If you’ve spent any time with me this summer or fall, you’ve likely heard me talk about the ego death I experienced in May. That experience shifted my entire reality, and I’m still feeling the reverberations of it and shifting my life in response to it.
Here’s a brief description, which I sent to my boss in an email after a work meeting in which we shared what we’d done over the summer, of how ego death can look:
About ego death, I think some folks may start with that popular framing that we are spiritual/soul beings on a human journey. In other words, our consciousness isn't really tied to what we feel, think, or do. But as we go through the human experience, our sense of ourselves is so deeply shaped by those things (not just what we feel/think/do but also how those things connect to our relationships/work/etc). So, sometimes, when we experience a really big loss (a death, a breakup, illness, etc), it can lead us to lose our sense of ourselves/it can call into question some very important part of our core identity. That is the ego death or "soul shock."
After that, most people experience a full body depression (I've seen this called "dark night of the soul" and "churning of the ocean," but I haven't really found much that resonated re: that second term, which seems to come from a Vedic text). That depression/DNOTS can last weeks or months or even years, depending on the person. After that, many come to some sort of spiritual awakening; it can look like a revival of religious or spiritual beliefs, or the birth of new beliefs, or unity consciousness (recognition of the oneness of all things).
Then, the challenging part is to accept that we are still in a human experience and have to do things like maintain friendships and pay bills and so on—for some people, this re-integration can also take a super long time (and they lose a lot of things along the way, things that no longer match their new way of knowing). Of course, as mentioned above, if you're wealthy enough, you can skip the reintegration and ditch your old life and just buy a villa on an island or something.
When in work meetings, it’s probably best not to answer the question, “What did you do this summer?” with “I experienced an ego death and am still recovering.” But sometimes, you say the wrong thing to the right person and they respond with grace and curiosity.
Early in the experience, in the midst of a spiritual depression, unable to stop crying but aware that I was not supposed to run from the tears (something my pain-avoidant, dissociative self would not have been able to do even a month earlier), I was combing message boards and social media to figure out what the fuck was happening to me and one recommendation kept popping up: Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.
I think in general, when I see titles like that, I write those books off as too self-helpy or new-age-y and definitely not for me. But I was desperate and in need of any kind of relief or solution to this unbearable, seemingly-without-end crisis. Was it a spiritual crisis, a crisis of the self, a breakdown of identity?
Tolle begins by talking about his own experience with ego death and spiritual awakening, and about how they led him to two main realizations: (1) we are not our egos and (2) we are our most authentic selves when we stay in the present moment. Most of the book is set up in a question-answer format, primarily offering guidance on the application of these two ideas to everyday life.
The more I read personal anecdotes on ego death and awakening, the more I found that most of us were arriving at the same realizations. A friend whose ego death coincided with mine pointed out that one of KRS-One’s most well-known talks about consciousness also covered these same major ideas.
As a neurodivergent kid, there was nothing I loved more than counting things, collecting data, and noticing patterns in the everyday. Maybe that’s what led me to qualitative research in the first place!
Along those lines, a part of this process that has surprised me is that the most isolating and devastating pain I’ve experienced as an adult led me to the discovery that no pain is individual—this is, in fact, a collective experience with identifiable patterns, pathways, and frameworks. And that means that guides and mentors already exist.
Before ego death, I took such pride in never needing anyone, and then my DNOTS hit and I needed absolutely everyone! And they were all there. My people showed up—for every single second of it. The oneness is not simply a philosophical concept, but a kind of collective action. The kind of presence you don’t even know is possible until it is there for you.
Have you experienced a profound event or loss that shifted your sense of yourself and the world around you? Are there books you’ve been skeptical about that ended up surprising you or informing your world view in unexpected ways? Click below to like, comment, and share.
I love this line: "But sometimes, you say the wrong thing to the right person and they respond with grace and curiosity." I like the idea of "wrong" things floating in the mind looking for the right person to receive it.