The goal is not death. The comment mentioned ego death which is something else entirely.
At the risk of trivializing something that must be experienced not explained, the realization of no-self (ego death) is one of the most liberating things one can experience.
It’s the realization that the feeling of “I” is just another feeling that arises in the same space as all other feelings, and that this feeling is ultimately greatly constraining/limiting. It’s the realization that what we are is far more expansive than most people realize without such exploration of self and no-self. It’s liberation from the illusion that is our default state.
> what's the point of living?
For me, experiencing it is what makes life worth living.
The best way I can describe this is that it was the gradual dissolution of certain ideas I had about what it means to be me. This dissolution wasn’t just experiential - it was also the result of rational interrogation of various beliefs I had about myself.
To put this another way, it was the sum total of a series of realizations about what it can’t mean to be me.
- It feels like “I” is at the “center” of me, but biologically and neurologically, there is no discernible center
- It feels like “I” am my thoughts and feelings, but who then is aware of these thoughts and feelings?
- It feels like “I” am looking out at the world through the windows of my eyes, “I” am in the inside, and the world is on the outside. Except this relies on the unexamined belief that there’s some kind of homunculus inside my head doing the seeing. Instead, there’s just seeing.
And a list of related realizations too long to enumerate without making this comment longer than it already is.
The end result that people often refer to as ego death is the opposite of a waste in my experience. A life without breaking down these illusions is a life of servitude to our evolutionary defaults. A life lost in thought is a life that hasn’t experienced some of the most awe inspiring states of consciousness on offer.
As a skeptic, I spent the first 35 years of my life lost in my thoughts and feelings, and unaware that I could experience life any other way, and frankly uninterested in such ideas.
Life circumstances gave me a taste of what ego death entails, at which point I realized how completely oblivious I’d been and how deep my misconceptions about people who talked about such things were.
This comment is a stream of thought and not sufficient to communicate what ego death entails, but it is certainly not the scary/bad thing I had once believed, and is one of the most meaningful/helpful experiences of my life and has made life much richer.
Death means dead. If it comes back, it didn't die. So either everyone saying they've experienced it, has no ego (what are "they" then?), or they're using the wrong word.
I've experienced all those realizations myself, but "I" am back for now. So what's a better word for it? Maybe if we didn't call it "death", it wouldn't sound so scary, or mysterious, or interesting, or even useful. Guess it'd be kind of hard to build religions around that though.
"Ego death" is really not the death of ego, but the death of the belief that ego is is at the center of all things, and is somehow a thing that actually exists in the way we tend to believe it exists before examining it more closely.
> Maybe if we didn't call it "death", it wouldn't sound so scary, or mysterious, or interesting, or even useful.
I tend to agree. I think there's a strong stigma and association people hold when they hear these words, that are unrelated to the actual phenomena itself.
> Guess it'd be kind of hard to build religions around that though.
This reveals some of the associations you seem to have with the concept. I'm not religious, have taken on no metaphysical beliefs, and consider myself somewhere between agnostic and atheist.
There is nothing at all religious about ego death, even if many religions and people who talk about such things are doing so from a clearly religious context. It's this religious association that kept me away from exploring the ideas for many years.
It wasn't until I had directly experienced a taste of what that phrase means that I took it seriously. My worldview remains as irreligious as ever.
In retrospect, avoiding it because of this association seems as ill-advised as avoiding science because of its origins and associations with the Catholic Church.
At the risk of trivializing something that must be experienced not explained, the realization of no-self (ego death) is one of the most liberating things one can experience.
It’s the realization that the feeling of “I” is just another feeling that arises in the same space as all other feelings, and that this feeling is ultimately greatly constraining/limiting. It’s the realization that what we are is far more expansive than most people realize without such exploration of self and no-self. It’s liberation from the illusion that is our default state.
> what's the point of living?
For me, experiencing it is what makes life worth living.
The best way I can describe this is that it was the gradual dissolution of certain ideas I had about what it means to be me. This dissolution wasn’t just experiential - it was also the result of rational interrogation of various beliefs I had about myself.
To put this another way, it was the sum total of a series of realizations about what it can’t mean to be me.
- It feels like “I” is at the “center” of me, but biologically and neurologically, there is no discernible center
- It feels like “I” am my thoughts and feelings, but who then is aware of these thoughts and feelings?
- It feels like “I” am looking out at the world through the windows of my eyes, “I” am in the inside, and the world is on the outside. Except this relies on the unexamined belief that there’s some kind of homunculus inside my head doing the seeing. Instead, there’s just seeing.
And a list of related realizations too long to enumerate without making this comment longer than it already is.
The end result that people often refer to as ego death is the opposite of a waste in my experience. A life without breaking down these illusions is a life of servitude to our evolutionary defaults. A life lost in thought is a life that hasn’t experienced some of the most awe inspiring states of consciousness on offer.
As a skeptic, I spent the first 35 years of my life lost in my thoughts and feelings, and unaware that I could experience life any other way, and frankly uninterested in such ideas.
Life circumstances gave me a taste of what ego death entails, at which point I realized how completely oblivious I’d been and how deep my misconceptions about people who talked about such things were.
This comment is a stream of thought and not sufficient to communicate what ego death entails, but it is certainly not the scary/bad thing I had once believed, and is one of the most meaningful/helpful experiences of my life and has made life much richer.
Anything but a waste.