Ego death

So how long will this take? How fast can it happen? I don't know. And when I've seen it, when I've experienced it in my sessions, it didn't come with dates, and it didn't come with a brochure detailing how it's going to take place. But I know in my bones that it's happening,...

I'd love to. One surprise in my psychedelic work was how much of it wasn't about personal transformation—it was about the collective. My love for myself expanded to embrace love for my people, my planet, and all beings on the planet—not just me personally. As it deepened, I began to be initiated into visions...

Very briefly, in the book, I describe the levels of consciousness I went through in this process: a series of death and rebirth experiences, starting with the personal level of mind, going through ego death, then reaching the collective level of mind, engaging deep structures within the collective psyche. Third, the archetypal dimension of...

That’s not a silly question at all. The phrase "Diamond Luminosity" points to states of consciousness I entered in the last five years of my work. I'd gone through the perinatal process, solid ego death, into the ocean of suffering, and into archetypal reality. In the last five years, I was catapulted into a...

Michael Pollan’s important book, he took psychedelics a handful of times. It creates short-sighted expectations of what a psychedelic journey can be. In a long journey, you go through cycles of death and rebirth, going deeper into the universe as deeply as your medicine and capacity allow. Your protocol must hold you in a...

Early stages involved personal mind, pain in the form of Stan Grof's described perinatal levels, confronting life's existential questions: Does life have meaning beyond death if everything we know is destroyed by it? It's an existential angst leading to a surrender of identity. Deeper into the collective psyche, I confronted immense suffering, not just...

No, you understood. You got it correctly. It's kind of jumping ahead to the story. Let me back up and work to that point. Okay, if you work, and I think in order to extract the maximal psychological, psycho-spiritual and philosophical value of these experiences, it's very important to create a container, what I...

At least, what came through in my work and what many affirm is that it's about incarnating deeper, not just patching up history, but incarnating the power of spirit into our bodies and relationships. It's about giving birth to this deeper consciousness inside our incarnations. We're bringing forth the soul consciousness in the body,...

Yeah, first, Stephen, thank you, buddy, for that very nice and warm introduction. I really appreciate our friendship, and I appreciate what you're doing with the conference, and Marc, you too. This is a great conference. It's my favorite psychedelic conference to participate in, and I always find it such a rich setting and...

Well, first, let me describe the protocol. Everything I did was within a strict therapeutic protocol. I followed Stan's protocols from his book, LSD Psychotherapy, so traditional—lying down, eye shades, earphones, listening to very carefully choreographed music to guide the session. I was always in private, always protected, always with a sitter who was...

Well, I'm always hesitant to jump into this, because my experiences are based upon shamanic, rigorous use of LSD. And when everyone hears LSD, they think of the '60s, they think hallucinations. This is very far from that. This is really within a therapeutic tradition. It's within the Stan Grof tradition. It's the systematic...

Okay, so I just say 73 high-dose sessions. And I did this in a very rigorous fashion, following Stan's protocol. In my case, I used the same protocol, same set and setting, same substance, same dose level, same sitter, same recording process, and same location. I tried to standardize all the variables as much...

Well, first, let me describe the protocol. Everything I did was within a strict therapeutic protocol. I followed Stan's protocols from his book, LSD Psychotherapy: traditional, lying down, eye shades, earphones, listening to very carefully choreographed music to guide the session. I was always in private, always protected, always with a sitter—who was my...

If you want to allow your consciousness to expand into the broader dimensions, the deeper dimensions of consciousness, you must surrender the narrow bandwidth of your individual body, mind, and ego. This happens slowly or fast, convulsively or smoothly, but that identity that we hold has to be shattered, has to be destroyed. When...

If you continue and press to the limits of your time and space identity, going through the transformation we call ego death, you begin to open to spiritual reality, farther removed from personal history. That's when experiences begin to overlap and converge. Spiritual reality isn't something you just enter and take from; it's interactive....

Well, for about the first two and a half years, it followed very much the material that Stan Grof had been tracking. My first two and a half years of work were very much perinatal in nature, going through the death-rebirth process, re-experiencing one's birth, experiencing a profound confrontation with death and the meaninglessness...

Well, for about the first two and a half years, it followed very much the material that Stan Grof had been tracking. My first two and a half years of work were very much perinatal in nature, going through the Death-Rebirth process, really experiencing one's birth, confronting death and the meaninglessness of existence. But...

Well, there are many levels of answers to that, but basically, if we want to move into deeper intimacy with the consciousness of the universe, we're moving into states of consciousness which are large, which are vast, and operate at a much higher frequency, much higher energy level. Our egoic consciousness, the consciousness which...

It took me a while to figure it out after my work ended in '99, when plotting the larger trajectory for the book. I differentiated five levels of consciousness that seemed operational. The first is at the level of personal mind, going beyond personal time-space identity, culminating in what we call ego death. The...

When one works with very high doses of LSD, one goes through a series of death-rebirth experiences. In this image, the drop at the center underneath the line represents our egoic consciousness, our private consciousness. Everything above the line represents spiritual reality. Transpersonal consciousness, the first death-rebirth experience, takes place at the interface of...

