Ego Death Is Real, But It’s Not What You Think

Hello My Love!

For the next few posts, I'm going to be diving into what I believe to be the TRUE Ego Death.

I'm going to be exploring this often very 'spiritualized' and vague concept of 'dying to the self' and putting it in a way that I hope makes the whole concept far more practical and understandable.

It won't make an 'ego death' any easier. It won't necessarily help you have one in a way that's not painful.

Rather, I hope to provide some context for anyone who's going THROUGH and ego death - as I know the experience can be quite confusing. I hope this exploration helps you understand what may have been happening in your body and emotions if you've been going through an ego death in your life, and I hope this clarifies the actual process so that it doesn't have to feel so esoteric and heady.

If you like, you can watch a video I made on this subject here

Let's dive into the first section and see how we go!

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Ego Death Is Real, Just Not What You Think:

Ego death is 100% a real thing. However, it’s likely not at all what you’ve been taught to believe it is.

Ego death is not a death to ALL identification.

It’s not a death of the ‘self’ in the sense that you become ‘no one’ or ‘nothing’ or ‘one with all that is’ forever and ever amen.

Hopefully we are at the point now where we recognize that to strive for such a thing is totally nonsensical in the practical world we live in. We have bodies we need to care for. Personalities that, no matter how hard we may try, will always come out. Societal rules that have to be abided by that require that we see ourselves as ‘separate’ from others. We have will and desire and these things are vital for staying on this earth plane existence. To fully lose track of a self, or to be in a state of ‘oneness’ at all times would mean we would need 100% tending to by someone else. There is no way to exist here without experiencing and playing in the separation. It is what it is.

YES we can have oneness EXPERIENCES.

We can even have an abiding awareness of how we as an individual fit within the whole - existing with a ‘both and’ mentality where we can unite the concepts of individuality and oneness to create something quite balanced and harmonious, as well as practical for this lived experience.

Yes we can lose touch with parts of ourselves we thought were 100% INTEGRAL, and yes we can expand our sense of self out so that it feels like it’s much more broadly encompassing - and all of these experiences are great additions to a life of being a self. They give us perspective. Empathy. The capacity to see that we are at once an individual AND a part of a collective - and it behooves us to behave as though BOTH realities exist at once - because they do. This lets us live a more harmonious life.

But the reality of TRUE ego death is that it’s an experience (oftentimes multiple experiences) where we come to realize that we were identifying as a FALSE SELF.

Multiple false selves that we’ve been trained to believe we MUST become/be/are - in order to fit into SOCIETY. Culture.

Our families. I

n order to be loved and therefore safe. 

What we’re actually losing in an ego death, is not identification with *a self*, but rather identification with the constructed self that was programmed into our nervous systems.

It All Starts In Childhood:

You see, when we're children, we're sponges.

We aren’t blank slates - we all have bodies, personalities, a base ‘self’ that is unique to us. A blueprint if you will - not something totally set in stone, but a general set of characteristics, aptitudes, interests and base genetics that predispose us to certain ways of being. There are multiple ways to grow and expand upon what we’re born with - and all of us throughout our lives will be continually working with these base parts. We will be growing parts, some parts will experience traumas and setbacks, we will be in a state of expansion in some areas and regression in others - all of this combines to create the ‘us’ we are at any given moment, as well as the potential that’s available to us. Each part we grow, becomes capable of more growth. Every time we expand upon a base part of the self, the options for what we can grow into next multiply.

So again, we aren’t fated to be anything super specific.

At the same time, we can’t create parts of self that don’t exist inherently. We can’t become something we have no foundation for. We aren’t infinite in our capacity to ‘become’ - we all have limits based on our core programming. What each part of self can become is in a sense almost limitless given that each growth step generates the potential for exponential new growth. But we can’t become something we aren’t, and we can’t 'unbecome' something we are.

Along with this, every experience we go through is going to have an impact on this base self. We are going to be affected by those around us, our culture, the levels of security we had or didn’t have, what was encouraged and what was discouraged in us. What we were given in the way of support and what came to deny us the opportunity to grow. This is the core of the ‘self’ we talk about when we are talking about a self.  

With this self in our childhoods, we are also FULLY dependent upon our caregivers for survival. We can't clothe, feed, teach, nourish, nurture, comfort or otherwise care for ourselves, and thus we rely on those around us to understand us so that they will meet our plethora of needs.

Before we have language, before we have conscious thought, before we have the capacity to draw connections with our minds and make stories and meaning out of what we are experiencing, we have our nervous systems.

