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Offlinebubbleguts365
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Did you find in the past there was a lack of resources for integrating an ego-dissolution experience into your spiritual life?
    #28356642 - 06/12/23 07:39 AM (7 months, 13 days ago)

Background: I've had what I'd describe as a "peak experience" of ego dissolution, or classical mystical experience earlier in life, totally sober in a spiritual context that I believe I have integrated slowly over the last two decades. I followed those experiences in academia after struggling to find helpful information. I studied comparative religion, focusing on the mystical/contemplative cores of the major traditions. I am now venturing into the entheogen space and getting ready for my first "heroic" experience, which I expect to be a visit "back home" so to speak after listening to an interview with one of the founders of "Psychedelics Today" on the Mushroom Show.

I've been lurking reddit subs and following YouTube trends and am seeing a major uptick in interest in nondual philosophies and paths, and I'm guessing it has to do with the resurgence of psychedelics (thank you Michael Pollan,) or from the cosmic spiritual viewpoint, a period of greater awakening that we are entering.

If you've had an ego-dissolution experience with entheogens, I've got three questions if you'd be interested in answering:

#1 Did you have a spiritual framework you expected the experience to fit into prior to your experience? (A.K.A. do you believe you were prepared for it spiritually?)

#2 If you went looking, did struggle to find information that helped you integrate that experience into your preferred or childhood spiritual tradition? (For example, if you were Christian, were you able to find info that helped you integrate that experience into your Christianity?)

#3 Did you have to reframe your spirituality afterward by abandoning your prior tradition, or radically redefining it in a way that past you might not have accepted?

Thanks a bunch if you take the time to answer!


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Offlinesolarshroomster
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Re: Did you find in the past there was a lack of resources for integrating an ego-dissolution experience into your spiritual ... [Re: bubbleguts365]
    #28357458 - 06/12/23 05:31 PM (7 months, 12 days ago)

#1) No, it was considerably outside my spiritual framework and... shockingly... still is. I don't think there is a framework that I can provide in the ordinary state of consciousness where it fits into. But prior to the experience, I was hopeful that there was "something more", but, if I'm being honest, probably a little doubtful.

#2) It was not related at all to any tradition that I was familiar with.

#3) I had to reframe my ideas, and it was opposed to what I accepted before. Particularly, I thought everything could be logically determined by rational thought, but now I know there are things you just need to experience to appreciate.


--------------------
Chopin in Eternal Sonata: "I believe that I am somehow being tested. That I am on this journey to come to some realization. And in order to do so, I think I’m supposed to live my life to the fullest, even if it is in this muddled world of dream and reality."


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OfflineLion
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Re: Did you find in the past there was a lack of resources for integrating an ego-dissolution experience into your spiritual ... [Re: bubbleguts365] * 1
    #28358134 - 06/13/23 09:11 AM (7 months, 11 days ago)

A very interesting question, and well-written post.

I had a perspective-shattering spiritual experience in January 2007, taking what I thought was a small-to-medium dose of LSD that turned out to be an extremely high dose. It was a definite instance of "ego-dissolution."

At the time I had some serious health concerns and was very severely despairing of the trajectory of my life as a young man. It was my second time using LSD - the first had been incredibly interesting and positive - and I was hoping for a Zen-like, pleasant, healing experience. Instead, I experienced a powerful awakening and spiritual emergency.

I've written about it here over the years, but not sure exactly where those posts are. To make it short, I had an acute crisis in which, upon returning to my ordinary small self after having forgotten myself (and forgotten I'd even taken a substance), none of the components of my life seemed reconcilable with the nature of what I'd seen and felt, and I could not imagine ever speaking to another human again. This was followed by a few days of feeling alive in waking a dream, incapable of putting up any pretense of being in an ordinary state of perception. Despair, terror, and joy blended together. For weeks and months after, many of the people closest to me thought I'd become insane, and in a way I had.

The story of "integrating" that experience, for want of a more precise description, was many years long. I was lucky to have some kind of framework, but as many people before me and since have learned, the map is not the territory, and (also I'm sure like many others) I thought what happened to me was totally unique and had never happened to anyone.

Some of the biggest components of the integration process were being able to talk with a close friend (who had introduced me to the Shroomery a few years before); the guidance of some older Shroomery members (particularly in the Philosophy forum); becoming part of a Buddhist community with a real lineage; and exploring what had happened with psychedelics, meditation, reading, and later with therapy and related things. Spiritual readings, and particularly the Buddhist Sangha (even though I never sustained a serious practice) were definitely beneficial. And time itself probably played a major role in being able to carry on and live.

It was not a linear process at all. (Is it even a process? It's certainly not finished.) It was life changing, but compared to what? I have no idea what would be happening in my life if I hadn't had that transcendent, terrifying encounter with myself. It is humbling to even reflect about it. I regard entheogens as something deserving of deep respect and seriousness.


--------------------
“Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all, for whenever I will—
and I will have the will, strengthened
as I’ll be with contemplation and study—
at the crucial moments I’ll recover
my spirit as was before: ascetic.”


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Offlinebubbleguts365
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Re: Did you find in the past there was a lack of resources for integrating an ego-dissolution experience into your spiritual ... [Re: Lion] * 1
    #28361873 - 06/16/23 09:03 AM (7 months, 8 days ago)

Quote:

Lion said:
It was not a linear process at all. (Is it even a process? It's certainly not finished.) It was life changing, but compared to what? I have no idea what would be happening in my life if I hadn't had that transcendent, terrifying encounter with myself. It is humbling to even reflect about it. I regard entheogens as something deserving of deep respect and seriousness.




Thank you for your response. I'm very familiar with that feeling of alienation from the world/people around you and sense that you're the only person that's ever felt like that. The first time I tried to share my peak experience it was in a written assignment in a  course on interpreting the poetry of a famous mystic. The professor (who was clergy, mind you) gave me a C- and said it lacked substance. My account of an encounter with the Absolute lacked substance.

You can imagine the sense of alienation in that instance. I needed it though, it was the first stress fracture in an internal monolith that needed to fall.


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OfflineFishOilTheKid
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Re: Did you find in the past there was a lack of resources for integrating an ego-dissolution experience into your spiritual ... [Re: bubbleguts365]
    #28362122 - 06/16/23 12:55 PM (7 months, 8 days ago)

I was taken to a psych ward and ruled to be GRAVELY DISABLED and given the diagnosis of BiPolar Disorder...:ifyoucanawe:

I found this: http://johnemackinstitute.org/dsmrsproblem.pdf

And this:

Those two bits of info allowed me to completely reframe the experience that I had back in 2006...


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Offlinepsilocybinmansions
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Re: Did you find in the past there was a lack of resources for integrating an ego-dissolution experience into your spiritual ... [Re: FishOilTheKid] * 1
    #28362841 - 06/17/23 01:16 AM (7 months, 8 days ago)

LSD certainly is "somewhere else", extremely beautiful but a little uncomfortable for us Earthlings. You need your mind to feed on something, some kind of high. Ego is like taking bites of happiness and sometimes it doesn't taste good or we pretend it does. Love is very general but you can get high on a spiritual kind of love, a kind of spiritual level. How? Well how does the mind work? Find out how it works and you'll see that most of what you want life to be, it is. How you want it to work, it does. A strange coincidence.


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