The ego boundary is a false hallucination whose dissolution brings relief

Evidence

Any loss of control is always scary, but to me, giving up on the idea of a false boundary makes sense not only conceptually but phenomenologically. That’s not to say there’s no such thing as a self, only that it’s hard to say where it begins and ends when you think about it for even a few moments. Alan Watts once called the sensation of an ego a hallucination, “a completely false conception of ourselves as an ego inside a bag of skin.” Learning to see past this boundary can also be a relief. In “My Adventures with the Trip Doctors,” Michael Pollan experiences something like this relief during an ayahuasca experience with a seasoned guide. At some point during the trip, Pollan’s traditional self disintegrates: “‘I’ now turned into a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, and they were being scattered to the wind.” Later, his “I” changes again: “Everything I once was and called me, this self six decades in the making, had been liquefied and dispersed over the scene. What had always been a thinking, feeling, perceiving subject based in here was now an object out there. I was paint!” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 478

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with Pollan’s account of dissolving ego — useful raw material for the reader’s Deep Listening/bioregionalism method comparison, since the dismantling is phenomenological here rather than civic. — connects to: Self-enclosure in one’s own ego permanently blocks genuine connection to the other. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 497; Claiming to merge with another is itself an arrogance of master consciousness — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 672
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘false boundary’ of the self with Watts’s ‘bag of skin’ phrasing.