The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Ego death, Individuation and the cyclical journey of self

“I have a question regarding ego death or “dying before you die”. What is it and how does it manifest? I am not a stranger to the subject and have read many traditional teachings on it. But I am interested to get your views as you have a unique way of clarifying such concepts. What happens after an ego death? One of my fears is that I will no longer care about my family or other people. Am also interested to see how your understanding matches up with modern psychotherapy theories such as Jung’s concept of individuation.”

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Death and birth are two sides of the same coin.

The notion that death is an “end” results from the limitation of our perspectives.

Look at the universe around you. There is no such thing as an ‘end’ in an absolute sense. All ends are merely relative to the limited contexts within which they occur in.

Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It merely transforms from one form into another. Every end is really a beginning. Every beginning, an end. That is the nature of all things cyclical.

To the infant in the womb - being forced out of the birth canal feels like death, which is why it comes out screaming. Until it feels the familiar warmth of its mother and the nourishment of her breast - and the realization gradually dawns that what it believed was a death was really a birth into a vaster experience than that of the womb.

The death of day is the birth of night. The death of winter is the birth of spring. There is no such thing as an infinitely straight line in reality. Even events that appear to be linear, when seen at macroscopic scales, reveal themselves as curves within cycles that perpetuate eternally.

There is perhaps no spiritual term as widely misunderstood as that of the ‘ego death’. And who can blame people? How are egos supposed to comprehend their own deaths?

Death is the transformation of the context within which reality unfolds. And egos are fundamentally bound to the contexts in which they exist.

So, when you ask questions like:

“Will I cease to care about my family and others after an ego death?”

…it is like a fetus asking:

“Will I still be loved by mother when the umbilical cord is cut?”

The fetus does not realize that what awaits it on the other side is the direct experience of mother in ways it cannot even imagine.

In reality, the ego doesn’t die in an ‘ego death’.

The ego is reborn as something vaster that it’s limited identity.

It becomes its manifest potential. It becomes the very being it has been incubated to be, in the darkness of the womb that is the unconscious life.

Yet, the ego cannot choose its own death (rebirth). Just as the unborn infant, cocooned in its own oblivion, never willingly chooses the journey through the birth canal. It must be pushed. It must be contracted. Even if violently. In the midst of all the blood, pain and mess the mother’s body can muster. In the midst of its mother’s own screams.

Have you ever wondered that the birth canal from the inside must look to the fetus exactly like a dark tunnel with a light at the end of it? Can you imagine how terrifying that must be for the infant? To go from its silent muffled existence to being ejected into the midst of total chaos, noise and sensory explosion?

On the other side, everyone claps and celebrates at the new arrival. But to the infant there can be nothing more horrifying!

Ego deaths are painful and chaotic by nature. Because it is a transition between realities. It is the dissolution of everything known and a resurrection within a radically more complex and sensual experience.

When a baby leaves the womb, it has not lost anything. Its limbs are intact, its heart still beats. Except now there is a new impetus to its life. Curiosity, growth, experience. There is now a world of multiplicity to interact with. And with each interaction, new ways in which that same self can enhance and evolve.

Similarly, when an ego goes through an ego death (rebirth) - it is a fallacy that the ego ends. In reality, it steps into an enhanced and vaster version of self. One that is driven by a completely different impetus. There is an oceanic field of being, of pure conscious potential, that it is plugged into and that it can interact with. And through these interactions, the same self further enhances and evolves.

And just as the mother’s love of the fetus is not diminished but gains new vistas to expand and grow - so also does the ego’s most cherished and authentic bonds of love not only endure but further deepen and enhance in ways the ego could not have previously conceived of within the black box of its unconscious existence.

In my own life, every fear I ever projected of what that process would yield at the other end was utterly unfounded. Not only were those fears misplaced but the reality that actually unfolded after coming out of that proverbial death tunnel (birth canal) was diametrically opposite to any doom and gloom scenario my mind had ever projected.

Why do we develop egos in the first place?

Human beings are born into this world of multiplicity whose boundaries are defined by the quality of separation. And so, the human mind adapts at an early age by mirroring the separation it sees in the world and internalizing it through the development of an ego. Just like a chameleon changes its color and textured appearance to resemble a brown tree branch in the background - our sense of self adapts to this world of diverse experiences, histories, beliefs, roles and narratives by taking the form of an equally diverse and complex ego. The more complex our social environments, the more complex our egos become to mirror that diversity of experience.

Yet, beneath the seeming separation of the world lies a unified and singular field of beingness which remains obscured for most people. Through experiences of deep suffering precipitated by intense feelings of separation and alienation from the whole, there may arrive spontaneous glimpses into this underlying singularity. Eventually, when the time comes to transition again, the ego experiences a death (rebirth). This time into a world of beingness - where the diversity and multiplicity of the previous world now appear as a thin, outstretched, translucent veil over a unified field of presence. And the self once again adapts by transforming to reflect the nature of its new reality - by internalizing and mirroring this presence, while maintaining the thin and translucent veneer of a personality.

These are not choices anyone willfully makes. These are the dynamics of how consciousness evolves in all human beings.

