Last Notes
Ego Death Builds A new Ego
Ego death has become something people pursue. There are retreats built around it, ceremonies that promise it, and a steady supply of writing about how to get there. The implied arc is that the ego is a problem, the problem can be solved, and solving it produces a person who sees clearly and wants little. I think the whole arc is aimed at the wrong thing, because the ego was never the trouble.
The ego is the function that holds a person together well enough to act. It keeps a continuous story running so you can make a decision today that still makes sense tomorrow, remember what you value under pressure, and move through a day without re-deriving your entire position on everything. Strip that out and what you have is someone who cannot function, which is a condition we already have names for and do not generally recommend. What causes trouble is narrower. The ego gets the final say on everything, including questions where it has no business being the authority, and the available fix for that is demotion.
It's worth looking at what happens in the one setting where any of this gets measured. In 2015, Lebedev and colleagues scanned fifteen people who received psilocybin intravenously and reported their degree of ego dissolution. What they found was a loss of integration. Communication between the medial temporal lobe and higher cortical regions dropped, the salience network came apart, and coordination between the hemispheres fell. The salience network is the thing that decides what in your environment gets flagged as worth your attention, so when it disintegrates, the ordinary business of sorting the world into relevant and irrelevant stops happening.
In plain terms, the machinery that assembles a coherent self from moment to moment stopped coordinating. The self stayed where it was. What paused was the stitching.
That's a small study, and measuring something this subjective is difficult, so hold the specifics loosely. The shape of the finding matters more than the numbers. What dissolves is an integration, and integrations reassemble. Everyone in that scanner was themselves again a few hours later, which tells you the main thing worth knowing about ego death. It's a state. Whatever happened, it ended, and the person it happened to went back to having preferences and opinions and a sense of being someone in particular.
The harder claim, and the one I'd defend most strongly, is that when the real version happens, nobody chose it. It arrives through a diagnosis, a bankruptcy, a marriage ending, a career that stops existing, a public failure that cannot be explained away. It shows up when the story you had been running about who you are stops being able to account for what is actually happening, and you cannot get the story working again no matter how hard you push. That is an event, and it happens to you.
The pursued version is a different thing wearing the same name. A ceremony is a controlled encounter with dissolution that comes with a return ticket, a facilitator, and a scheduled end time. People get real things from it and I am not dismissing that. But the knowledge that you'll be back by Sunday does most of the work of making it survivable, and that knowledge is exactly what the involuntary version withholds.
This connects to something I argued in the book and still believe. Constraint reveals character rather than building it. Pressure removes the room a person had to perform in, and what's underneath becomes visible, to them most of all. Involuntary ego death is that taken to its limit, which is what happens when the room disappears entirely and there's nothing left to perform for. You cannot want this, and if you're seeking it, you're almost certainly not in it.
So what actually dies. The self survives, still preferring coffee to tea, still annoyed by the same people. What ends is a specific story, the version of yourself you had been defending, the account of who you are that your decisions were arranged around. People describe this as losing themselves and I understand why, because from the inside the story and the self aren't distinguishable, which is the whole problem the book is about. What goes is narrower than it feels. It was a narrative, it was always a construction, and its collapse feels like annihilation because you had never located yourself anywhere outside it.
Then comes the part almost nobody mentions. A new story assembles immediately, within weeks and sometimes days. The machinery that built the first one is still fully operational and it doesn't sit idle waiting for permission. It takes the most salient material available, which is now the collapse itself, and it builds.
The new identity is a person who lost everything and came through it, who has seen what matters, who is no longer fooled by the things that fool everyone else. That identity has the same properties as the one it replaced. It confers standing, it would cost something to give up, and it generates its own defensive reflexes, which are harder to examine than the originals because examining them looks like doubting hard-won wisdom rather than questioning a position. It's also why people who have been through genuine ego death are so frequently insufferable about it. That's the machine doing the thing the machine does, with better raw material than it usually gets.
None of which means nothing happened. Something did, and it can matter enormously. What changes is that you watched the story come apart and reassemble, and you were present for the assembly. You saw the seams. A person who has seen their own story get built has a harder time believing the next one arrived from somewhere outside of them, which is a smaller claim than enlightenment and the one that survives.
So the available thing is demotion. The ego keeps running, because you need it running, and it keeps producing verdicts. What changes is whether its verdict is final, whether there's a gap between the reaction and the ruling, and whether anything else gets to speak in that gap. That doesn't require a ceremony or a catastrophe. It requires noticing, repeatedly, that the voice insisting it knows is the same voice that has been wrong before, and declining to give it the last word on this particular occasion.
It also doesn't stay done. It has to be done again tomorrow, and the day after, and it never produces a person who has finished, which is probably why nobody sells retreats for it.
