endlessness said:
what do you call ego, gilbran? A center of consciousness that observes, or the notion of you as in, who you are, that you smoked dmt, your personality, etc?
In my way of looking at it, if you still remember you smoked dmt and your name and where you are or whatever else, you havent brokenthrough. But in breakthroughs one can still be very conscious, in a totally different way (with no recollection of 'you'). But as Lunaria well said, you can definitely have pre-breakthrough experiences that are very strong and you are immersed in another dimension but still aware of yourself as an individual human being that just smoked dmt.
I consider ego to be that which I normally call myself – my memories and my identity as a particular individual. If we arbitrarily define a breakthrough to include ego death, then many of my breakthroughs aren’t breakthroughs by definition. But that’s not how I define a breakthrough. A breakthrough is a fully immersive experience – a transition to another reality – often a “transformation” of self, sometimes a loss of self, but sometimes not.
I’ve had a variety of different kinds of breakthroughs with respect to ego, and I consider them all to be breakthroughs.
Twice I’ve experienced “ego replacement” where I became another being. To say I “became” another being isn’t quite correct, because there was no sense of transition. There was no awareness that I had ever been anything else. Toward the end of these experiences, I gradually became aware that I was something else – something called a “person”, and I had a whole life different from the one I assumed I always had.
Other times, I’ve been fully immersed in another reality, out of body and unaware of body, yet there is still an acknowledgement that I have a body lying on my bed. I’m not there with it, but I know it’s there. In these experiences, I’m aware of my body as a machine, and it’s a machine that I’m not inhabiting at that moment. I trust that it will continue to function without “me” present.
My deepest and most profound journey is still unique. I posted about it before, and it was the journey that motivated me to join this site. Visually, it was unlike any DMT experience before or since. I was “further” from my body than I have ever been. It was so unique that I quickly became convinced that it wasn’t a DMT experience at all – I concluded that I had died. This was a breakthrough unlike any other, yet I was fully aware of who I was, of what I did prior, etc. (I guessed that I had a heart attack soon after taking my dose of DMT.) I felt a sense of loss and was very much aware of what I was losing. If anything, my ego – my sense of self – was clearer and more vivid than in everyday life.
