Losing Your Ego Sounds Like Heaven. Some People Just Go Cold

Imagine two people who have both stopped caring about themselves.

The first gives away their time and money freely, sits with dying strangers, and seems strangely light, as if a weight they once carried has been put down. The second has also stopped worrying about what others think. They no longer feel embarrassment, guilt or much of anything when someone else is hurt.

From a distance, both could be described as having lost their ego. One looks like a saint. The other looks cold.

Almost every contemplative tradition says that letting go of the self is the way to freedom. Christianity speaks of losing your life to find it. Buddhism teaches not-self. Sufism describes fanā, the passing away of the self in God. Today the phrase people use is "ego death."

So what does that phrase actually mean in the traditions? Why is the goal supposed to produce more connection rather than less, how can the process go wrong, and how do you tell the difference?

The question bothered me because of how egolessness looks from the outside. I wrote it this way:

"How come becoming egoless is presumed to be more connected to the whole if locally egoless behaviour can lead to separation from human norms and thus perhaps human community itself?"

And then, more bluntly:

"Could the argument be posed that those closest to the Observer within them are actually the sociopaths?"

What Is Supposed to Die

The word "ego" causes confusion because it means different things to different people.

In the contemplative sense, ego is not your personality, your memory or your ability to function. Teachers in these traditions still ate, taught, kept schedules and remembered names. It is the sense of being a separate self that has to be defended: the constant background work of protecting an image, comparing yourself with others and treating your own experience as the center of everything.

Ego death, in that sense, is the dropping of that defensive center. People who report it describe a loss of the boundary between themselves and everything else, followed, at least ideally, by a sense of belonging to the whole. Researchers studying such experiences have even built questionnaires to measure "ego dissolution," and the reports are consistent enough to compare.

Losing Your Life to Find It

The Christian version of this idea is centuries old. Paul's letter to the Philippians describes Christ as one who "made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant" (2:7, KJV). Theologians call this kenosis, self-emptying.

In the sixteenth century the Spanish mystic John of the Cross described what he called the dark night of the soul, a painful period in which familiar comforts and certainties fall away. He treated it as a stage of purification, not the destination.

Buddhism makes the same pairing explicit. The teaching of not-self is never presented alone. It sits alongside compassion, karuṇā, and in the Mahayana schools the ideal figure is the bodhisattva, who vows to keep working until every being is free from suffering. Seeing through the separate self is supposed to make that vow natural rather than heroic, because there is no longer a firm line between your suffering and anyone else's.

None of these traditions describe the end state as indifference. The self that is lost is the one standing between the person and others. What is supposed to remain is love.

When It Goes Cold

That is exactly where things can go wrong.

In 1984 the psychologist John Welwood coined the term "spiritual bypassing" for using spiritual ideas to avoid unresolved emotional problems. A person can adopt the language of non-attachment and use it to step back from grief, conflict and other people's needs. The detachment looks like progress, but it is avoidance.

Psychiatry also describes depersonalization, a state in which people feel detached from their own thoughts and body, as if watching themselves from outside. It can sound like a description of awakening, but people who experience it usually describe it as flat, unreal and distressing, not as freedom.

And a person with psychopathic traits may appear free of anxiety and self-doubt while having a very large ego in the ordinary sense: little empathy and a strong focus on their own interests.

Telling the Difference

So how do you tell the saint from the cold one? I think the difference is what disappears.

In the cold version, concern for others drops away while the self quietly stays in charge. In the version the traditions describe, it is self-concern that drops away, and what is left over flows outward. The test is not how little someone feels. It is whether their care has grown or shrunk.

I asked about the suffering side of it once:

"So the overcoming of that suffering or rather the association with the suffering (or any other sensation) is what they would call ego death right?"

My understanding now is close to that. The feelings still arise. What changes is that they no longer have a separate self to stick to and defend.

What Is Left Over

That answers my sociopath question, at least for me. Being close to the observer within does not mean watching other people suffer from a distance. If the separation between you and others was part of what dissolved, their suffering is no longer someone else's problem.

Real ego death, as the traditions describe it, should make a person warmer, more available and easier to live with. If letting go makes someone colder, that is a sign that something other than ego death is happening, whether it is avoidance, detachment or simply a self that has learned to sound spiritual.

That is the practical measure I keep coming back to. Not how much of yourself you have let go, but whether the people around you can feel the difference.