ego dissolution

(i haven’t actually gone through ego dissolution myself so i’m not going to write about it directly, but if you’re curious or unfamiliar with the term i think this is a decent intro to the topic in relation to the brain and to psychedelics)

sometime during high school i made a quora account and began receiving daily quora feed emails which i happily read. the quora algorithm has in my experience been extremely good at picking up on users’ intellectual interests, so of course it began supplying me with a lot of content about cognitive biases, and then other forms of mental deception like optical illusions. one of the more commonly-discussed illusions on quora back in the day was where you stare at your reflection in the mirror for a few minutes, at which point your reflection will begin to morph, particularly when the lighting is dim. people have reported seeing monsters, the faces of other people, the devil, and so on. i don’t remember which quora answers i read then but this post gives a good summary of the experience. people think it’s an analogue of the troxler effect, which is when your visual cortex gets lazy while looking at one thing continuously and begins behaving weirdly (eg. you’ve probably seen one of the optical illusions where you stare at a bunch of dots and some of them begin disappearing or whatever). the link hasn’t been proven but that’s what i’ll refer to it as because apparently people call it the strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion and writing that makes me feel dumb

anyway, i developed a lasting fear of looking at myself in mirrors afterwards because i was fairly averse to the idea of turning into a monster or into someone else and thought seeing that could be potentially traumatizing. (of course the logical solution would’ve been to stop using dim lighting, but this post is not about logical experiences.) for the past few years i’d focus on anything but my reflection while brushing my teeth or washing my hands. usually this isn’t much of an issue because i don’t apply facial products or shave or anything that requires extended mirror usage, but it became a bigger problem over this summer after getting my wisdom teeth removed; i had to perform a lot of annoying oral cleaning and would regularly spend around an hour a day standing in front of a mirror while peeking into my mouth

introspection is staring at your internal reflection as your perception of it changes, and the troxler effect here is staring at your literal reflection as your perception of it changes. which you might argue is a contrived comparison, but i think it begs the questions — how do you know if anything you introspect is a legitimate statement about you? why do we consider our realizations about ourselves to be real and what we see from the troxler effect to be fake? is any conception of your own identity fundamentally different from the distortions in the mirror? 

and on some level i realize that there is no difference here. every version of my ego has been a mirage. five years ago i thought i’d be a math researcher and three years ago i thought i was a rationalist and one year ago i thought i’d be a faang engineer and for now i am distancing myself from all of those things. someday i’ll also look at my present self with amusement and a healthy amount of ridicule, but knowing this hasn’t stopped me from constructing new egos or from being scared of the possibility of seeing my reflection change

i haven’t experienced ego dissolution but it’s funny how by default we’re all terrified of it, even though when i look back at my major identity shifts they’ve always felt positive and necessary and freeing for the version of me that went through them. i’m grateful for having undergone each of them, even though many have been direct contradictions of one another. and i guess this is a sign that i should be less scared about changes to my sense of self

after wisdom tooth surgery exacerbated my mirror problem i told a friend about it and sent them an article about the distortions. they read it and then immediately proceeded to try it out, i guess because they’re genuinely fearless or something, and i love that about them. they said they saw some strangers’ faces and enjoyed it

so i know this is a silly thing to write, but this week i took a deep breath, filled myself up with the joy of being alive, and looked into the mirror while washing my hands