Just as a fetus cannot be born until it has grown too large for the uterus and the womb pushes it out (often against the fetus’ own will), the ego cannot experience its death (rebirth) until the womb of consciousness has incubated it long enough and is ready to transition it. And just like a fetus can never know what it feels like to be a human child, no matter how many stories it overhears from beyond the walls of its mother’s womb, an ego can never know what the experience of what lies beyond its own death (rebirth) will be like, no matter how many spiritual teachings it has heard or how many scriptures it has read.

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You asked me how this all tracks with a Jungian perspective. The way I see it, Jung’s views on individuation greatly complement what I have spoken about.

To illustrate this, let me use another analogy.

Imagine a man who has been paralyzed from the waist down since birth. In other words, he has only ever had awareness of the top half of his body. He can see his own legs, but they are like his nails or hair to him. He cannot feel them, so he doesn’t have any sense of attachment to them.

(This is what every human infant or toddler feels like when it looks in the mirror. It sees its own reflection, but it feels no connection to it. It may even know that reflection belongs to it but there is no attachment there. The ego is not yet born. The basic structure is in place (just like the legs of the paralyzed person are in place) but the connection to the ego has not yet occurred.)

Now imagine that one day, quite spontaneously, the man begins to gain feeling in his legs. At first it trickles in and then after some time it begins to flood his senses. Imagine his newfound curiosity and sense of excitement!

(This is how young children feel when they first begin to recognize themselves in the mirror as “me”. The birth of the ego arrives with a sense of fascination, curiosity and enhancement. The things you can do with the ego!)

His newfound infatuation with his legs comes at the expense of everything else. He ceases to care about the rest of his body. He becomes completely transfixed by what he can do with his legs. He can stand, walk, run, cycle, hike, ski - the options are limitless.

Over time, he takes his infatuation to an extreme where his legs begin to ache. After a while, the pain becomes constant and unbearable. He cannot stop thinking about his legs. He is perpetually preoccupied with them. His days and nights are spent seeking remedies - massages, medicines, oils and creams, herbs and tinctures, exercises and rehab - to minimize and manage the pain.

Eventually, one day he comes to realize that his legs are really part of a whole body. And that his one-sided infatuation is what has led to this state of affairs. Gradually, he begins to connect to the other parts of himself. He learns to notice how his back and abdomen, torso and shoulders connect to and impact his legs and are likewise impacted by them. He comes to learn that the body is a seamless whole.

Then one day, the pain in his legs subsides. And he realizes that his attention is no longer captured by his legs. He experiences his body as a unified whole and not disparate parts.

Now, think of the human mind as those “legs”. When a child is very young it is like the paralyzed man. It is unaware of its own mind. Yet, the day that awareness dawns, its own mind becomes its infatuation. The infatuation grows so intense over time that the child disconnects from the awareness of its own being in favor of the mind. In the process it begins to identify with the mind constructed identity, the ego, and loses all recognition of the being that is its core truth.

Over its lifetime, this infatuation and hyperfocus grows and with it comes the suffering. At a certain point the suffering becomes so intense that the individual’s attention is entirely captured by the mind’s version of reality. Days and nights are spent learning to manage, to cope, to alleviate the suffering of the mind - the therapy, the teachings, the practices, the retreats act as the proverbial ointments, medicines, herbs and creams for the mind. None work for too long.

Eventually, one day the individual comes to realize, after much trauma and suffering, that the mind is an aspect of a larger whole. And the process of integration commences. Until there arrives a day when attention is no longer captured by the mind but rather defaults towards that vaster field of being that exists prior to the mind.

This is individuation. When the ego is no longer felt as something separate from the being. Just as the man, in the analogy, no longer feels his legs as being something separate from his body.

In other words, we are not saying the ego ceases to exist. It simply ceases to be experienced as something separate from being. It no longer captivates one’s attention. It no longer occupies front and center stage. It no longer pretends to be the whole self. It relegates itself to a purely functional role. Much like our legs do not demand our constant attention except when they are required for functional purposes.

It is only when we are in pain that we typically become aware of our body parts is it not? As I type this, are you consciously aware of the ring finger on your left hand? Most likely not, unless it is injured or irritated in some way.

The nature of awareness is to become unaware of that which is already whole, integrated and does not require its attention.

In other words, when one is individuated in the Jungian sense, one does not experience one’s ego as something separate from being.

We are drawn to be aware of that which is unhealthy, injured, diseased or dissonant. But when health is the case - we naturally default to unawareness unless we deem it necessary.

You could become aware of your ring finger if you set your intention. But chances are when you get bored, you will default to unawareness. Why? Because your ring finger doesn’t need you to waste your time being aware of it! (This is why meditating on the breath for an extended period of time is hard. Because our breath doesn’t need our attention! However, if you were suffocating or finding it hard to breathe your attention would most certainly immediately go to your breath quite naturally.)

Similarly, when the mind becomes fully integrated and healthy, it no longer demands attention. It no longer needs to dress up in an “ego costume” and act out the narrative of its trauma and separation.

What would your life look like if the narrative you told yourself about it disappeared and yet nothing actual (the events, the relationships, the places, the experiences) changed?

What if all you lost was your story, not your life?

What if all you ceased to be was who you think you are, not that which you are?

That’s what my own experience of ego death, individuation (or whatever else you want to call it) has been.

All the dots that animated this life remain. Only the imaginary lines I once used to connect those dots have faded.

In giving up my story, I am left with my history.

In stepping out of my ego costume, I am left with my naked self.

In losing my mind, I have found sanity.