Ego death is the collapse or dissolving of a person’s ordinary sense of who they are, described in mystical traditions, in psychedelic research and in accounts of shamanic initiation. Therapeutic Shamanism does not treat the ego as the enemy or try to get rid of it; the ego, the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer, is a necessary part of us, made of stories, which needs to be healthy, of service and not in charge. What does have to “die” in shamanic practice is our identification with those stories, and that is practised again and again, in journeying and the transformation practicesTransformation practices. The family of journey-practices in which the self is deliberately taken apart, reduced to something formless, and reformed: burials, burnings, dismemberments, sky burials, dissolvings, cocoonings, poisonings, shapeshifting. A mini death-and-rebirth: cleansing, loosening of identity, and preparation for the greatest transformation of all. Read the full answer, rather than sought as one dramatic event.
What does “ego death” mean? #
It means different things in different places, but the common thread is the loss, for a time, of the usual sense of being a separate self. In psychedelic research the more common term is ego dissolution, a blurring of the boundary between self and world that can, at its furthest, leave no sense of a separate self at all. The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of psychedelic therapy, defined ego death as the “death of our old concepts of who we are and what the world is like”. A recent review by Tobias Buchborn and colleagues argues that, in psychedelic-assisted therapy, the passing state of regression is not enough on its own; lasting change depends on emotionally working through the early experiences that shaped a person’s habitual patterns.1 Therapeutic Shamanism does not use psychedelics; see Do you need psychedelics or plant medicines to practise shamanism?
In writing on shamanism, ego death is part of the story of initiation. The German transpersonal psychologist Holger Kalweit, in Dreamtime and Inner Space, holds that true transcendence calls for a willingness to suffer “a genuine death of ego and not merely an imaginary death experience”, and describes the shaman’s initiatory crisis as a walk on a tightrope between this world and the next.2 See What is shaman’s sickness (initiatory illness)?
What is the ego, in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
The ego is the middle-world self: the part of us we build in order to live and act in the middle-world. It is made of stories, personal, family and social, along with the beliefs we adopt, the roles we play and the masks we wear, and it is mostly built without our being aware of it. Going over the stories again and again, we come to think “this is who I am”. Carl Jung called this face we show the world the persona, from the Latin for mask, and the trouble is that we come to think the mask is who we are.3 In the Therapeutic Shamanism map it is our soul with a small “s”, one of four parts of us alongside the body, the Lower-World Soul and Spirit.4 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Should we try to kill the ego? #
No. Many spiritual teachings say the ego is an illusion, or that it must be transcended. At one level everything is indeed one; but back in the everyday middle-world the ego is very real, and it does not go away by being ignored or denied. “What we resist, persists.” A denied part becomes Jung’s shadow, stronger and out of conscious control, which is why people who deny the reality of the ego often end up with an ego that seeks to dominate and control, a guru complex. And trying to rise above the ego by focusing only on Spirit tends to produce a top-heavy, ungrounded spirituality. Shamanism asks us to rise, but rise rooted, reining in the middle-world self by descending to the Lower-World Soul as well as ascending.5
The ego is not “bad”, it just needs to be of service and not in charge. It is the tool through which both Soul and Spirit can express themselves in the world, and unless we withdraw from the world altogether, we need it.5 The practices for transcending the ego are nearly as old as the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer itself, and they have not cured it. In more than thirty years as a therapist, Paul Francis found that deeply spiritual people, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and others with a strong connection to the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer, turned out to need good psychotherapy just as much as anyone else. What heals a damaged ego is not escaping it but dismantling the unhealthy parts and building a healthier one, and that is what psychotherapy is made for.6 See What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Then what has to die? #
The stories, or at least our hold on them. Shamans say that to become a shaman “the past has to die”, or that we have to die to the past. It is the aware self, the part of us that can watch the stories, that journeys, not the middle-world ego, and the more a practitioner can let go of their middle-world identity, the less they get in the way of their GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this and the more truthful their journeys become. The stories have to go, or at least we need to be able to step away from them when journeying; they remain useful clothing to put back on again for ordinary, day-to-day life.7 See What is hollowing-out? and What is recapitulation?
The transformation practices work the same ground. In burials, burnings, dissolvings and dismembermentsDismemberment. A transformation practice in which the Power Animal takes you apart (classically: eats, digests and regurgitates you), reformed and healed. A practice of trust, cleansing and death-and-rebirth. More about this, the journeyer is taken completely apart, reduced to something formless and then reformed. “In a sense, they are a mini ‘death’ and rebirth.” Anything unhealthy is dismantled in the process, and they train the ability that all journeying needs, which is letting go of our habitual middle-world form, and disentangling from our stories, our ego and even from being human, to become just an awareness.8 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting? and What is shamanic initiation, and what part does dismemberment play?
Does ego death have to be a dramatic experience? #
No. It is often said in the shamanic community that people come to shamanism, or to finding their Soul, through near-death experiences or similar traumatic events. This is sometimes true, because such experiences can involve the death of an old way of being and make room for a new one. But there are other paths, gentler and steadier, and equally effective. Paul’s own path was a traumatic one. There is nothing about doing it that way that he would recommend, and it is not a path he would choose again, which is why his teaching aims to be effective and yet manageable: grounded, trauma-free, and free of unnecessary drama.9
So in Therapeutic Shamanism the letting go is practised regularly, in the transformation practices and in every journey, alongside the slower work of healing the middle-world self. This differs from accounts such as Kalweit’s, which make a real and dangerous death of the ego the price of real transformation. See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
What happens to the ego when we die? #
It fades. All middle-world things are subject to time, and the ego, being a thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this, will eventually lose its coherence, fade away and die. The trouble is that the ego does not like this thought, and an ego that clings on after death is the issue behind the unquiet deadUnquiet dead. The middle-world self become ghost: the ego that, having no body left to anchor it, lingers among the living instead of moving on to the Land of the Dead. Unhealthy for the living, and moved on by psychopomping. More about this.10 The transformation practices are also a preparation for “the greatest shape-shift and transformation that awaits us all”, our own physical death. The more we have loosened our attachment to our middle-world form during life, the more readily we can let it go when the time comes.11 See Why do shamans say shamanism is preparation for death, and how does how we live shape how we die? and Who are the unquiet dead, and are ghosts real?
