Ego death - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Some famous examples of people claiming to have had the experience are Ramana Maharshi and U. G. Krishnamurti. In 2000 Eckhart Tolle claimed that he underwent the experience after having suffered from long periods of suicidal depression. He says he woke up in the middle of that night and thought,
“
I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved.”
Tolle recalls going out for a walk in London the next morning, and finding that “everything was miraculous, deeply peaceful. Even the traffic."
I have had a brief experience of the 'void' during a lucid dream - it is difficult to describe 'overwhelming calm'.
PS Judging others is an expression of ego so I really should avoid having any opinion about Less as a person - just saying - he no longer 'rattles' me, which is nice not to experience such negative emotion.