Self

Making the Ego Go Away is a Mystical Experience

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psychodelics-ego-dissolution2-nour

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“When subjected to a scientific experiment, these characteristics proved to be identical for spontaneous and psychedelic mystical experiences.
1. Unity is a sense of cosmic oneness achieved through positive ego transcendence. Although the usual sense of identity, or ego, fades away, consciousness and memory are not lost; . . ., so that a person reports that he feels a part of everything that is, or more simply, that “all is One.”  – Walter N. Pahnke

 

The core experience that has been found to be present in spiritual awakenings is a loss of the personal self. What they used to refer to as the self is experienced as just a part of an integrated whole. People who have had these experiences report feeling interconnected with everything else in a sense of oneness with all things. Although awakening experiences can vary widely, they all contain this experience of oneness.

 

Millions of people worldwide seek out spiritual awakening by engaging in practices, such as meditation, yoga, and prayer. Others use drugs such as peyote, mescaline, LSD, ayahuasca and

psilocybin to induce spiritual awakenings. The experiences produced by the drugs have many characteristics which are unique to the experiencer, their religious context, and their present situation. But, the common, central feature of these drug experiences is a sense of oneness, that all things are contained in a single thing, a sense of union with the universe and/or God and everything in existence.

 

Hence, central to both practice induced awakenings and psychedelic drug experiences is a loss of self that is sometimes called an ego death or an ego dissolution. In today’s Research News article “Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI).” See:

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1358413174182605/?type=3&theater

or see summary below or view the full text of the study at:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906025/

Nour and colleagues attempt to develop a psychometric scale measuring ego dissolution and its opposite ego inflation and compare the results on this scale for people who self-reported use of psychedelic drugs, cocaine, and alcohol. They recruited participants with on-line ads and obtained anonymous responses from 691 people. The ego dissolution inventory (EDI) contained 8 items; “I experienced a dissolution of my “self” or ego,” “I experienced a dissolution of my “self” or ego,” “I felt at one with the universe,” “I felt a sense of union with others,” “I experienced a decrease in my sense of self-importance,” “ I experienced a disintegration of my “self” or ego,” “I felt far less absorbed by my own issues and concerns,” “I lost all sense of ego,” “all notion of self and identity dissolved away.” Items were rated 0–100, with zero defined as “No, not more than usually”, and 100 defined as “Yes, entirely or completely.”

 

They found that the ego dissolution inventory (EDI) had adequate psychometric properties suggesting reliability and validity of the scale. The scores on the EDI were extremely similar to the participant’s responses to unity experiences on the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ) suggesting that ego-dissolutions were virtually identical to reported senses of oneness. Interestingly, they found that ego dissolution was highly related to well-being suggesting that loss of the self produces a sense of personal well-being. In terms of drugs, it was found that when psychedelic drug dose or intensity of experience was high, ego dissolution was also high. But, there was no such relationship with cocaine or alcohol, while when cocaine dose was high ego-inflation was also high. So, psychedelic use is associated with ego dissolution while cocaine use is associated with a heightened sense of self, ego-inflation.

 

The results demonstrate that the ego dissolution can be measured and that the EDI is a reliable and valid measure. They further indicate that ego dilution and unity experiences are virtually identical suggesting that they may be measures of the same experience. The results also show that psychedelic drug use, but not cocaine or alcohol are highly associated with ego dilution. All of this adds to the case that awakening experiences and psychedelic drug experiences are either extraordinarily similar or perhaps identical. Since psychedelic drugs alter the brain, the results further suggest that awakening experiences may be due to similar changes in the brain.

