Jung, Buddhism, psychedelics, and the strange afterlife of “ego death”

Apparently, we’ve reached the point where someone has to defend the ego from people who want to kill it.

Which is a sentence I never expected to write.

Somewhere between Instagram spirituality, psychedelic culture, and New Age coaching, “kill your ego” has become one of those phrases that sounds profound enough to end a conversation while conveniently avoiding the inconvenience of actually knowing what the ego is.
“Release your ego.” Transcend your ego.”
“Dissolve your ego. “Ego death.”
Say it with enough confidence and a soft enough voice, and suddenly it sounds like psychological wisdom.

Except… what exactly are we talking about?

The more I listen, the more I hear the ego being described as some defective part of the human psyche that needs to be eliminated before we can become free or enlightened.
But before we start trying to destroy something, perhaps we should first understand what it actually is.

The ego is the centre of conscious psychological life.

It is not synonymous with narcissism, vanity, selfishness, arrogance, or the need to be better than everyone else.
The ego is the “I” that can say: I think, I feel, I remember, I choose.
It helps us organise conscious experience, distinguish ourselves from the world, establish boundaries, make decisions, and maintain a coherent relationship with reality.
The ego is not the whole personality, and it certainly is not the highest or deepest part of the psyche. But neither should we regard it as an enemy that needs to be annihilated.

A sufficiently stable and flexible ego is part of what allows us to encounter unconscious material without simply being overwhelmed by it.
And this is where the current obsession with “ego death” becomes particularly careless.

If a disturbance in the sense of self also involves a serious loss of the capacity to distinguish inner experience from external reality, we are no longer simply talking about a poetic spiritual metaphor.
In clinical psychology and psychiatry, serious impairment of reality testing can involve delusions, hallucinations, disorganised thinking, or profound disturbances in the distinction between inner experience and external reality.

That is not automatically enlightenment because the experience feels profound, mystical, or extraordinarily intense.
A person can have an extraordinary experience while still being able to say:
“This is something I am experiencing. I do not necessarily know what it means objectively.”
That distinction matters.

And this is also why the history of “ego death” matters.
The term is not an ancient psychological concept. Language such as “ego dissolution” and “ego loss” emerged in mid-twentieth-century psychedelic research, particularly in connection with LSD, as researchers attempted to describe experiences involving a weakening or disruption of the ordinary sense of self.
Today, “ego dissolution” is generally the more useful scientific term. It describes a phenomenon: a temporary alteration in the ordinary experience of being a distinct, bounded self.
That is a perfectly legitimate phenomenon to study.

But a phenomenon is not the same thing as the interpretation we place upon it.

The Bardo Thödol Isn’t a Manual for Killing Your Ego

This is where the history gets particularly interesting.

The Bardo Thödol, known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a Tibetan Buddhist text concerned with death, the intermediate states known as bardos, recognition, the nature of mind, liberation, and rebirth.
It belongs to a religious and philosophical tradition with its own vocabulary, assumptions, practices, and history.
It is not a manual for psychologically eliminating the ego.

There are genuine Buddhist teachings concerning non-self ~ anattā/anātman ~ and the absence of an inherently existing, permanent, independent self.
But that is not equivalent to saying, “Your ego is bad” or “Kill your ego and become enlightened.”
Those are different claims.

And that distinction became particularly important in the twentieth century.

In 1964, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They took a Western translation of the Bardo Thödol and used its structure and imagery as a framework for interpreting psychedelic experiences, particularly LSD.
They were not simply transmitting an ancient Tibetan teaching called “ego death.”
They were interpreting a modern psychedelic experience through a Western reading of a Tibetan Buddhist text.
That is a very different thing.

The Buddhist language of death, bardo, recognition, dissolution, and rebirth became intertwined with the psychedelic language of ego loss, ego dissolution, and eventually “ego death.”
What began as an interpretation became a cultural shorthand.
And eventually, the shorthand started being treated as if it were ancient wisdom.

And then, because apparently that still wasn’t enough, astrology, even Evolutionary Astrology, got involved and twisted.
Suddenly Leo is all about “ego,” a solar or lunar eclipse in Leo becomes an “ego death” portal, and throw in the South Node and apparently your old ego should be karmically dismantled.

Except even Jeffrey Wolf Green’s evolutionary astrology is considerably more complicated than that. n his system, the South Node is associated with prior egocentric structures of the Soul, while the ego itself is not some disposable psychological defect. It is a necessary function of consciousness – something the Soul actually creates in order to have a defined identity.
So when did “ego” become shorthand for everything we supposedly need to transcend, dissolve, purge, kill or die to?

That is precisely the problem: we keep using the word as though everyone means the same thing.
They don’t.
Except nobody seems to stop and ask the most embarrassingly basic question:
What exactly do we mean by “ego”?
The Jungian ego?
The Freudian ego?
The Buddhist concept of self?
Ordinary personal identity?
A psychedelic alteration in the experience of self?
A metaphor for narcissism?

These are not interchangeable concepts.

They come from different traditions, with different histories, different assumptions, and different meanings.
And this is where a little intellectual hygiene would go a very long way.

