In a way, people live in two worlds. This is exemplified by how most of us ruminate. Thanks to our complex language, we can supercharge our minds with plethora of concepts. Not only that, but we are also able to compare, combine and make these concepts interact with one another. To say we have a world inside our heads is not an exaggeration. It grants us with astounding problem-solving ability, but our bodies can’t seem to distinguish between the world inside and the world outside.
To use the example of rumination: Someone said something hurtful and while the situation has long passed, it still lives inside your head. Not only are you able to retain the words, their meanings, and the person with zero external stimulus, you are able to come up with a variety of hypothetical courses of actions and alternative meanings behind the words. Oh, and your body is most likely in some type of emotional state while your thoughts revolve around what happened, despite nothing happening in the real world.
To get to the point: You can populate your mind with stand-ins for real things, and your body has a tenuous grasp on the difference between the real thing and the stand in. This includes a stand-in for you. Yourself. Now that makes things real spicy. Let’s call that stand-in ego, but in neutral sense with no connotation to arrogance or selfishness. It’s just a mental representation of yourself, a psychic avatar, and when our bodies make the mistake of regarding it as it would your corporeal self, we fall for the idea it’s something that requires protection. And boy, are the threats aplenty. It can be hurt (or perceive hurt) by what are just symbols for various things, and our heads have no shortage when it comes to symbols, all thanks to our complex language.
I think herein lies the appeal of ego death. If you understand on an experiential level the falsity of the psychic self, how it’s more akin to an online avatar rather than your representative, you would be liberated from every symbolic threat that stems from the make-believe world that is the psychic realm, the curse and the blessing of the cognitively hypercompetent species that we are.
The extreme options of turning into a monk or taking a heroic dose of psychedelics are not a viable nor recommendable for everyone. Until then, various techniques to avoid getting trapped in the psychic whirlpool can be helpful. I think this is what mindfulness is trying to teach you by turning you into an observer rather than participant of your thoughts. In a way, it’s creating distance between your symbolic self and symbolic content. The self is still around, it just won’t make a racket if it feels secure.
Another way is by using words. I’m taken aback how powerful they can be at steering your internal world in a preferable direction. I assumed the feeling of lying to yourself would undermine this approach, but as it turns out, that’s not necessarily how it goes. Does it take more effort? Absolutely. If you feel sad, sad words will come easier. Your state makes symbols thematically related to it more salient, and conjuring up something different sure can feel awkward and hard, but they still hold the power to affect your inner state, just like all the other mental stand-ins do. I just find that neat.