The personal self temporarily ceased or was revealed as illusory
The felt sense that the personal self — the one with a name, a history, and a boundary — temporarily ceased, dissolved, or was revealed as illusory. This is the experience type most often described explicitly and in detail; it leads all categories on the strict count.
The higher number includes anyone whose account implied a loss of the sense of self; the lower number counts those who directly described the dissolution or absence of a personal 'I' in their own words.
I woke up one morning and I was just pure awareness, the person had totally disappeared... I looked at my clothes on the rack and I was like, whose clothes? No one could be found.
I took a very small deep breath in and then I disappeared — basically I was gone, I was completely gone. There is no body, there is no person, there is no consciousness, there is nothing at all.
I made a choice to allow myself to dissolve or disappear... and then it was like intimacy fails to really capture it, but it's just no filter, no distance.
My mind went completely vast and clear. No thoughts, no Self, no person thinking. It happened from the inside out. That became a kind of base camp — always present — that sometimes unexpectedly comes very much into the foreground.
Among accounts that include ego dissolution, these were the most common pathways that preceded it:
Experience types most commonly reported in the same accounts:
Among the 515 accounts that include ego dissolution, these integration challenges appeared most often — shown as a percentage of those accounts:
Physical phenomena reported by people whose accounts include ego dissolution:
First-hand accounts from people who described this experience — drawn from the interviews in this collection:
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