In a recent study on ego dissolution, researchers at Maastricht University examined people before and after drinking ayahuasca in a ceremonial setting. In other words, people who scored higher on ego dissolution tended to be more positive and have a better outlook on their life after the experience. But why exactly is the encounter with the infinite possibly therapeutic and so intense?
Well, to understand this, first we need to consider the architecture of our finite existence. And, taking this a step further, what if even your most basic thoughts and feelings, the things that define you as a person, were never your own to begin with? Try to consider everything you have ever been told and shown about the world, about who you are, how things work, and what actions and reactions are adequate. Throughout your development, all of these external voices eventually came together, creating a complex personality with ideas, desires, ambitions, fears, attitude patterns, beliefs about the world, levels of education, aptitudes, and so on.
This data also gets stored somewhere. To make matters even more complicated, most of our memories are not actually the original informationbut a version altered by the context you remembered them in, with gaps filled in with best subconscious guesses. This version also morphs depending on what else you have associated with it and degrades with time with blanks filled in based on your desires and fears. We are loaded with falsified memories that help determine everything we do, and they are what we identify with as our selves.
This is what we, synonymously, refer to as the ego. Our ego is what we know and who we believe ourselves to be. So, who, or what, then, are we really? Regrettable patterns of behavior that had plagued me for years resolved into view with astounding, terrifying clarity. What I had internalized as faults to be hated were revealed simply to be games, which I could choose to play or not. I realized I could turn away from a mirror whenever bad thoughts arrive. I gained a healthy aversion to my smartphone.
The inescapable immersion of the psychedelic experience also removed my urge to record it in writing: every moment I spent wondering how to capture it was time lost inhabiting it.
The trip was the thing, not any souvenirs I might take back with me. The trip had changed me. Ego death is as much a learning experience as it is a psychedelic one, and I came away from it with new, unforeseen ways of coping. We go to a great deal of trouble to live without fear. But to experience ego death is to confront your worst fears in a brief period of time. I imagine skydiving has a similar effect, or bungee jumping — anything so conducive to extreme anxiety that you feel bolder for having survived it.
From sexual climax follows a transcendent lightness, and with it a release from a condition of mind in which thinking about yourself precludes existence. Escaping from that condition of mind in order to look at yourself as if from the perspective of another person can be a scary prospect — one which is made scarier still if it comes not during repose after sex but while peaking on psychedelics.
In order to ascend and transcend through LSD, you must trust that an unpredictable series of neurochemical reactions will benefit you. She is in a treatment room at the Imperial College Clinical Research Facility in London, taking part in a scientific study into the effects of illegal hallucinogen DMT. She's in a chair, eye mask on, cannula poking out of her forearm. The lights are dimmed and a specially commissioned ambient soundtrack plays in the background.
Chris Timmermann, a psychologist and neuroscientist who researches psychedelic drugs, stands nearby. The hallucinations hit her like a hurricane. A sense of dread envelops her. As expected, Iona didn't suddenly dematerialise into a swirling space-time void.
This intense journey took place entirely within her own mind — induced by an illegal drug that sits on the periphery of recreational psychedelics. DMT is perhaps best known as the hallucinogenic compound in ayahuasca. This bitter, brown liquid is created by combining two plants — the ayahuasca vine and a shrub called chacruna — and has been used ritually and medicinally by Amazonian tribes for centuries.
The mysterious allure of the ayahuasca ritual seems to hold a particular appeal for young Westerners, who have helped spawn a cottage industry of ayahuasca tourism in South America. Those who seek it out may believe it can heal , provide a glimpse of death, or perhaps even the afterlife.
But it is not a drug without risks. Ayahuasca could trigger issues in those who are predisposed to mental health problems and four years ago, a year-old British backpacker died following an ayahuasca ceremony.
Human trials involving illegal drugs demand a strict ethical and regulatory framework and the express permission of the Home Office.
The fear of dying is all about the sense of self — in this case, what happens to it after the body stops functioning. The ego death Turner experienced while taking shrooms helped her weeks after her trip to make sense of, and accept, the loss of a friend she who she believes died of suicide.
She extended the understanding of her body as a shell that housed her spirit to her friend. In general, people who experience it feel reset and have a greater sense of agency. Again, though, it's important to stress that this is based on Johnson's clinical observations. Scientists have yet to conduct controlled studies that show direct evidence of the mental health benefits of ego death from psychedelic use.
While the science on ego death is still relatively nascent, Johnson says some experts have traced it to a collection of brain regions known as the default mode network.
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