I experience something in my third year of high school. I think my experience is called ego death, but I don’t know for sure. It’s like the experience described by the author of The Power of Now, albeit in a weaker form. Let me start the story.

It happens somewhere between June 2012 and December 2012. I was walking home from my usual after school math lesson at about 6 pm when I felt an unusual peace and freedom engulfing me from the inside of my chest.

How much peace do I feel at that time? Let’s put it like this. If someone pull out a gun and aim it to my head at that time, I’d probably just stare at him.

Do you know what freedom feels like? For me, it feels like emptiness. It feels like all the burden in your chest is being poured out. I was like a bowl full of sand, dust, and dirt. And somehow, something put a hole at the bottom of that bowl and all the things inside that bowl just fall down bit by bit until the bowl is empty.

And after I was completely empty, another feeling set in. I felt like I’m one with the universe. I felt like I’m one with the dark gray cloud that covered the whole sky, with the people eating at a nearby street food stall, and with the gray car passing on the street besides me. It feels like I was a body of water living inside a bubble and, somehow, something put a hole on that bubble. The bubble bursts and the water leaked out into the universe.

It was an interesting and vivid experience. The weird thing is, as if the whole experience isn’t weird enough, after I catch a public transportation, I don’t know what else was going on. The only thing I remember of that day was sitting at the public transportation and looking outside in a trance-like state of mind.

Another weird thing is that it took me months to realize and internalize what had happened. Fortunately before that happened, I had read The Power of Now a bit so I know the keyword to search in Google: ego death. Hence, I research ego death on the web months after I experience it.

There are some possible causes of ego death experience. Or, in other words, if you want to experience ego death, there are some ways to, hopefully, experience it. The best way, in my opinion, is to meditate for an extended period of time like the Buddhist monks. The fastest way is to take some LSD and hope that you experience ego death instead of horrifying bad trips. The way I experienced it was the same way that the author of The Power of Now experience it. I experienced ego death after going through an almost unbearable amount of stress for an extended period of time.

I think my period of stress starts when I was about 12 (November 2008) climaxing at December 2011. It was bearable enough that I didn’t get permanent mental illness or started shooting people at school, but unbearable enough that, at one point (January-March 2012), I sometimes cries for hours at night for no reason at all (probably a minor post-traumatic stress disorder). Well, actually there’s a reason and the reason is the negative emotions building up inside me started demanding for cathartic activities (like crying) so that it can be released in a controlled way. After that (April-June 2012), the crying became less often. The negative emotions started to subside dramatically, particularly after the ego death experience.

I still reflect to that experience now (April 2016), trying to get some insights from it. And after years of pondering, meanings start to emerge. I’ll share the lessons that I get so far from that experience.

There are many kinds of realities. My body is in the physical reality, my name is in the social reality, my self is in the reality I construct in my mind, and “I” lives in a reality that I still do not truly understand. I think this is what people subconsciously mean when they say that “you” are not your body (physical appearance, clothes, makeups), your name (status, social standing, reputation, popularity), or your self (ego, self-esteem).

Understanding this different realities, for me, means freedom from caring of my body since it’s just a blood and flesh container, freedom from caring of my name since it’s just a non-unique identifier of my body, and freedom from my self since it’s just an artificial construct of my mind.

These different realities also provide a model for me to understand that when people hate me, it’s not “I” that they hate. When people hate me, what they do is they start constructing an artificial profile at their mind full of negative characteristics (arrogant, evil, etc.). After that, they give it the name “Yoshua Elmaryono” and associate the name (with the negative characteristics) with my body (the body that they see in the physical reality). At the opposite end, when people admire me, they follow this same process, but instead of giving negative characteristics to the profile, they give it positive characteristics (humble, kind, etc.). Understanding this gives me freedom from caring whether people admire or hate me and other such trappings of social reality (reputation, popularity, etc.).

After that experience, I become a much more calm and peaceful person. If narcissist’s ego is a big fragile glass, then my ego at the time of ego death is a formless gas. Years after the experience, my ego has taken the form of water. I don’t really mind when people try to bruise and hurt my ego. I can still get pissed off but that feeling usually doesn’t last long anymore.

Another lesson that I get from that experience is that it’s possible to kill fear, or even fear of death. I know that I can kill much of my emotion by just shutting them down since I have a mild avoidant personality disorder when I grow up. I also know of the ways people use to kill their empathy to another human being so that they can treat other mercilessly like a piece of trash. But ego death make me realize that once the feeling of oneness with the universe fill a person, the feeling of fear cease to exists until the feeling of oneness subsides and the ego form again. It’s probably possible to live in a state of constant oneness if you’re a monk living in the mountain. But, if you live an ordinary life inside systems in a society, it’s probably better to keep a bit of your ego intact since it will be very useful for survival sake.

Unfortunately, I still don’t know who I am. But I know what I’m not. I’m not my body. My body is just star dust and “I” am bigger than that. I’m not my name. Whatever happens to Yoshua Elmaryono in the social reality is not that important for me. And, finally, “I” am not my self.