🌻 EAST CHARLOTTE FARMER’S MARKET! 🌻
Stop by @mclawlandfarms market this Wednesday 10/28 from 3-6:30pm
Last date this year with your favorite local farmers, growers, bakers, makers and producers. Shop local and connect with the people behind the products.
@eastside_bestside_clt_
COME TRY FREE FUEGO
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https://blossom.primal.net/b2a3e2e2fdbaf6140d50be3859ec63214fdf462c077c740f33a5bac74fd0a6ff.webp
Really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for the opportunity to come on 🤝
***Bitcoin Merchant***
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Find them at the @concordmillsnc food court
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This flavor has quickly become a customer favorite 🔥
It’s only around for a limited time!
https://borntobefree.store/products/cinnamon-spice-tallow-lip-butter
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By the way, is there any way to do deepfakes and that sort of video editing? Or audio editing? I was trying to deepfake a person in a video with a second provided picture and couldn't get it to work at all. Even the models that have both IMG to vid and vid to vid can't seem to do this. Especially since this is the biggest normie use case for ai and all of the solutions that do it are shitty single purpose "sign up for free trial and forget" apps. And it seems OAI and Gemini refuse any deepfakes of public figures.
Also, if you could figure out a way to provide the audio and video models as tools available to a text model with visual input, it would massively help some use cases.
I tried to VPN to my house from the hospital and found out their firewall was blocking everything except TCP 80/443
Be honest when you listen to this. Is Kratter making shit up or is Jack not being 100% here. I think the latter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ck-rrBusxk
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Song credit 🔥 https://wavlake.com/track/4d744796-36b2-429f-a40d-8069a2b0a55a
I say this as I play with my phone. So... Pot, kettle, black or whatever.
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Check out the new episode of The Bitcoin Edge @npub1d9d…6h5w with @npub10xv…g437 ⚡️🍿
#nevent1q…stpc
Check out my custom hoodies!
I LOVE THESE DESIGNS! 🤩
Thank you @npub1a6z…vhjk 💜⚡️
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This is something that I want to know more about. Swan Lake Remixed with the National Opera and Ballet from the Netherlands and the Irish Dance Collective. https://v.nostr.build/riTziGkxIy6g5XpIBetAXl.mp4
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Hmm, I dunno. You sorta know when you are inputting a low value answer, as it's typically a very short list you've built in your head for valid answers. So, I guess being able to unblock/discard quickly and move on is a skill?
Kinda wanna play another now...lemme see if you can play past ones...
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There is a soy dog template there too which you can remix with other template ones like the radio events one, notifications, the playlist events and publish own playlist from there in theory, I like the idea of mixing into one napplet from many that you can also publish separately in different combinations or by themselves, as kind 1 only is boring.
That's a good point. The degradation of sexual discipline often seems to coincide with the downfall of societies.
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🏀 Yaxel Lendeborg is making an early statement in Golden State: through five games, the Warriors rookie is averaging 22.6 PPG, 9.2 RPG and 4.0 APG. He’s already posted a 31-point, 12-rebound, 6-assist game against Denver and followed with 26 points and 9 boards vs. Minnesota. #NBA
Apparently. She had no wrinkles. She also had no pores.
Jumble shows unsupported kind, but I've been using amethyst desktop so i saw it the first time 😁😂
There have been free sex cultures before. They never last long.
i'm so nervous i want to ragebait a dog
I thought this was real, but the little chat near the end, both the animation and the actors are AI.
Few. No actor was dumb enough to entertain this idea. 😂
Or the author of this video is unserious enough to not bother getting a proper crew to build this "ad". Either way.
That is more tricky for sure. I find the buffer of more people helps me as I can go find anyone else to talk to. As far as the mental health goes, you have to do what's right for you. If you can go and have a good time, definitely go.
My mama always said "my name ain't huh or what. When I call, you come."
This have anything to do with the drama we talked about at NostrValley? The potential vc shit.
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Start Doing Graph Theory
https://vertex.degree
Sending 🫂 with no questions asked.
This. And when they're black, green, and fuzzy...😐
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Told my wife that when I die I want my ashes shot out of a canon while Kenny Loggins "Danger Zone" plays to a synced laser show. It's in writing and no inheritance unless she pulls it off successfully 🤣
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Brain cell computing
https://youtu.be/mwISkfdRN4o
Crazy about the Spanish train. 😔
This.
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When they leave juices on the counter it's time to trash them.
I thought bananas were never too bad for banana bread. Guess I was wrong
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The People Who Make the Internet Feel Like Home
https://pablomurad.com/the-people-who-make-the-internet-feel-like-home/