Humanity must heal to make the evolutionary pivot from an adolescent stage to a mature stage of soul development. Healing is the first step to establishing a new foundation, a new platform where we can then take in more light and wisdom from the universe. As we heal, we take in more. Initially, breaking...

Part of my experience is rooted in the classic teaching in some Eastern traditions that the essence of the individual is the same as the essence of the totality—that Atman is Brahman, that our nature is the nature of the Divine, which is the nature of reality itself. It's not accurate to think of...

What happened on this journey was that I went through not just one death, not just ego death, but multiple layers of reality, entering deeper and deeper levels of consciousness. Accessing these deeper levels required going through a series of deaths—dying at one level of consciousness to enter a deeper level, mastering it, then...

Completely surprised by these visions—since I was at the tail end of thinking my work was about personal transformation—I found these consistently about collective transformation. Nowhere was I shown how nature would pull off this transformation. In 1995, during the diamond Luminosity work—having entered the diamond Luminosity twice—I was expecting to be taken back...

After going through yet one more intense cycle of death and rebirth, I was spun into a brilliantly clear radiance that Buddhism calls Dharmakāya. I came to call it the domain of Diamond Luminosity. I had known light many times before, but this was an exceptionally pure light. This domain captivated me so completely...

When I first began to enter the ocean of suffering, after ego death, and went into episodes of collective anguish, each session seemed divided into two halves. There was a purification half followed by an ecstatic half. You go through the purification, and if you submit to it, it crescendos and breaks through, spinning...

In psychedelic work, you go through a death-rebirth process. The horizontal line represents the line between physical matter and spiritual reality, or ordinary consciousness and Transpersonal consciousness. The open line represents the vast expanse of non-ordinary states of consciousness, and the drop at the bottom represents our individual egoic awareness. The first circle, the...

Sure, it actually started in the very first session. My very first session, I hit an experience where I could not remember anything about myself. I could not remember who I was, what I was; I couldn't remember what I did for a living. I could not remember whether I was a man or...

I think it is possible to say. I think Stan Grof's work allows us to say it, where he's dealing with integrating the experiences of thousands of people. I'm only talking about integrating my experiences, but my experiences fit comfortably within the larger matrix Grof's work has explored. It's a complicated answer because, on...

As my work progressed, especially some 15 years in, time became porous. I was taken beyond linear time into what I call deep time—not eternity or timelessness, but different spans of time from a new frame of reference. I was taken into the future and experienced what felt like the death and rebirth of...

Yes, it’s complex. While personal purifications taper with ego death, the wider ocean of collective suffering indicated a healing of species history, pivotal in expeditions clearing ancestral burdens. Taking on these sufferings wasn't solely for me but something envisioned before birth, rewarding beyond worth, universal recompense flowing in forms sustaining my soul’s path —...

Well, you're breaking up a little bit, but I'm going to assume that I can just go ahead and talk now. You know, I spent, after doing this deep LSD journey for 20 years, I spent another 20 years thinking about my experiences, digesting them, processing them, and eventually writing down the story of...

Wouldn't that have been interesting? I did have an opportunity to do some teaching at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, but this came rather late in my series. Basically, I did my work between 1979 and 1999, when I was between 30 and 50 years old,...

Now I found that there was a continuity between my sessions, that one session tended to end and the next one would start exactly where the previous one had ended, more or less, with some varying degrees of overlap. In that process, I found that I went through not one, but a series of...

I worked for four years, stopped for six, then worked for ten more years, averaging about five sessions a year. The high dose allowed me to push through personal boundaries into what Stanislav Grof calls the perinatal level of consciousness—early experiences like birth and death experiences, as well as existential crises. Then I went...

Well, I'm glad you brought in Easter, because it is Good Friday, and this is a special weekend in the Christian calendar. I know that you and I have both been touched by Christianity, by its teaching, and by people who have been steeped in Christian teaching. We have been Christians and we have...

A lot of work at the medical level, at the therapeutic level, really focuses on ego dissolution, transcending the limitations of your physical body, entering into a deeper communion, into mystical experiences. What I found was when you—and I did this work—it wasn't just one cycle of death-rebirth. Now, in this image, the drop...

Yes, when I began my work, I thought there was just one death—ego death—that would launch you into the spiritual universe. But I found that the spiritual universe has many layers, and you have to undergo another metamorphosis of death and surrender to be reborn into deeper layers. This reflects the Tibetan idea of...

Well, physically, I'm fine. It's actually a very beneficial process because in this work, when the body begins—basically LSD is an amplifier of consciousness. It hyper-stimulates, hyper-amplifies consciousness. Our conventional understanding of psychedelics is quite wrong. We're coming into a new era of psychedelic research, and the public is being educated to a deeper...

A significant part is experiencing ego death, where your physical personality dissolves, leading to awakening inside a spiritual reality. Continuing this process takes you deeper through Transpersonal consciousness levels as Stan identified: psychic, subtle, and causal. For terminally ill cancer patients, a high-dose strategy was developed (300 to 500 micrograms) aiming not for therapy...