 

This study was strictly correlational and no causal connections can be determined. But, these interesting results strongly suggest that a double-blind clinical trial of drug effects on ego dissolution and inflation should be conducted. It is not possible to manipulate participants into having non-drug induced awakening experiences. But, the similarity between the two suggests that drug induced experiences may be an excellent model for the study of the neural changes that underlie spiritual awakening experiences

 

“Because the ego never actually exists, those who are most captivated by its illusion are still playing. They take it seriously and do not know that they are playing. By inducing ego-death and evolutionary perspectives, psychedelic drugs can counteract
the fear of death.” – LSD Experience – Ego

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available on Google+ https://plus.google.com/106784388191201299496/posts

 

Study Summary

Nour, M. M., Evans, L., Nutt, D., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2016). Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI). Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 269. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00269

 

Abstract

Aims: The experience of a compromised sense of “self”, termed ego-dissolution, is a key feature of the psychedelic experience. This study aimed to validate the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI), a new 8-item self-report scale designed to measure ego-dissolution. Additionally, we aimed to investigate the specificity of the relationship between psychedelics and ego-dissolution.

Method: Sixteen items relating to altered ego-consciousness were included in an internet questionnaire; eight relating to the experience of ego-dissolution (comprising the EDI), and eight relating to the antithetical experience of increased self-assuredness, termed ego-inflation. Items were rated using a visual analog scale. Participants answered the questionnaire for experiences with classical psychedelic drugs, cocaine and/or alcohol. They also answered the seven questions from the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ) relating to the experience of unity with one’s surroundings.

Results: Six hundred and ninety-one participants completed the questionnaire, providing data for 1828 drug experiences (1043 psychedelics, 377 cocaine, 408 alcohol). Exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that the eight EDI items loaded exclusively onto a single common factor, which was orthogonal to a second factor comprised of the items relating to ego-inflation (rho = −0.110), demonstrating discriminant validity. The EDI correlated strongly with the MEQ-derived measure of unitive experience (rho = 0.735), demonstrating convergent validity. EDI internal consistency was excellent (Cronbach’s alpha 0.93). Three analyses confirmed the specificity of ego-dissolution for experiences occasioned by psychedelic drugs. Firstly, EDI score correlated with drug-dose for psychedelic drugs (rho = 0.371), but not for cocaine (rho = 0.115) or alcohol (rho = −0.055). Secondly, the linear regression line relating the subjective intensity of the experience to ego-dissolution was significantly steeper for psychedelics (unstandardized regression coefficient = 0.701) compared with cocaine (0.135) or alcohol (0.144). Ego-inflation, by contrast, was specifically associated with cocaine experiences. Finally, a binary Support Vector Machine classifier identified experiences occasioned by psychedelic drugs vs. cocaine or alcohol with over 85% accuracy using ratings of ego-dissolution and ego-inflation alone.

Conclusion: Our results demonstrate the psychometric structure, internal consistency and construct validity of the EDI. Moreover, we demonstrate the close relationship between ego-dissolution and the psychedelic experience. The EDI will facilitate the study of the neuronal correlates of ego-dissolution, which is relevant for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and our understanding of psychosis.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906025/

 

Alter the Brains Self-Related Processing with Mindfulness

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By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“Mindfulness and meditation are the two most effective brain trainers to support optimal prefrontal cortex functioning. The more you incorporate them into your daily experience, the more you will be training your brain to recalibrate, balance, and control.” – Michele Rosenthal

 

The nervous system is constantly changing and adapting to the environment. It will change size, activity, and connectivity in response to experience. For example, the brain area that controls the right index finger has been found to be larger in blind subjects who use braille than in sighted individuals.  Similarly, cab drivers in London who navigate the twisting streets of the city, have a larger hippocampus, which is involved in spatial navigation, than predefined route bus drivers. These changes in the brain are called neuroplasticity. Over the last decade neuroscience has been studying the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and has identified neuroplastic changes in widespread areas.

 

There are two primary brain areas that appear to be altered by mindfulness training, the prefrontal cortex, including the orbitofrontal cortex, and what is termed the default mode network, which includes the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, precuneus, inferior parietal cortex, and lateral temporal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is involved in attention, decision making, and cognitive processes while the default mode network is involved in mind wandering and self-referential thinking.

 

Self-referential thinking is an important process that I prevalent when the mind is wandering and appears to be reduced by mindfulness training. In today’s Research News article “Medial orbital gyrus modulation during spatial perspective changes: Pre- vs. post-8 weeks mindfulness meditation.” See

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1204026446287946/?type=3&theater

or see below.