You cannot take a concept from Tibetan Buddhism, run it through 1960s psychedelic culture, filter it through Jung, sprinkle some astrology over it, and then present the final product as an ancient psychological truth.

That isn’t depth. That’s conceptual soup.

And this is one of the things that genuinely “fascinates” me about New Age culture.
There is a recurring tendency to take something that took centuries to develop – a religious tradition, a philosophical system, a psychological theory, a mystical text – remove it from its historical and intellectual context, keep the most dramatic five percent, and turn it into a slogan.
It sounds ancient. It sounds profound.

It is often considerably less profound once you actually go back and read the thing.

And that is precisely why psychedelic language, Jungian psychology, and Buddhist philosophy should not be treated as interchangeable.

Buddhist non-self is not the same thing as the Jungian ego.
Jungian ego is not the same thing as the Buddhist concept of self.
Psychedelic ego dissolution is not the same thing as Buddhist liberation.
And none of these automatically means psychological enlightenment.

You actually have to study the traditions you are borrowing from.
You have to know what the terms meant in their original context.
You have to understand the differences between traditions.
You have to distinguish a historical teaching from a later interpretation, and an interpretation from an experience.

Apparently, this is now the controversial position.

You can experience a profound dissolution of the boundaries of the self without that experience proving that your ego has literally “died,” that you have reached a higher state of consciousness, or that you have discovered some ultimate metaphysical truth.

This is precisely where I think many spiritual coaches make their largest conceptual leap.
They take a subjective experience and turn it into an absolute conclusion:
I experienced ego dissolution, therefore I transcended the ego, therefore I am more conscious, therefore I understand reality on a higher level.

That is an interpretation of an experience.

And sometimes it is a spectacularly inflated one.

And Then There Is Jung

Individuation is not the annihilation of the ego.

It involves developing a relationship between the ego and the wider totality of the psyche, which Jung called the Self.

The ego needs enough stability and flexibility to encounter unconscious material without simply being overwhelmed by it or possessed by it.

The point is not to have no ego.

The point is to have a relationship with it.

The ego is necessary. It gives us identity, continuity, individuality, boundaries, and a way to function in the world.

The problem is not the ego itself, nor the fact that we need to stand up for ourselves and defend ourselves, but our identification with it — when the story the ego has constructed about who we are becomes something we feel compelled to defend; when we begin to perceive that image as our true and only “I.”

This is where Buddhism’s teaching of anattā, or not-self, becomes relevant. It does not mean that we have no identity. It points to the absence of a permanent, independent self behind our changing thoughts, feelings, perceptions, roles, and experiences.

We suffer when we cling to these things.

Instead of “I am a failure,” we can see “the thought of failure is arising.”
The experience is real.
The identification with it is optional.
And this is also why an “ego crisis” should not automatically be romanticised as spiritual awakening. When a familiar identity begins to collapse, it can be transformative – but it can also be psychologically destabilising.

Buddhist liberation is not the destruction of the ego.

It is the loosening of our attachment to the idea that the ego is a permanent Self.

You can still have a personality, a name, career, relationships, ambitions, boundaries, and a life. You simply stop mistaking them for the whole of who you are.

And there is a rather beautiful psychological paradox here: even “ego death” can become material for a new ego.
“I have transcended my ego.”
“I am awakened.”
“I am beyond ordinary consciousness.”
“You still have an ego; I have moved past mine.”
And suddenly the ego has not disappeared at all.
It has simply found a much more sophisticated story about its own superiority.

The honest question is not:
“How do I kill my ego?”
but:
“What is my ego doing here, and what is it trying to protect?”

“Can I remain myself even when being myself risks changing how someone sees me?”
“Can I face painful parts of myself without immediately turning away because I am afraid of how they might be perceived?”
“Is this actually what happened, or is this the story I am telling myself about what happened?”
“What am I feeling, and what is underneath that feeling?”
“Am I reacting to what is happening now, or to something from my past?”
“Can I tolerate not knowing?”
“Can I admit that I might be wrong?”
“Can I change my mind without feeling that I have lost myself?”
“Do I need to be right, or do I actually want to understand?”
“Am I listening to this person, or am I already preparing my response?”
“Can I disagree with someone without needing to diminish them?”
“Can I set a boundary?”
“Can I accept someone’s boundary without experiencing it as rejection?”
“Can I be close to someone without losing myself?”
“Can I be alone without feeling that I have no value?”
“Can I receive love without needing constant reassurance?”
“Can I love someone without making them responsible for my sense of worth?”
“Am I projecting something onto this person that actually belongs to me?”
“Am I making this relationship about connection, or about validation?”
“Can I see the other person as they are, rather than as I need them to be?”
“Can I experience something profound without turning it into proof that I am above others?”
“Can I remain connected to myself without constantly reshaping who I am to remain accepted by others?”

The problem was never that we have an ego. We do. And it function is very significant.

The problem is that people keep talking about “the ego” as though it were a psychological defect without understanding what it actually is.

And honestly, before we start telling people to “kill the ego,” perhaps we could do the remarkably unspiritual thing of learning what the ego actually is – and what the fuck it is there for.

-TEA