Ego Death - Definition

Definition

See also: Ahamkara, Kensho, and Sotāpanna

An ego death is said to be characterized as the perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment, a sense of the loss of "control", the loss of the accustomed feeling of existing as a "personal agent", and loose "cognitive-association binding". This "perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment" is said to be experienced through a sensation that one is the whole universe (and therefore there is no need to differentiate the "I" from the "universe") or by simply acknowledging the "I" does not exist.

According to Stanislav Grof,

Ego death means an irreversible end to one's philosophical identification with what Alan Watts called skin-encapsulated ego.

Read more about this topic:  Ego Death

Famous quotes containing the word definition:

    One definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.”
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
    Walter Pater (1839–1894)

    Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
    principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
    definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)