Tomasino and colleagues further investigate the neural process in self-referential thinking and the area of the brain that underlie them. They studied the effects of 8-weeks of meditation training on the brain responses to tasks that involve referencing the self or involve non self-referenced thinking. Brian activity was measured with functional Magnetic Imaging (f-MRI). They found that when processing the self-referential thinking task, there was significant activations of the left and right medial orbital gyrus. This activation was greater after the meditation training than before. In addition, after training response speeds increased on the self-referential thinking task. They also found that the magnitude of the signal change was negatively related to Self-Directedness, such that the higher the level of self-directed thinking the lower the activation.

 

The orbitofrontal cortex area is normally activated in high level thinking and with attention. It is thus not surprising that the orbitofrontal cortex would be activated by processing information necessary to make decisions. It is, however, surprising that the response would be greater for self-related tasks than for non self-related tasks. Meditation training is known to reduce self-referential thinking. So, it would make sense that that this intensified activation of the orbitofrontal cortex to self-referential thinking would be negatively related to self-directedness after meditation training.  But, it is surprising that the activation of this area by self-referential thinking would be intensified after meditation. It will remain for future research to disentangle these puzzling responses.

 

Regardless, alter the brains self-related processing with mindfulness.

 

“Meditation practice appears to have an amazing variety of neurological benefits – from changes in grey matter volume to reduced activity in the “me” centers of the brain to enhanced connectivity between brain regions.” – Alice Walton

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

 

Study Summary

Tomasino B, Campanella F, Fabbro F. Medial orbital gyrus modulation during spatial perspective changes: Pre- vs. post-8 weeks mindfulness meditation. Conscious Cogn. 2016 Feb;40:147-58. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2016.01.006. Epub 2016 Jan 25.

 

Highlights

  • We used fMRI pre and following a 8-weeks mindfulness training (MT).
  • During fMRI subjects solved a own-body mental transformation task.
  • The own-body mental transformation task (vs. non-bodily) in the post (vs. Pre-MT) significantly increased activations in the left and right middle orbital gyrus.
  • The signal change correlated with changes in a self-maturity scale.
  • A brief mindfulness training caused increased activation in areas involved in self related processing.

Abstract

Mindfulness meditation exercises the ability to shift to an “observer perspective”. That means learning to observe internally and externally arising stimulations in a detached perspective. Both before and after attending a 8-weeks mindfulness training (MT) participants underwent an fMRI experiment (serving as their own internal control) and solved a own-body mental transformation task, which is used to investigate embodiment and perspective taking (and an non-bodily mental transformation task as control).

We found a stimulus × time-points interaction: the own-body mental transformation task (vs. non-bodily) in the post (vs. pre-MT) significantly increased activations in the medial orbital gyrus. The signal change in the right medial orbital gyrus significantly correlated with changes in a self-maturity personality scale.

A brief MT caused increased activation in areas involved in self related processing and person perspective changes, together with an increase in self-maturity, consistently with the aim of mindfulness meditation that is exercising change in self perspective.

 

Meditate to Respond More Effectively to Self-Praise and Criticism

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 “If you’ve ever felt too depressed to solve a problem, it might be because your brain is having a hard time regulating your emotions. One solution? Mindfulness training.” – Ruth Buczynsk

 

Meditation is known to improve the physical and mental health of practitioners. To some extent, it does so by improving emotion regulation (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/emotions/). This improvement involves fully experiencing emotions, not suppressing them, and responding to them in a rational and adaptive fashion. In other words, meditators appear to be able to feel and work with their emotions responsibly, non-judgmentally, and with acceptance, and not react in ways that are harmful to themselves and others.

 

Emotion regulation is in part improved in meditators by helping them to take things less personally. Meditation tends to reduce self-referential thinking (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/self/). Mindfulness tends to reduce self-critical thinking and their emotional aftermaths and improve self-esteem. As a result, meditation tends to reduce responses to self-related thoughts, ideas, and stimuli. This improved emotion regulation contributes to many facets of the individual’s mental health.

