my ego death - trip(lsd)

[mike ra]

A trip report was harder to write than i originally thought it would be.. sorry for the length, I still had more to say, but made it as short as i could. I think it's straight to post this trip report in the forum, if not.. feel free to delete it. I know a few wanted to see this, so here is my experience:


LSD - two star shaped microdots.. dosage - allegedly 500 mcg per microdot.

My day began by sharing half of 80 small liberty cap mushrooms with a good friend, we both ingested roughly 1.2 grams of the mushrooms each. The mushroom trip was rather mild, no real visuals; but obviously, i was functioning within a mushroom state of mind. This trip report is specifically about my experience with LSD; mushrooms are mentioned only because they are known to have a cross-tolerance to LSD, thus affecting the strength of the LSD trip.

I ate the mushrooms at about 11:00 a.m. on a wend say morning,.. fast forward about 10 hours later.. Alone in my room, I think to myself, I really would have liked to trip harder today.. And i have this acid.. So alrighty then....:)

In attempt to not dose the whole microdot at once, I proceeded to slice it in half with a knife; this was a bad idea.. a whole leg on my star microdot shot across my room like a rocket, never to be seen again. After a few minutes of looking for my lost leg, I gave up and dosed the fairly large chunk of acid i did have. After about 10 minutes following ingestion, I had a bit of anxiety because of my anticipation.. so I decided to take a shower. In the shower, as the water ran down over my head, I could not help but sense this moment as my ritual baptism, washing away all unnatural imprints upon my ego. After the quick shower, I walked out the bathroom feeling like a completely new person; everything around me looked 'in place', but a perception of missing space between objects distorted my whole surroundings; in a very unexplainable way. Everything surrounding me seemed a little more brighter and a little less real.

After dressing, I phoned a friend and asked him if he wanted to blunt ride around for a short while. Within minutes of my phone call, he arrived, and we where off . Each hit of the blunt lifted me a bit higher into unreality, i enjoyed the feeling a lot. After the short ride, I stopped by his house to let the LSD high kick in a little more before i went home; shortly after grabbing a seat, I thought to myself, I am clearly in another world at the moment. I had always thought of the psychedelic experience as a way to experience the raising of kundalini energy, thus opening the third eye, so these thoughts naturally played a role in directing my trip. To my amazement, as i pondered over ideas of opening my chakras, I imagined a vast number of crystal/light elements being emitted from my pineal gland, thus opening my third eye; no question about it, i was having a great trip.. Despite my occurrence of imaginative events, I felt as if another level of psychedelic bliss was obtainable by dropping another hit of acid, a voice in my head told me if i wanted to experience ego death, drop the other hit, so that was the plan..

Back home again, I waisted no time dropping more of the same microdot acid. After dropping, I then sat in my bed, lights out, in complete silence. Racing through my mind, all i could think about was, "will i finally experienced ego death?"

While pondering over the question of ego death, I could sense a faint charge of energy pulsating throughout the whole room; this energy proceeded throughout the whole trip. This pulsating energy seemed as if it where the moonlight glimmering against the vastness of an open sea, but that sea was my own mental and physical field of thought/vision. After i became impatient with laying in a bed, i got up, and just sat in a chair as i was coming up on the peak. It seemed as if i could see the code to the matrix while in that chair. I closed my eyes and noticed nothing but a vast network of .. what i can only describe as pods, each one connected to the other via a system of white electrical currents existing along a energy grid..

In my LSD state of mind, while peaking on the trip, the experience gifted me a no holds barred view on all parts of my ego which I felt needed eliminating; specifically self deception, and conscious ignorance. The LSD allowed me to analyze all the bullshit about myself which found it's way embedded into my deep subconscious; there was no more hiding.

During and proceeding the peak, I had the ability to view friends, situations, and my world view in a perspective to which i can only describe as hallucination of orbits. As I pondered over various personal issues, each problem showed itself to attract and revolve around each other like planets revolving around suns.. ultimately the sun represented my current state of ego, while 'planets' presented themselves to me as personal problems. This concept i had discovered was very meaningful.. Because of it, I made a conscious effort to do what i termed as "Blend". I conceptualized the acid as a tool used to Blend one reality into another; one reality being my life before the trip, the second reality represent the ideas, realizations, and promises to myself I made during the trip. Like magick, I let the Acid burn away my old 'veils of deception' and ignorance, thus transmuting old problems into exciting challenges.

