Ego and The Mirror.

[Philosopher]

When I have a trip on mushrooms, acid, or DMT I always feel my ego slip away. At some times this terrifies you, and sometimes it is astonishingly beautiful. When you trip enough and become comfortable losing and regaining your ego a lot of the anxiety of tripping goes away. When I look in the mirror when I'm not tripping I am not surprised by what i see. I see it everyday. But when I am tripping a proof of my loss of ego is that when i look in the mirror I am surprised. Very surprised. In fact, this is a complete mind fuck. In the middle of a trip. When you have lost your name and your prior knowledge of existence, you see a live image of what you are. Something that should be impossible to display is shown so plainly on a mirror. This is not you. Because it is unrecognizable. I know this face. It is very reminiscent. But it is not me. The ego leaves on a trip freeing the mind to explore and perceive the world as if everything is new. With no prior knowledge or context of your existence you can only have the power to think.

 

[Guyomech]

I used to sometimes look in the mirror on high doses of acid or shrooms... And I'd always see Archetypal Hairy Tripping Dude. No name attached... Always very amusing and somehow liberating.

In last week's DMT trip I got deep into a visual language space, then at one point got too deep to follow any further, and ended up in a pleasant but formless disassociative state. Eventually I started to perceive this image of a human sitting on a couch, motionless, feet up, sounds of crickets all around. Then, a flash: Dude, that's you!

 

[Jarl Von Hoother]

I ran around naked in a forest with a primitive stick like ...tool, lost on 8 hundred milligrams of mescaline chasing after some animal or another, skipping over logs! looking at my hairy legs and toes squishing in the mud between the shiny grass at dawn break while digging up random roots where spiders crawled and suddenly I felt I had transcended my own species enough to really feel in touch not with who I am, but instead what I am.

weird no?

thankfully I was found by this indian woman.

 

[Ryusaki]

The first time i took (hawaiian)shrooms more than a decade ago, i was standing one hour infront of the mirror and was watching in awe how my face morphed/melted into various south-american indigeous shaman archetypes inclusive their hats and decorations.
There was no egoloss, just an pure visual and extreme euphoric trip. The images in the mirror had an extreme otherwordly quality. It wasn't just distortions and frame overlays, i really saw my face morphing into a hundred other destinctive faces with completly different facial proportions than mine, and they would stay like this for an amount of time (a minute),smile at me, look deep into my eyes before changing again.
Some of them looked like the Shipibos, they had their hats with the usual patterns.
The only strange thing is, that at this time i did not know anything about this tribe(or others), nor did i had knowledge of the shipibo pattern art and their clothes.
When i later watched Jan Kounens "Blueberry" (Renegade in the US), it absolutly floored me that the shaman looked EXACTLY like the image in the mirror i saw years earlier.

Another thing: i would absolutly suggest everybody to be careful when gazing at youself in the mirror over a longer time. Don't do this if you feel unstable or a little depressed, or if you are in general not so experienced with psychedelics. It can and will bring something up you might not expect nor want. Seeing the ugly, hidden, darker side of oneself can be the result of that exercise. And what has been seen, cannot be unseen.
I have psychonaut buddys who refuse to do this as it freaks them out.