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Discussion (9 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I think this describes what happens in Simondon’s ‘psychic individuation’.[1]
[1]https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...
Near every thought in your head is an abstracted away primal urge. Hunger, fear, security, etc - We justify and express these urges with our actions and thoughts and interactions each day. This mesh of impulses eventually creates patterns of behavior that form our identities.
We go about our lives viewing the world through the lens of this identity, with even our most selfless actions being driven by a reason derived from the rule set of the identity. This rule set is the "ego"
Ego death then is the temporary dissolution of the guiding ruleset of the identity. It is a self, without the self. You exist, but, often for the first time in your life, your mental and emotional rule set does not.
Often, without the blinders of the ego blocking a view of the world, a person experiencing ego death feels the unimportance of their existence - not in a bad way - but in a universal matter of fact state, shared by everything else. This is often the "awe" of ego death
It's called "death" because it can be scary as f to experience the dissolution of what you thought was yourself, it can feel like the end of the world. Sometimes it's described as a "surrender" to a higher power, though the latter is beyond words and religions often prohibit pointing directly (HaShem). Why surrender? Because the ego and the little self will go to great lengths to prevent from losing its dominion, including emotional and psychological tricks from outside your conscious view - so you don't even know what your "self" is doing. This is why people say, "Your worst enemy is yourself." But of course you are your best friend also.
My favorite is how this transcendent experience is called "love". How do I love Thee? Let me count the ways. When you get it, you see how so much of poetry and music is singing about this.