We have the most basic part of our neuro-anatomy programming cause and effect reactions into our bodies and minds. We’re learning not through logic but through experience the kinds of behaviors that get us love and approval, and thus provision and attention, and the kinds of behaviors that get us rejected or abandoned. 

**We are learning that love and affection = provision. That rejection = insecurity and not getting our needs met. THIS is the BASE program we are ALL given in our most formative years - because this is the REALITY of our experience in this time.**

We were dependent upon others to be the middleman between us and our needs/wants/desires being met.

We could not do or provide for ourselves, we couldn’t understand our own needs and thus we needed those around us to love us, take the time to understand us and then give us what we needed to grow. Without this, it was being programmed into our system that we would then be STUCK in PAIN. We could not fix our own pain nor could we provide our own pleasure - this was our core program. Remember, when we were children and hungry, thirsty, afraid, alone, confused, desiring something - we couldn’t figure out why we were in pain and resolve that pain for ourselves. All we knew was that we were in pain. To us at the time, crying out or letting our caregivers know was the ONLY route to relief - as their understanding us and then meeting our needs/resolving our pain for us was all that was available.

We learned that pain went away/pleasure was achieved via an external source understanding us, loving us, and providing for us.

Love was the middle man, others were the middle man, between us having a need/desire and us getting that need/desire met.

At the same time, we were learning which CHARACTERISTICS of self/which of our behaviors garnered this love and approval that would lead to being understood and provided for, and which characteristics of self/behaviors caused our caregivers to withdraw/punish/reject us. There was an extra layer being added in where we were learning how to BE in order to be LOVED and therefore SAFE. We were learning which ways of being/parts of self got us rejected/abandoned - and to us at the time what we were really learning was which parts of self were DANGEROUS to our SURVIVAL.

With this, we were learning on a base level which parts of self, which expressions, which ways of being are existential threats to us.

We’re learning in our BODIES that to be certain ways and to do certain things either get us the safety we need to survive, or gets us ‘cast out’ in the sense that it causes our caregivers to pull away - and in this we are recording which parts literally feel to us like they will kill us (because rejection = needs not being met = death because we were dependent upon our caregivers for all provision). Remember - we weren’t capable of true intellectual learning at this stage of our lives. All of this was being programmed into our bodies/nervous systems.

We weren’t consciously thinking about any of this.

Rather we were learning on a visceral level that this is what reality was.

These are base programs that precede logic - which is why our adult logic doesn’t work to resolve these patterns and belief systems. They are pre-logic and reason.

This Is Where Our Pain/Pleasure/Reality Determining Wires Get Crossed:

We have to remember here that this is where our pain and pleasure wires would have gotten crossed.

You see in REAL reality, that which feels GOOD feels good because it supports our growth and expansion in some way.

We all have a base blueprint that is ‘us’ - like all other aspects of nature. A set of characteristics and ways of being that make up who we are, that need to be allowed to express in this life.

When we aren’t supported in our natural growth we have pain, when we are supported in our growth we have pleasure. That is a base program of this reality to help us discern that which is helping us survive and that which is antagonistic to our survival. The opposite is also true - when we are in pain we are experiencing something that is breaking us against reality.

We are feeling the consequences of an action or way of being that is out of sync with reality.

Pain and pleasure are not good and bad - we need pain in order to understand reality, and growth will always involve SOME form of pain.

Growth requires that we step outside of our zone of awareness, so as to take in new information. As we do this, we’re going to be interacting with parts of self that are immature, unknown to us or that need to attempt new ways of being in order to keep growing. We’re going to be needing to interact with a world around us that’s constantly outside of our awareness because again, in order to grow we have to be taking in NEW information. So again, pain isn’t ‘bad’ but just a messenger that it’s time to see something we didn’t see before, and time to evolve our behavior to match reality better than what we’re doing right now.

With this, because of how our pain/pleasure signals are set up, when we are expressing ourselves in ways that match our base blueprint, we feel TRUE pleasure. When our being is being supported in getting it’s needs met we feel TRUE pleasure. When we feel safe and supported, we actually DESIRE to head into the unknown, to challenge ourselves, to do things we’ve never done before and to face pain with a mind for learning from it - because this actually feels GOOD!

When we're being antagonized, shut down, held back from growth, in this we are going to experience pain. It’s not going to feel good to have to pretend we are a way we aren’t. To pretend we aren’t the way we are.

