Modern Claims of Ego Death
Some famous examples of people claiming to have had the experience are Ramana Maharshi and U. G. Krishnamurti. More recently Eckhart Tolle has claimed that he underwent the experience after having suffered from long periods of suicidal depression. He says he woke up in the middle of that night and thought,
| “ | I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. | ” |
Tolle recalls going out for a walk in London the next morning, and finding that “everything was miraculous, deeply peaceful. Even the traffic."
Many users of psychedelics like psilocybin, DMT, LSD or Ketamine report experiences of ego death along with other mystical experiences common with psychedelic substances. This becomes apparent on study of psychedelic reports where themes relating to dying and mortality, transcendence, and expansion of consciousness are commonly observed.
Read more about this topic: Ego Death
Famous quotes containing the words modern, claims, ego and/or death:
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“For that is love’s nature that it lays claim to exclusive right and that all other claims are nil.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.”
—Norman O. Brown (b. 1913)
“Yea, worse than death: death parts both woe and joy:
From joy I part, still living in annoy.”
—Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)