About Ego death

Ego death is a change in one's sense of self-control.

Zen theorist Alan Watts often equates ego with the controller, which AI theorist Marvin Minsky would call the homunculus. Ego is the controller homunculus. Above all, I perceive myself as a controller, a cybernetic steersman of my thoughts and actions. Normally, we feel ourselves to be free entities wielding the power of control. But in the mystic altered state, this ordinary sense of freedom and power is cancelled out. Our freedom expands into insanely unrestrained freedom, but this freedom no longer is perceived as being in my control. My loss of the feeling of being a controller is the loss of the ego's power: ego death. Rationality also keeps pace with the experience of suspension of ego's control.

In the intense mystic altered state, rationality combines with a radically freed and innovative imagination to form what transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber calls 'vision-logic' -- a powerful concept and powerful mode of cognitive processing. Vision-logic enables you to feel, comprehend, and see that the ego's power to control might not really be its own source, but rather, a result of a deeper level of control that entirely precedes your control. Not that this deeper control happens prior to your control along the time-axis, but rather, it thusts forth your control from a hidden place that is beyond your control. Ego death is not only a feeling of cancellation of ego's power-to-control, but a rational understanding of the way in which ego's control can never be powerful in the way we usually assume and feel.

Mystic egolessness is a more advanced and powerful way of not having an ego. The mystic both has an ego and does not have an ego. He "has" an ego in that the cognitive structure of the ego and the general cognitive structure that is the egoic mental model of the world, remain intact and present if the enlightened mind chooses to use them. He "does not have" an ego, in the sense that his mind is not centrally identified with the ego structure anymore. The enlightened mind knows that the ego is only conventionally conceived of as the center, origin, and controller of all mental activity.

Once the structure of ego is built, it is preserved and you retain all the benefits of it, as a tool. In the schizophrenic mind, the structure of ego is not preserved -- it is effectively dissolved, destroyed, at great loss. The mystic mind advances through the ego and preserves the ego for its use; the insane mind destroys its ego and therefore loses the ability to use the ego. It is very bad to 'lose' the ego in the sense of destroying it. You only want to lose your ego in the sense of wiggling out of identification with it. You can only healthily lose your ego by constructing a mental conceptual system that is more integrated and consistent and true than the ego. Without a solid new foundation, you cannot leave the old accustomed foundation. It is not enough to find that the ego is (partly) false, you must identify and comprehend the true nature of the mind, self, and world, and their relationships. You must build a new world before leaving the old world, and even then, you must not destroy the old world -- just loosen it. Even the master engages his egoic structures almost all the time throughout the day -- but he knows they are largely based on invalid logic and on dreams taken as waking reality.

Watts focuses on enlightenment through taking frustration (about poor control) to its full development. Then you understand the true nature of control, through wrestling with it. Underlying all this wrestling with self-control is a deeper source of control that trumps our control. You learn to mentally see this prior or deeper level of control: the ground of being, from which emanates our every thought, choice, and mental tension. The only way to "trust" and "stop controlling" is to discover and clearly conceptualize the nature of self-control, and its relationship with the ground of being, or "the great Tao that flows everywhere". Then you realize that all your controlling has always been, by its very nature, flowing from a source beyond your control. Then, you are logically, conceptually forced to see that trusting is the only possible action, because you have always been at the mercy of the Tao, that intrudes even into your decisions. This isn't the very clearest wording possible, but it's how Watts describes the essence of enlightenment in _The Way of Zen_ and in the essay "Zen and the Problem of Control" in _This Is It_.
The Tao's control underlies all our sensation of lack of control and self-struggle, our inability to force and restrain our own thoughts, and our inability to silence our own mind. Watts portrays the method of Zen as "enlightenment through the complete frustration of control".

To completely unbind cognition in every way, completely and 100%, would be instant chaos. If your self-control were to fragment completely, you would die of a heart attack (that is, a mind-core breakdown). Perhaps cognition can only be mostly-loosened, not completely dis-integrated. Fear the complete disintegration of cognition. Hypoth: if cognition completely disintegrates, then you are not only metaphysically helpless; you are thoroughly incoherent and have no chance, no way to be coherent. Can loose cognitive binding completely suspend, completely loosen and remove all mental-construct binding? That is the sheer chaos, sheer insanity of which they are afraid -- even prayer to Jesus couldn't save you if your mind completely shatters. MC loosening -- cognitive loosening, vs. cognitive shattering. Want to make cognition rubber, not shatter it, not merely fall apart completely. That is the feeling for most people -- that's the worst, not that you'll retain force of will but sans accustomed code of behavior, but rather, you'll lose force of will along with code of behavior and along with every other type of mental structure as well -- lose your mental structure entirely, in all ways. That the accustomed structures and guiding forces, guiding systems are not merely disengaged, but actually quite beyond the ability to remember them -- "lost" control in the sense of being unable to find any accustomed cognitive structures. So that you literally don't know what you're doing; amnesia, replaced by sheer chaos, entirely unable to conceive of anything but sheer randomness of cognition. That's the worst possible fear.
the transcendent mental model coagulates, congeals, drops into place, flips into place - both by literally seeing and feeling it, and by rationally understanding it in detail, if your rationality is advanced. (in fact, rationality is required, to enable feeling it). The more you can reason about ego death, the more you can experience ego death. The more you can reason about unity consciousness, the more you can experience unity consciousness.

http://www.egodeath.com/egodeath.htm