“Having only ever taken psilocybin mushrooms once, I set about attempting to understand ego death by consulting Hamilton Morris, psychedelics expert and resident pharmacopoeia correspondent for Vice. He described ego death as “a very complex and strange thing that involves, at least, loss of consciousness, like washing away into a black ocean of unconsciousness, then coming back and not really knowing where you were or what happened. You could just as easily call it being reborn, but you don’t need to call it anything. There is no word to describe it — who knows what it is? It’s a pharmacological fact and no language will ever describe what it is accurately. It’s a neurochemical change.””
“In the moments leading up to the dissociative experience, a user approaching ego death is hit with waves of regret and anxiety. “It’s not like pleasantly drifting into a Zen ego-death realm,” said Morris. “It’s a very painful feeling. You lose control, go into this place where you’ve lost control. Then you come back, and you come out of it feeling better on some level.””
“As a name for such a deeply transformative psychological experience, “ego death” is contentious. “The ego is just a construct,” Morris continued. “It’s not real in the same way the occipital lobe is real.” Yet he went on to say that whatever it is that dies leaves empirical traces of its passing, and they can be observed and measured.”