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.
There is no me in any of this — I cry and weep like the cutting of an onion, scream and kick like being kidnapped — the memories who aren't hers, they belong to no one, they have an innocence, they have a relation to everyone and everything.
It shattered me because it was a unitive expression that was the total opposite of joy — it appeared that everything I knew to be real was ephemeral and a dreamlike illusion, and there was no focal point and there was no me.
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.
There was no me at all. It was just light and bliss and the cosmic Om. And, but there was no self at all. It was just Being, pure Being.
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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