>>12188774>nope. for me it's best described by "not giving a fuck if I'm dead or not"This. It's nothing like a panic attack and is pretty much the opposite.
You can have a panic attack from psychedelics, but ego death is something totally different. You basically lose your sense of self, and no longer care about or even have your own personal desires or intentions or motivations. It's a very weird feeling. Psychedelics disrupt and block certain brain circuits, so it possibly could be blocking some of the internal processes that maintain that notion of "selfness".
The only time I experienced it, I distinctly remember thinking at the time "this is neither good nor bad and neither positive nor negative". I think that's kind of the best way to describe it. It's kind of an ultimate neutrality and dissolving of the separation between you and other things. In some ways you temporarily feel a little bit like an inanimate object, except for the whole "cogito ergo sum" stuff. It definitely lets you think about certain things more objectively.
My takeaway from it is kind of confirmation of what I already sort of knew: a lot of what goes on in the brain is kind of an evolutionarily-driven trick to increase the chance of you achieving goals. Your "soul" or "self" or even "consciousness" is sort of illusory, and you're at the mercy of whatever's going on in your brain.
But when the "illusion generator" is active and working as intended, it's at the same time also not an illusion; it's quite real. So I'm not trying to give some reductionist "we're all just a bunch of particles, bro" view. I don't think consciousness is fake - it's real when a brain is actively creating it. It's just good to remember that at the end of the day we're all obeying physical laws and everything is real or non-real depending on what level you look at it on.