 

Meditation is also known to alter the nervous system. Actions that are repeated often tend to produce changes in the nervous system in a process called neuroplasticity and meditation is no exception. It tends to increase the size, activity, and connectivity of structures in the nervous system that are involved in attention and emotion regulation, frontal cortex regions, and decrease the size, activity, and connectivity of structures involved in mind wandering, self-referential thinking, and stress, the so called default mode network  (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/neuroplasticity/).

 

In today’s Research News article “Altered processing of self-related emotional stimuli in mindfulness meditators”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1155866777770580/?type=3&theater

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811915008794

Lutz and colleagues investigate emotional regulation responses in the nervous system of long term meditators (> a year of regular practice) in comparison to meditation naïve participants. As expected the meditators were higher in mindfulness especially in observing and non-reacting, self-compassion, and emotional awareness. The participants were then presented with personality descriptor adjectives that were either positive (attractive, handsome, funny) or negative (unattractive, unsightly, ugly) and recorded the responses of the nervous system to the stimuli.

 

Self-relevant items either positive or negative, but particularly positive, produced greater activation of the Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex in the meditators. The mindfulness component of non-reacting was positively correlated with activation of the Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex in the meditators but not the naïve participants. Finally, they found lower functional connectivity to posterior midline and parietal regions in the meditators compared to the naïve participants during both types of self-relevant items.

 

The meditators stronger activations of the frontal regions suggest that they have stronger self-awareness and focus on inner feelings. It also suggests that they have greater emotion regulation with non-reactive attitudes towards these experiences. Since the posterior structures of the default mode network in the nervous system are associated with self-referential thinking, the decreased connectivity to these regions in the meditators suggest that they have lesser self-focus than meditation naïve participants.

 

In sum, these results indicate that meditation produces changes in the brain that allows for greater emotion regulation and less thinking about self. These neural changes may in part account for the improved mental health in meditators. They are better able to cope with emotions and respond to them constructively and take everything less personally. So, meditation appears to change the brain making it better able to respond more constructively and less personally to emption laden events.

 

So, meditate to respond more effectively to self-praise and criticism.

 

“mindful attention does not inhibit initial evaluations insomuch as it limits the automatic expansion of initial evaluative reactions into activation of a broader set of implications about the self and the world.” – Norman Farb
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Think more Clearly with Mindfulness

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“Typically, people want to see themselves in a positive light the majority of the time. Unfortunately, we may even do that at the cost of blaming others for things that may actually be our own fault. We want to believe we are responsible for good things, and someone or something else is responsible for the bad things. These wants cause the self-serving bias.” – Harmony A Robles

 

People in general tend to believe that they are rational and unbiased in their viewpoints, particularly in regards to themselves. But research has repeatedly demonstrated that this is not true. People are overly reactive to past experience, tending to act and think in the same way repeatedly even when a more accurate or productive mode is available. People tend to overreact to negative information giving it greater value in their thinking than positive information. People tend to believe that events are more likely to occur in the future if they have recent memories of their occurrence. If a belief is commonly accepted then it is more likely to be believed by the individual.

 

People generally fall prey to the gamblers fallacy believing that if an event hasn’t happened in a while that it is more likely to occur in the present. People tend to be wishful thinkers being over-optimistic and overestimate the likelihood of favorable and pleasing outcomes. People tend to overestimate the amount of influence they have over other external events. People also have a tendency to see themselves as less biased than other people. The list is much longer, but suffice it to say that our thinking is not as rational and unbiased as we tend to think it is.

 

Mindfulness has been shown to help correct some of their biased thinking. In particular, it’s been shown to help relieve individuals of being overly influenced by past experiences that is known as task sets (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/09/23/free-your-mind-with-mindfulness/). It’s been shown to improve decision making by improving reflective consideration of the information, ability to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information, reducing irrational behaviors, habitual tendencies, risky decisions, and overreacting to negative information See http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/09/12/make-better-decisions-with-meditation/). So mindfulness may be somewhat of an antidote for biased thinking.

