Ego death is the hypothetical state of consciousness in which you lose all sense of individual self. You become one with the “universe” or “God”.
Ego death - Wikipedia
I am curious if anyone here has ever achieved this state through intense spiritual practice and mediation. My exwife, who got me into Buddhism, told me her books she read spoke of such a process.
Question: is ego death real? Or is it simply the power of the brain’s creativity at work?
Question: is ego death a valid way to confirm God’s existence?
Extreme poverty causes many to lose the sense of themselves, and they welcome death as a release from their suffering.
Was Jesus interested in helping the poor, sick, and hungry? Yet, that was pretty much his entire preoccupation. So, if Jesus tended to the poor, we should too. So why aren't we??????
Take a look at
Los Angeles (I was there, and I saw). The picture, below, shows a little bit of sidewalk under the miles and miles of homeless tents. But I saw no sidewalk at all....they were jammed in there tight.
Unless you go to the inner city and look at the
homeless, you won't see them.
You won't see them in expensive cities (Beverly Hills, Belair, Newport Beach, Irvine), so many smug Christians assert that they don't exist because, quite frankly, they don't see them.
Part of the problem is that there are now
too many poor, so it is a small gesture to donate to the needed. There is
not enough money to help all of them. The middle class has been shoved into the poor class. We are
now a nation of the Haves and Have Nots. There are rich, there are poor, but there is no middle ground to speak of.
That middle class should be the largest segment of our population, and it is missing.
How did we lose the working middle class? The greedy politicians convinced us that
trickle-down works (though it has been shown, time and time again, that it does not). They said that if we cut taxes for everyone, the rich could build more efficient businesses then pay the workers more. The middle class got a small tax cut, while the rich got huge loopholes and folks like Bill Gates of Microsoft paid no taxes at all as he amassed over a hundred billion dollars, and Donald Trump took advantage of tax loopholes, and was blasted for it by the idiot Senator who made those loopholes). So did it help the economy? Nope, that was the year (2008, W. Bush administration) when the entire worldwide economy collapsed. Technically, it collapsed because of deregulated banks that loaned 125% of the value of houses. Once the houses dropped in value a little bit, the banks foreclosed on the loans, and that caused an avalanche of debts. Since the real estate market is far far larger than the stock market, the stock market was hit like a ton of bricks, and it took years to recover. Of course Republicans blamed Obama for having to pay for the Recovery Act (to build infrastructure...shoring up bridges, making stronger roads) to pay our way out of the recession and employ construction workers. Yet, the recovery act worked, and bailing out corporations was necessary because the failure of a few large corporations would create a domino effect and wipe out vast numbers of other companies, which would, in turn, wipe out others (with no end in sight).
Derivatives (land on the stock market) contributed to the collapse.
Hoarding decreased M1 (cash, a term of economists), which added to the woes.
The US had to bail out foreign owned businesses (we have to remember that all of the businesses on the stock market are traded internationally, and even the family of Osama bin Laden (a rich Arab family) owned parts of large corporations traded on the New York Stock Exchange. There is no guarantee that bailing out a stock will help a US owned company. For example, Renault (a French car company) owned 1/3 of Chrysler at the time that it was bailed out, and Cerberus (a collective of 100 millionaires) owned over 1/2 of Chrysler at the time. Cerberus was founded by a junk bond king, and no one is allowed to know who those investors are (bin Laden perhaps?). No one knows who owns America, but it is rather important to know that especially if we have to bail them out.
The needs of Jesus are inexorably tied to religion, economics, and politics.
We should have known that trickle down didn't work when Ronald Reagan's deregulation cut taxes for the rich and corporations, resulting in the failure of the FSLIC (savings and loan insurance, when they failed), and FDIC (which insures banks and had to be bailed out at the same time). America's steel companies failed (cheap foreign material and cheap foreign labor took their place). Cheap defective steel bolts broke in half and engines fell off of planes until ISO government regulated steel bolts were used in their place (so regulations and high standards of American production were necessary, after all). Air traffic controllers went on strike. Family farms, that were in the possesion of families for 300 years were failing right and left, so President Reagan announced that all of America's farmers (after 300 years of hard work) were simultaneously lazy. Yet documentaries showed that the farmers were working as hard as anyone could. Believe the realities, not the lies and cover-ups. Deregulation and lower taxation didn't work under Reagan's Voodoo Economics, nor did it work when W. Bush tried it in an even larger way.
Normal families are now losing their jobs and finding themselves homeless.
In Los Angeles, the price of rent is so high that many people working 2 jobs (with wives working 2 jobs) cannot afford rent....so they and their young children are homeless, and the
kids are basically dumped onto the streets, with drug pushers, addicts, prostitutes, and criminals, with no guidance (in Christian matters or morality) whatsoever.
The mean spirited Christians,
instead of tending to the poor, are vengefully attacking Gays, claiming that Gay sex is against their bible, and that Gay marriage somehow (I don't know how) wrecks Christian marriage. Jesus said "Judge not, lest ye be judged" and only God is the judge. So why are Christians trying to intrude their religion on others?
Meditation is not the only way to lose the sense of self....poverty will also do it. This explains why those who lost all hope are committing suicide in record numbers.