you think later 'my God, that was really it!"
You talk about feeling 'comfortable' in the tripping headspace, maybe too comfortable. You want to be taken out of your comfort zone....
I think the whole process of ego death often starts with the growing feeling that you are not comfortable. I can remember when this happened to me for the first time - it was a growing feeling that there was a presence in the trip with me, almost like a fear of God, that I'd gone too far and was going to pay for it.
It's like the trip itself becomes an external entity rather than something that is happening in your head. Rather than expanding into infinity, you are slowly being crushed by this ominous presence, up until the moment when you surrender to it, and at that point you are 'inside' it - the alien presence overwhelming you turns out to be the very same oceanic, universal consciousness that you were seeking in the first place.
Did you ever get the sense of this kind of force inside your trip? That there is something there to surrender to?
Also you mention magical thinking. At the kind of doses required for ego death you would expect some kind of magical / delusional thought processes to be occuring - sudden realizations and so on. I think this is part of what gives heavy trips their power - they show you all kinds of things (in terms of closed-eye-visuals and visionary thoughts) and the delusional element of the trip attaches great significance to your thoughts and visions and puts you in the position of a hero, single-handedly battling your way through the apocalypse and out the other side. Do you get trips like this?
I think an 'ego death' trip is one which has to be powerful enough to take you up to the brink of oblivion, but not so powerful that it just smashes you straight into infinity. There might be a void in the center of the trip but from that point on it's an experience of your consciousness coalescing into a new form and showing you amazing things. It's a sudden clarity, like waking up for the first time and discovering you have spent your whole life asleep.
As well as the suggestion of tea, another possibility is to try splitting the dose. For example on an 8g trip if you ate (or drank) 4g initially, followed by another 4 after 60 or 90 minutes, you will reduce the volume of shrooms digesting in your stomach at one time. The trip will start off as something moderate and easy to handle, then once the re-dose kicks in it will quickly get more powerful. Just as an experiment you might find it alters the trajectory of the trip.
I suppose this whole thread hinges around the question "what's the difference between 'tripping balls' on a high dose, and an ego-death trip?".
Probably the simplest answer is that if you get an experience where it really feels like you died within the trip, and within your oblivion you entered some boundless realm of consciousness that leaves you spellbound afterwards, wondering if you experienced the fundamental reality or some kind of afterlife... that would be ego death. Something profound and revelatory which is so meaningful to you that it doesn't really matter what anyone else wants to call it.
On the other hand, some of my most epic trips have skirted around 'ego death' itself, so I don't think it's an essential component of an amazing trip, and I don't particularly aim for it these days because it can feel like a lot of hard work unraveling the secrets of the universe on the comedown, only to remember you did it all before and there was really no need to do it again.
I think experiencing some kind of 'ego death' does help to provide a sense of serenity when tripping because it gives you the feeling that no matter what the trip strips away as it intensifies, there is some underlying core of consciousness that you can fall into, like an ocean of bliss. I think you can recognize this background level of consciousness to some extent during other moments of (less total) ego dissolution, for example when you let yourself relax and sink into the trip.
If you have epic trips that feel satisfying then I don't really suppose it matters if they qualify as ego death or not, but if someone says "All I get is pretty visuals and a lot of mindfuck, I am missing something?" then the answer would be yes.
To finish this rambling post - you will never get complete agreement in a thread like this, or a single post that makes sense of everything. An attempt to clearly describe something like ego death which is ultimately ineffable is doomed to failure; but taken together the responses are generally pointing in the same direction and hopefully give some collective sense of what we are trying to express.
Good luck with your continuing explorations!
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I wrote that, but I meant something else
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