 

In today’s Research News article “Dispositional Mindfulness and Bias in Self-theories”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1118220854868506/?type=3&theater

Hanley and colleagues investigate the relationship between levels of mindfulness and biased thinking about the self. In particular they looked at whether the individual had an even or a biased view of the permanence or changeability of intelligence and personality. They found that more mindful individuals tended to have a more balanced and unbiased view of the self.

 

These findings provide additional support for the notion that mindfulness assists us in seeing things, including ourselves, in a more rational and unbiased way and as a result to reason better, solve problems better, and be more creative.

 

So, be mindful and think more clearly.

 

“The true means of being misled is to believe oneself finer than the others.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Losing the Center

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For most people the self is the center of their universe. It is seen as the center of all experiences, as the initiator of all actions, and as the center of what they believe it means to be human. We are a very self-centered species. This has been useful from an evolutionary standpoint as it has fueled self-preservation and the desire to better the self. This has led to constructive and adaptive behaviors that have furthered the well-being of the individual and the species.

 

But, the idea of a self, of a center, also has its dark side. Problems with the self-image or a weak self-concept can produce suffering and maladaptive behavior. It can also lead to selfishness. It even leads us to miss how interconnected we are to other people, the earth itself, and the entire universe for that matter. This has led to a lack of appreciation of the environment which has resulted in devastating environmental degradation.

 

One of the many problems with the self, the center, is that it can exacerbate rumination which fuels depression and anxiety. Rumination is a repetitive thought process usually involving some negative life event or situation from the past or repeated worry about some potential negative event in the future. Rumination is a characteristic of anxiety and depression which focuses on past issues and future potential problems. In rumination, the individual is normally at the center, with all the repetitive thoughts revolving around the self.

 

Mindfulness training has been shown to decrease rumination and depression (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/08/15/spiraling-up-with-mindfulness/) and reduce worry, depression and anxiety (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/stop-worrying/). One hypothesis for mindfulness’ effectiveness is that it reduces the individual’s tendency to see the self as the center of everything. It may be producing a decentering such that events are no longer seen as personal. Occurrences then can be seen as just things happening that do not necessarily either involve or reflect upon the self.

In today’s Research News article “A shift in perspective: Decentering through mindful attention to imagined stressful events”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1115957915094800/?type=3&theater

Lebois and colleagues investigate whether mindfulness leads to decentering as evidenced by brain activity. They taught non-meditators a strategy for dealing with stressful events, mindful attention, which involved simply viewing events as fleeting experiences in the mind. They compared neural activity when imagining a stressful event between mindful attention and the normal self-centered process termed immersion. In general they found that immersion resulted in increased neural activity while imaging the stressful event, while mindful attention decreased neural activity. In other words, when the self was removed from the stressful event the nervous system became more relaxed, while when the self was the center of the stressful event the nervous system reacted more vigorously.

 

The systems in the brain that were activated differed between the mindful attention and the immersion conditions. In comparison to immersion, during mindful attention there was greater activation of brain areas that have been associated with changing ones perspective (Angular Gyrus), decision making and attentional control (Inferior prefrontal cortex), augmented inhibitory control (medial prefrontal cortex), and visual processing (inferior and middle occipital gyrus). In comparison to mindful attention, during immersion there was greater activation of brain areas involved when integrating visceral states, including the subgenual cingulate cortex, ventral anterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex/medial orbitofrontal cortex. These areas are associated with monitoring and processing reward, attending to feelings, and labeling stimuli as self-relevant. Thus, immersion appeared to engage stronger self, bodily, and affective responses than did mindful attention, consistent with engaging oneself in events physically, becoming immersed in them, and experiencing them as subjectively real.

 

These results suggest that mindful attention produced a shift in perspective that disengaged the sense of self from events, decentering. As a consequence, imagined events could be experienced as transitory mental states occurring in the present moment. These results further support the hypothesis that mindfulness reduces worry and rumination by removing the self from the evaluation of events. Hence, mindfulness’ effectiveness for anxiety and depression may be due in part to the removal of the self from one’s perspective on events, leading to a blunted impact of worry and rumination, leading to reduced anxiety and depression.

 

So, practice mindfulness and decenter.

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies