While ego can hijack identity for it's own mad desires, an identity is required for the actuation of relational actions on a basic level. With no "center" from which to make decisions, the functions of your mind tasked with making choices will panic - this is a foundation of brainwashing/psychological manipulation. Very similar things happen to people who have a TBI, where they become stressed when forced to make choices that seem to have zero baring on "their" lives.
So dissolved identity > Panic attacks when choice-satisfaction plummets > subconscious suggests all kinds of cartoonist extremes for an easy and powerful identity > Conscious mind agrees to play along, uses this character to make decisions about > Choice-satisfaction rises.
I'm sure it's different for most others, but I had the opposite experience. It has introduced a great calm into my life.
From where I am now, I see identity as the central problem we face as a species.
Yeah, except that in practice awareness of no-self is very far from an ethical cure-it-all. There's plenty of supposedly "enlightened" folks in a variety of spiritual traditions who routinely engage in morally sub-standard behavior, despite having reached that awareness themselves and teaching it to others. We know for a fact that many spiritual traditions view correct ethics and behavior as paramount, and as the hardest part of their training.
I remember a clip I'd seen where a veteran with a TBI would break down when shopping, since there's so many choices that are focused at appealing to personality rather than utility, and his notion of his own personality was minimal.
It sounds like you may have had an experience, to some extent, of dwelling in the union of wisdom and emptiness or what some call dharmadhatu [2]. It's not a teaching I encountered until I started practicing Vajrayana, as Theravada teachers don't often emphasize the teachings on sunyata. It's something you'll encounter in Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings.
[1] https://www.shambhala.com/cutting-through-spiritual-material...
Ah, the extent that some people will go through to avoid acknowledging God. It's like some people take stubborn pleasure in being purposely nihilistic and strenuously denying all that's good about the world. How this can be part of a supposedly spiritual practice, I just can't understand.
That sense of impeding doom is nothing more than those spiritual entities oppressing with overwhelming power them by those gaps.
We are locked out of that world for a reason. The safe means to get unlocked is by getting your soul to borrow the power of God and slowly expose yourself to such world. Other than that, self enlightenment is just wishful thinking of empty vessels.
Our intentions, understanding, morality, sense of self, sense of direction, is so frail. A man who believes he can manufacture these things for himself (which is, in my opinion, wfundamentally what occultists are doing) is doomed to spiritual sufferring.
"Emptiness" of your mind means something like a thin soap bubble around you. This bubble acts as a lens, it can enlarge arbitrary things, it can create stable patterns on its surface, and all that is useful, but it blocks whatever is outside the bubble. In its natural state it would be a perfect invisible sphere, letting you see outside: this union of clarity and emptiness creates wisdom. You are still going to use this bubble as a whiteboard for your thoughts, but you'll also know how to see thru it.
The concept of emptiness applies to material world in general: the western science calls it space-time, the idea that any thing can turn into any other thing, for both are fundamentally just motions of energy that has no natural shape. Buddhism tries to teach this basic idea in different terms.
For some reason that I don't quite understand, the founders of the three religions had fragmented the truth: buddhism teaches wisdom, christianity teaches love and islam teaches action - the three aspects of the spirit. Perhaps they thought that mixing everything into one bag would be too difficult to grasp, or maybe they hope it will make the peoples collaborate to assemble the pieces.
I also would point out that if anything Buddhism is life-affirming and immensely hopeful, not denying what's good in the world. It teaches that there's a way out of suffering right here and right now, and it's available to every being without exclusion. The fourth noble truth is the spiritual practice to make that happen. Every meditation session in Mahayana and Vajrayana lineages have the common preliminaries, which includes love and compassion for all beings.
https://untetheredsoul.com/untethered-soul
https://untetheredsoul.com/living-untethered
I also found eckhart Toll's book "A New Earth" are also helpful:
https://eckharttolle.com/books/
I found "A New Earth" better/more details than "Power of Now" probably because it was written later and I read it later.
I got the message that I should destroy my ego and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s; we were going through a whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I was slowly putting myself together round about Maharishi time. Bit by bit over a two-year period, I had destroyed me ego.
I didn’t believe I could do anything and let people make me, and let them all just do what they wanted. I just was nothing. I was shit. Then Derek tripped me out at his house after he got back from L.A. He sort of said “You’re all right,” and pointed out which songs I had written. “You wrote this,” and “You said this” and “You are intelligent, don’t be frightened.”
Always tough to discuss slippery, ill defined things such as ego, which in a real sense does not actually exist.
My mother for instance at one point thought she was Jesus but also thought some of her thoughts or actions were not her own.
These adverse experiences are the ego's last-ditch effort to maintain cohesion. It's the same with psychedelics. If you let go in the face of the terror and accept, the terror becomes utter bliss.
In response to these experiences, ask "Who exactly are they happening to?"