Ego Deaths and Spiritual Awakenings
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Aaron Eschenburg is an Ayahuascero and Astrotheologer. He is the Founder and creator of Ancestral Herbs, a natural plant medicine company, and MiTranscendance Entheo Religious Society.
I’ve died a hundred times and will die a hundred more. I’m not here to heal 14 generations of family trauma. Our ancestors left us with so much more than that: willpower, strength, courage, wisdom, tenacity, love, compassion, forgiveness, and life itself. Not just their problems passed down to us.
I had to kill off the part of myself that spiritually bypassed self-acceptance and accountability, the part that had to understand I am 100 percent responsible for being exactly where I am in life today. The part of me that thought someone was coming to save me had to die, and I slayed the part of myself that thought I was going to save someone else.
The part of me that thought I was going to be with that one girl forever had to die when it didn’t work out. I had to kill the part of me that didn’t understand that my parents and family did the absolute best they could with what was available to them while raising me, regardless of my perception of right, wrong, fair, bad, or good.
I had to kill off the part of me that held resentments. I had to kill the part of me that wanted to be understood by others. The part of me that wanted to be liked and to “fit in” had to go.
"I had to kill the weeds of rage and rejection to plant a garden of self-worth so flowers of inner peace could blossom."
The part of me that was fueled by politics had to die, letting go of what is out of my control while still caring, yet not allowing myself to be pressured by others.
I had to kill the part of me that truly wasn’t me and wasn’t mine, all that was outside of myself, the thought that I could control an outcome or had some ability to do so. I had to allow people and the world to be exactly how they are while coming back to myself and what is within my abilities and field of expertise.
Each time we shine light on one of these aspects of self, we can dissolve that part of our ego to explore and rediscover who we are without it. This exploration leads to seeing other aspects of self that we must face as well, continuously sculpting our behavioral patterns, our lens of perception from the inner world to the outer world, and how we interact with it. Lose everything and find out who you are with nothing.
There are many forms of ego death
I’ve been working with psychedelics for over 20 years. I learned from and brewed Ayahuasca in Peru, started a religious nonprofit, and have been serving legally in the States since 2019. The topic of ego death and what that is comes up quite frequently, so I’d like to talk a little about that here as a psychedelic facilitator.
Your ego is part of you, your light and your shadow, the yin and the yang, the anima and animus. The ego never fully dies, nor can one rid themselves of their ego, ever. To remove your ego would be to remove the consciousness that animates your physical vessel. Humans need three things working to maintain life: the brain, lungs, and heart. The heart pumps the blood, the lungs pump the air, and the brain pumps electrical impulses.
In many ancient languages, breath and spirit are synonyms. Your spirit is your breath. Your lungs are lifeless without breath. Your breath is medicine. Strong, full breath equals a strong spirit and strong tenacity. Weak, shallow breathing equals low spirit, low energy, and low blood flow. When the spirit has left the body, breath has left the body as the body stops breathing.
Sol means light. Soul, Sol, Sun, light. “The Temple of Solomon” is three different languages, meaning light: Sol, Om, and On. Your soul is your light. You are light. You are physical, manifested, dense light. Your body, the soul, is literally a temple of light, while spirit is the breath that rolls through you and connects you to every living person, plant, and animal on this planet.
You don’t have a soul, you are the soul. You are the light, as well as the light that is within you. When we engage in breathwork, we add fuel to the fire. The fire itself is consciousness, the spark of life and furnace that suspends all of existence.
We are humans, manifested hues of light, individual colors within a spectrum of the rainbow that is the collective. Consciousness is a collaborative experience between the unified collective and the individual. The unified consciousness chooses individuality like the colors of the rainbow, separate yet together as one, each with its intended purpose and harmonizing color creating combinations. Your individual experience is part of the unified consciousness, choosing to see the world through your eyes, hear music through your ears, dance the way you dance, dress how you dress, and speak the way you speak.
The spirit fuels and amplifies the soul. The breath fuels and amplifies the light body. The light body and soul are woven into the fabric of the unified consciousness, both individual and collective. The breath and spirit are one of three necessary fuels for the soul and light body to sustain life on this planet, the others being food and water. We are beings with awareness and discernment. Without consciousness, the body is lifeless, the soul lacks animation and movement, and the driver is no longer behind the wheel.
So who or what is the driver? What’s driving the decisions this vessel makes? This is the great existential question and journey of self-awareness that allows us to truly reflect while looking in the mirror. Observing one’s own thoughts and actions allows the self to become aware of what drives the driver to set the destination on the GPS of their life decisions.
Am I truly the driver within this earthly vehicle, or are there a set of preconditioned circumstances that force the accelerator and the hand that turns the wheel? If I don’t identify with, or no longer fit into, a particular subgenre or category based on belief structures, who am I? Without my wardrobe, without these things, what would I be? Would I lose my friends? Were they really friends if they only liked me because of my wardrobe, car, boat, job, status, popularity, lifestyle, money, or what I offered? Am I the same person without those friends?