While coming into the trip, what i planned to gain from it was my own experience with the Ego Death practice. One conclusion I never expected to come to was a realization of psychedelic tools being very secondary to your own will and determination. ""Ego Death can only come from within yourself""... and at the moment that truth was realized, my psychedelic reality and my new reality blended into one. Finally, I found what I had been chasing after even prior to my knowledge of Ego Death theory.

For a period of about six hours, I sat in one position with a stupid smile on my face... realizing my goal had been completed; a rebirth through meta programming. It's been about six days since that experience.. and I still feel a faint/joyful buzz from the LSD.

[Blazing Glory]

Amazing post. Thank you very much for sharing your experiences and good luck with your new "perspective" :).

[Ostritt]

Great report. I never managed to get those experiences with acid, I tend to agree with McKenna's statement that it is "abrasively psychoanalytic", but it's all ways good to hear people who are able to negotiate that tool well and come back with such interesting tales. May you bask in the glow of your new self! Peace

[London Eye]

Sounds like a truly enlightening trip, allowing the LSD to act as a facilitator for your own conscious exploration of your own personality, seeing it as it is and working on it whilst in the psychedelic state.

But I'm interested to know what your definition of ego death is. I have discussed this at great length with Max, who has a very definite idea of what this is (though which I'm still not 100% clear on).

Did you have an experience where you thought you had died and would never come back? I've had a couple of very heavy LSD trips (and a fair few mild ones). In the heavy ones, there were stages where I found myself in an eternal moment and unaware of who I was, or am. There was no before or after and there was no me, ie the personality that has a name.

On my first DMT experience (thanks Max) I did have the sense of getting to a place that instantly made whereever I ad come from meaningless and irrelevant. I had the sense that I would never return. But I don't recall ever thinking that I had died.

I feel this has something to do with the method I use when going into heavy psychedelic states (I have used this method with heavy doses of K and Salvia) ie just to let go and allow whatever is to be. Thus there is very little resistance from me. Not to say resistance doesn't arise, but I have so far been able to let go of that feeling of wanting to hold on to something, even my personality.

Extra note: Have to say with Salvia it was different to K in that in K I had some sense of my personality in a voyage, whereas in Salvia land whatever was experiencing the state was not me and the me that was in the body was wailing and shrieking (according to witnesses) and the return to normality was very uncomfortable...this has happened twice on heavy smokes of 20x!

I don't know whether others might deduce from this that I have not experienced ego death, and that means that I am not psychedelically enlightened :p

See, to me that's the problem of the definition of the word ego death. To me, if you are still alive, then the ego is not dead, maybe transformed. So I would perhaps prefer the term ego transformation, which leaves more room for people to experience this phenomenon in unique and individual ways, not according to one person's perspective.

But I haven't read any Hoffman, so will have to skim through some stuff and see what he's going on about.

Hey Max, found a broadband connection yet? :)

[Ostritt]

Hey London Eye, I have some of the same questions and I'm going to be a bit tedious and say again that this ambiguity surrounding what ED is stems from the fact that we are not using a common metaphors. Everyone has a different concept of ego, a different concept of death. For example if you believe your ego is ultimately eternal energy, you will never accept the idea that you are about to "die". As someone mentioned very perspicaciously in another thread, the fact that there is a thinking entity thinking "I'm going to die" or "I have died" implies the existence of some type of ego. My main problem with it is this idea that ED is somehow more authentic than another form of enlightenment. There have been moments on a mushroom trip where I lost control of my whole body and was watching from a point about 2 metres in the air to my left. I didn't think that I would never have my body again and I wasn't afraid because I was aware that the creator viewing the scene was me and is eternal. Other people may have viewed this experience as "ego death". It really does lie with the individual's model of reality. I'm also going to read Hoffman's stuff again now just to see if there is anything I've missed. Peace!

[mike ra]

But I'm interested to know what your definition of ego death is. I have discussed this at great length with Max, who has a very definite idea of what this is (though which I'm still not 100% clear on).

Did you have an experience where you thought you had died and would never come back?



IMO, the ego never goes away, it can only be transformed; but is that transformation not death of the old ego?

I did not experience any notion of a physical death.. at the point where i was, I don't think it was possible for me to even concepualize the meaning of death; I just was, pure bliss.

Following the trip.. I consciously use the imprint it made on self to guide the decisions i make.