A piece I wrote regarding "who we are"?

I used to have dissociative symptoms with my bipolar. They went away, but a few months afterwards I tried a dissociative drug (methoxetamine). A couple of months ago I wrote an account of what it was like, and what we can learn from dissociation:


So, I had the recent mixed pleasure of reading my old blog, which dates back to me being as young as fourteen. As I was reading it, I couldn't help but feel slightly embarrassed about how objectively dumb and lacking in substance my words were, yet somehow impressed at the relative intelligence for someone in school. But it got me thinking. As I was reading, certain sentences evoked vague, faint memories that were somehow slightly familiar to me, with the occasional concept provoking a sudden "oh wow, yeah" moment. But for some reason, it was a lot more like reading the words of someone who isn't me, yet at the same time someone I'm familiar with. The personality seemed unfamiliar, but it was some form of my previous ego.

This got me thinking about the ego. What is the ego? Most people have heard of it, psychology students have a basic idea of what it is, and people who've used certain drugs in the past (including myself) have experienced its temporary death. It was through all this, the ego death, the changes, the days upon weeks upon months upon years that have both changed me into something unrecognisable, and at the same time, something which keeps me and everyone else on this planet going. Many, what I would call "serious" or "enlightenment-seeking" drug users attempt to experience ego-death, that is to say, a temporary state where the sense of "I", "me" and "myself" stops existing, in order to… well, there are a number of reasons. When I experienced ego death on analogues of Ketamine, I spoke and my voice wasn't mine. I typed on my computer, but my typing was only able to happen because it was a muscle-memory. But we are not our muscle-memories. We are the sum of our sense of familiarity. When I was coming back from outer space, very slowly, very gradually, very, very disturbingly, different facets of who I am began to return to me.

Herein lies the problem for some people. Many people experiencing the loss of ego feel exhilaration when they're there, because everything they hated (i.e. themselves) has disappeared. They, as I was, are merely tabula rasas experiencing sensory information in diluted form. And, while it's comforting to come back down to earth, to re-realise that you're a person, you're a defined being with specific characteristics, some people collapse, spiritually speaking, under the weight of their own self-hatred. The tendency is that one can learn a lot about one's self this way. When the dissociative effects of the methoxetamine were wearing off, I took a whole new look at who I was.

I would suppose this all seems very abstract to anyone who hasn't experienced this level of dissociation. Sometimes, when you've had a lot to drink, you forget, every now and then, for a moment, where you are, what you're doing. It's a bit like that, only it's a thousand times more intense and unlike alcohol, your superego or your "rationality" attempts to take over and ward off dangers. Dissociation is such a powerful force, that can happen to anyone at any time, given the right psychological conditions, that it can produce anaesthetic effects. This is one of the reasons why people self harm. Severely depressed individuals cut, burn, stab themselves because in a world where the only feelings are anaesthetic numbness and a complete lack of identity, pain is a welcome reminder that you are still alive.

And indeed, many depressed people will be stuck in this state of identity death for most of their lives. They often end up killing themselves, an act often aided by the perception that there is no "self" to kill anyway; it's just like putting an object down, putting this tabula rasa to sleep and ending the madness. But this is not all a bad thing. In fact, it can be enlightening, if interpreted in the correct way. You do not need to have tried, want to try or ever try dissociative or any similar drugs to understand what I am about to say. Our egos are us and we are our egos. We are simple synaptic collective mechanisms. In going back and looking and things you've written in the past, in listening to people tell you what you used to be like, hell, in meeting people you used to know when you were "someone else", you can, if you really will it so, learn to accept that you are the sum of everything you've done, and if you're not happy with who you are just yet, you still have the time to be the sum of what's to come.

We're all atoms. We're all chaos. But we're all defined. There might not be a God, but the potential for happiness is unlimited.