Am I the story of what happened to me while growing up? Am I a victim of my previous relationships? Is that why I can’t trust or love someone new? Am I a record repeating the same story to different faces at different times, so they hear the song that I sing that makes me who I am? Am I that song? Am I that story on loop? Who would I be if I stopped telling the story?
Am I a story of rejection or prosperity? Do I sing a song of hard times or make an anthem of accomplishments? This thing happened to me, which made me like this, and now this is my personality.
The ego is an aspect of our personality and our personal perspective of the whole universe and all of its contrasts. Depending on how we were raised and where, our ego will influence our life decisions, how we judge scenarios and people, how we dress, what music we listen to, and the social activities we partake in. The ego is the driver in the seat of the vessel. A person can have awareness of the driver or pretend to be the passenger in life and play the victim role. Things don’t happen to you, they just happen.
A “blessing in disguise” mindset is fundamental ego awareness. Locking your keys in your car could have saved you from a terrible accident, or the person who ghosted you may have actually opened you up to a relationship that is more in alignment. The observer judges, labels, categorizes, and compartmentalizes the experience to put it into an area of understanding that best fits their ability to comprehend the scenario. The ego itself may be limited by the capacity of its own awareness to fully comprehend the dynamics of the whole situation.
The child wants a cookie before dinner, and the parents say no. The child may kick, scream, and say the parents are unfair, don’t care about the child, don’t love them, or whatever else comes up. The truth is, the parents were making sure the child waited until dinner to fill up on healthy nutrients instead of sugary sweets. The child simply cannot reason or even fathom it if the parent tried to explain.
The child may even try to refuse the good food when presented with it, literally pushing away what’s healthy because they didn’t get what they wanted that was unhealthy. A child may hold other resentments toward the parents, as if they denied them an opportunity to fit in with other kids in school, stunting their social status if they didn’t keep up with the current trends.
The child who had “too much” in others’ eyes or “too little” in their own eyes suffers the same in different ways. Every rose has its thorns. Being broken up with and hating an ex, only to realize later that you were an equal part of the problem, means you just couldn’t see it at the time. Refusing the good, healthy relationship because you didn’t get the unhealthy one you wanted is like refusing dinner because you wanted the cookie. The ego can learn, heal, forgive, accept, and adapt. Our sails can be adjusted accordingly.
"Resentments in the heart and an unchecked bad mood can turn into a behavior pattern, which can lead to a personality trait that holds a negative outlook."
An ego with a negative outlook will focus on what it doesn’t like. What it resists persists. It finds more things it doesn’t like to complain about. It likes complaining about the things it doesn’t like, and that triggers its happy dopamine receptors. It finds comfort in misery as a confirmation bias of how bad the world is or how bad life seemingly is.
An attitude of gratitude focuses the mind on the positive things we appreciate, so we will naturally align with more things we find joy in and are grateful for, which also triggers the dopamine receptors. Our ego is always seeking its chemicals and will get them any way it knows how. The person at the bar for last call and the person on the yoga mat are both chasing a feeling, one is more sustainable.
It’s up to the individual to learn for themselves, how it triggers its dopamine receptors, its energy manipulation tactics, and its self-preserving narcissistic tendencies. Our ego is the way we bob and weave through 8 billion others. There are healthy and unhealthy relationships with it, authentic and inauthentic. Learning to manage our own energy, when to be humble, when to be bold, and how to be authentically honest with others about our intentions is class and character.
Our egos are a combination of the foundational seeds of our upbringing, how we learned to manipulate or get energy, the outlook of our personal perspective on life experiences, and the ability to self-reflect on our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. All of these collectively accumulate and harmonize to create our personality.
Our personality adapts as we learn and expose our unconscious behavioral patterns. The awakening involves becoming aware of our behavioral patterns and tearing down the walls of personal identity and belief structures. It means bringing awareness to our body’s own chemical addictions and learning to manage them, as well as our communication style and how we receive energy and chemicals from others.
Awakening is understanding that we are responsible for our personal expansion, so we don’t get stuck telling the same story, but continuously adjust our sails to create new ones.
Awakening is withdrawing for a little while, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. It can be a painfully cathartic and beautifully rewarding experience as we lose parts of ourselves to discover new ones. Our ego never really dies, it just changes and learns to fly.
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Aaron Eschenburg, Ayahuascero, Astrotheologer
Aaron Eschenburg is an Ayahuasca Shaman and creator of the natural plant medicine company Ancestral Herbs. Being hit by a drunk driver at 21 spiraled him into a journey of exploring alternative medicines to get away from the side effects of pharmaceuticals. Astrotheology and plant medicines then came into his life at the same time, creating a better understanding of humanity's relationship with our living planet, solar system, and the universe. He now dedicates his life to helping others explore the options of natural healing, entheogenic practices, and embracing the Aquarian Age.
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