Ego Death VII: The Temporary Cessation of Self

This is the seventh episode of a series on ego death. Read episodes one, two, three, four, five and six.

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An understanding of “ego”. Check. A decision about when the ego comes into being. Check. Choosing what death personally represents. Check. Now, all that remains is to take a look at “ego death” itself. Let’s begin.

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Like confused adolescents and adults the world over, my first choice of comprehension aid is the internet. Specifically, Wikipedia followed by a barrage of googled terms and questions. 

The head of Wikipedia’s entry for “ego death” cites two interpretations of the idea. The first frames ego death as something that occurs as part of a person’s development, as a transition from one state of mind to another that occurs multiple times throughout a life. The second frames ego death as a momentary transcendence of self. It hints at ego death as an experience of oneness, that is, a foregoing of individual identity in favour of a connectedness with with the universe.

We could label these two branches as a process-orientated and a presence-orientated definition of ego death respectively. The former is concerned with the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. The latter is concerned with an isolated moment, with a single point in time rather than a journey through it. The presence-orientated version of ego death is the one we’ll take on first.

 One way to begin thinking about it is the idea of immersion-vs-detachment. I’ve used this imagery before to help myself understand the creative process. I’ve said that, for me, the creative process is a continuous cycle between immersion in experience and a detachment from it.

It’s a frame that also works for the presence-orientated version of ego death. Ego death occurs either when the self is forgotten—you become detached from your sense of self—or when you immerse yourself so entirely that you lose your sense of self.

The first example of this that comes to mind concerns in-groups and out-groups. Taken to an extreme, dependency on an in-group can result in the disintegration of individual identity. You shape-shift and assume the form of that which is assigned to or demanded of you by the group. This is the opposite of what Paul Graham calls keeping your identity small. It’s allowing one part of your identity to enlarge and swell to such a degree that it extinguishes all others. Think of how a great tree sucks up all the nutrients from the soil surrounding it, making it very hard for others trees and plants to flourish in its shadow, and in some cases, killing that which is in its vicinity. That’s akin to what can happen when one identity overpowers all others.

That’s the insidious side to the momentary loss of self. Another side is the one described above, the loss of self that manifests itself as a connection with the wider universe. I’ve only come across this explicitly via the work of Alan Watts. Consider this passage from Still the Mind, especially the last sentence:

That idea, “becoming it”, whatever “it” is, is at the very heart of this kind of ego death. If you imagine ego death as the temporary cessation of self, then you can also imagine it as the temporary becoming of something else. Your ego, for a moment or for many minutes, can die and in its space you can become the sounds you’re hearing, the sky you’re seeing, the joy you’re feeling, the world you’re a part of. This is where mindfulness and its derivatives border on the mystical. From here, the tumble over the precipice takes you to places where  you consider yourself as a drop in the ocean, a stone on a mountainside, a blade of grass in a great field, or as a particle in an unimaginably vast organism.

All of those examples provoke a contrast; smallness next to bigness. Perhaps that’s how this momentary ego death is manufactured, via an intense focus on our size relative to a chosen entity of much greater size?

Of course, there are other doorways to ego death, besides mindfulness and meditation. External aids like psychedelics can (apparently) help to elucidate that state. By going on a trip you can end up seeing the world from a perspective other than your own. I don’t claim to understand to understand exactly how this works, or claim to be able to adequately reproduce that feeling using mere words. Language follows thought, it is not a precursor to it, so it’s very hard to portray visceral experiences and strong feelings.

As well as identifying with an in-group, mindfulness, meditation and psychedelics, there’s another way to achieve momentary ego death: approaching the boundary between life and death.

Do you remember that extreme planking craze? The most memorable instance of it is this. 

​Do you think that the guy, with one hand behind his back, looking down at a forty-plus storey fall, had a sense of self? Do you think that, in that moment, his ego was dead? I do. You can’t have a sense of self when you’re face to face with your own mortality. And I bet that when he shuffled back onto the building, stood up and thought, “I didn’t die!”, thoughts about himself came flooding back.

Go and watch any video in which people do crazy shit. The same process applies. In that moment of madness, their ego is flat-lining.

Finally, we can consider the idea of masks in relation to ego death. My contact with the idea of masks is twofold. First, from experience in secondary school. I was part of a drama production, and one of my roles was a fox—it was an interpretation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which made use of various animals. On one of the rehearsal weekends, I was instructed by my teacher to go outside and “be a fox”. So there I was, a fourteen year old kid, outside an arts centre on a Saturday afternoon, figuring out how to slink around like an orange predator. (Dissonance was provoked by the fact that the fox is nocturnal, so if I had really wanted to play my role and “be a fox”, I’d of found a nice spot and slept for a few hours.)

My second contact with the idea of masks came from reading Keith Johnstone’s Impro. The final chapter is entitled “Masks and Trance” and it remains one of the most disturbing—and illuminating—things I’ve ever read about the human psyche. I’ll refrain from exhaustively reconstructing Johnstone’s ideas and instead post this passage, which I think reveals the central point of the chapter, and of Johnstone’s approach to improvisation. 

“Letting go” of what? The ego. “Possessed” by what? Something other than your self. 

Now, I know I said “Finally” a few paragraphs ago. That’s not happening now. See, the above passage from Johnstone’s book brings up two more instances of ego death which I hadn’t considered. 

The first is the medium of dance. If you watch any master of this expressive art, it’s hard not to get the sense that the dancer has surrendered themselves to the rhythm. They’ve stopped being themselves and are allowing their body to become whatever shape or movement the music is demanding of them. I could direct you to any number of examples, but the point is, masters of dance move according to the will of an external force. If the music is smooth and gentle, their movements take on a grace and fluidity that alters via gentle bends, instead of fast jolts. If the music is aggressive and urgent, louder, with more abrupt beats, so too is their movement. The dancer then moves with a pow-pow-pow in time to the beat, as opposed to a da, da-da-da, da-da, daaaaaaaa.

The second instance of ego death brought to mind by the Johnstone passage is the idea of possession. Specifically, the possession necessary to achieve a superior creative state. It’s like waiting for the visitation of a daemon, or for inspiration to strike. It’s visualising inspiration as an entity which shows up and takes over.

This concept of daemon-driven creativity aligns in some ways with the concept of presence-orientated ego death. It is surrendering yourself to a feeling, a sense, an insight, an emotion, and letting it—not you—determine where you go and where you end up. 

As I type this, I begin to wonder: how much does this idea of ego death—the temporary cessation of self—correlate with a flow state? Flow, a concept coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, has six elements:

All of those elements seem to align with the idea of ego death. That’s because they all point to the person in a “flow state” having an enhanced awareness of an activity and a heightened awareness of the domain in which they’re acting. And this increased awareness comes only at the expense of the ego. For one cannot achieve flow without foregoing a sense of self, and one can only achieve ego death—that is, transcend the self—by becoming something else.