At the same time, when we feel this threat that we’re not going to be safe, not going to get our needs met, we actually shut down in our desire to grow, head out into the unknown and interact with newness, because we don’t feel secure in our foundations. The less secure we feel in getting our needs met the less we want to GROW and the more we want to hunker down and find security. The more we shut down our true selves, our true expression and our true GROWTH path, the more pain we will be in in REAL reality, because this means we aren’t growing. If we aren’t growing, we aren’t living fully, and this causes pain. When we ARE embracing our true nature, when we are going out, making mistakes, trying things, discovering as we go, learning along the way - we are going to feel GOOD overall. Pleasure overall - even within the temporary learning pain of challenge. This is how true pain and pleasure work.

Thus when we felt our caregivers pulling away/abandoning us we felt that our security was going away.

At the time all we had control over was our own behavior.

We could only discern that we were being loved for something we were doing, or rejected for something we were doing. We had no concept of our caregivers as separate people having their own lives, bias’, ideas and so on - that had little to nothing to do with US or with reality at large. We had no concept of what our needs were or how to get them met independently. All we had access to was our caregivers, and the only way we had control over our own experience was to alter our behavior to match expectation so that they would provide for us.

We HAD to fit into our caregivers rules for ‘right and wrong’ in order to be loved by them, and therefore provided for.

Our behavior was our ONE point of agency. Our one way of changing our pain/pleasure. It was an indirect method of agency, but it was our single form.

This is where we learned how to shame, blame, guilt and reject ourselves. To tell stories about how our behavior was the CAUSE of all of our pain. This is where we learned that it was our behavior that needed to be altered any time we were in pain, rather than learning from reality why we were in pain and what needed to shift.

If being our true selves, which would have felt good in REAL reality, got us rejected, this would have created consensus reality pain - the pain of the fact that in the MOMENT being rejected WAS an existential threat so much more than not being our true selves was. In the moment the pleasure of being accepted would have overridden the pleasure of being our true selves, as being accepted would have meant survival. In REAL reality, when we are no longer in this codependent situation with our caregivers, when we are mentally, physically and emotionally capable of understanding ourselves, our own needs, and more importantly understanding how reality works so that we can get those needs met WITHOUT the middleman of our caretakers/someone providing for us.

We didn't have access to real reality ie. we can recognize that the pain in our stomach means we are hungry, we can discern that this means we need food, we can locate food as well as figuring out how to acquire that food, and we can feed ourselves, being our true selves IS the best for survival. Shutting down our true selves, our needs, our desires, our growth path is how we thwart our growth. In the codependent beginnings of our lives, being loved and approved of was the best route for survival. Shutting down our true nature in order to be accepted was overall, better for longevity.

It was, in other words, a totally backwards temporary reality.

It would have felt good to be our true selves, but bad to be rejected.

It would have felt bad to not be our true selves, but good to be accepted. When these two things conflicted, we always had to choose CONSENSUS not real reality.

We had to abandon our TRUE pain and pleasure signals for our CONSENSUS/conditioned pain and pleasure signals being shown to us by our caregivers in order to survive the best.

Last thing to understand again, we only had control over our own behaviors. As we started to develop storytelling and pattern recognition capacity, we would have begun taking the visceral ‘stories’ of ‘this gets me rejected/approved of’ and would have began drawing narratives around WHY certain behaviors were ‘bad’ and wrong, vs. others being ‘good’ based on the RECEPTION of our caregivers.

Most of the time we were developing stories of things being ‘bad’ that actually felt GOOD to us in our TRUE selves, in order to stop ourselves from doing behaviors that got us rejected.

Shame and guilt were tools our little minds used to try to keep us in line.

Because again, we naturally would have wanted to continue doing things that felt GOOD to our true selves even in the face of these things being rejected by our caregivers, and we would have continued to feel bad about doing things that weren’t true to us even though they got us accepted. In order to keep living this way, we had to come up with a whole bunch of stories about how our caregivers were RIGHT and we were WRONG and BAD.

Oftentimes we were supported in creating these stories as our caregivers fed us narratives of being bad, wrong, lazy, broken, rebellious and a whole host of other things in an attempt to augment our behaviors so that we would fit into their conditioned ideas of ‘rightness.’ By the time we’re adults, all of this is so solidified into our beings, we don’t see any other way of being. We have built up all these rules around what is right and wrong, good and bad, based on the temporary reality of our childhood - that for the most part doesn't match REAL reality and how we are actually going to get our needs met/grow in actual life. We are living as though our conditioning is REAL and have no idea it’s even conditioning most of the time.

To us, it’s just assumed that this is how things are, this is how we have to be, this is what’s expected and doing anything else is going to lead to death.

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Let's take a pause here for this week, and come back next week for part two!

<3