Images of Ego Death
If you’d like to take the survey BEFORE this post primes you, do it now! I might update this post sometime in the future if the sample gets sufficiently bigger.
How do people visually think of ego death? How do people’s visual representations differ between different groups - people who’ve experienced it vs not, or how they experienced ego death, or gender?
I generated a bunch of images in Midjourney to represent ego death, and selected 97 of them. I tried to get a wide variety of possible representations of ego death - lots of dissolving humanoids, surreal landscapes, classic psychedelic imagery, etc.
You can find the total set of images I used here, sorted from least to most ego-death rated by all respondents. (for images sorted by disproportionately ego-death-experiencer-preferred to non-ego-death-experiencer-preferred, see this sorting) The images also include the shorthand names of images I used, if you want to make sense of my raw data.
I asked people if they’d experienced ego death, and if so, was it primarily through psychedelics or meditation? Which psychedelics, what kind of meditation?
I then presented them the ego death images at random, and asked them to rate each one on a sliding scale from 1-100 for how much they felt each image represented “ego death”, with a higher score meaning it represented ego death more.
Around 400ish people voted for each image (give or take some, as it was randomized and not everyone finished the survey). At the time of writing this, 1114 people answered any questions at all, and of these, 306 said they hadn’t experienced ego death, 516 said ‘unsure’, and 291 said ‘yes.’
Experienced Ego Death vs Not
Among people who hadn’t experienced ego death, the image that got their average top rating was:
Among people who had experienced ego death, the top rated image was:
What about gaps? What images had the biggest difference in rating between people who had and hadn’t experienced ego death?
The image that people who had experienced ego death rated higher compared to people who hadn’t, with a gap in the average of 13 points (out of 100), was this
And the image that people who hadn’t experienced ego death rated highest compared to people who had, with a gap of 10.5 points:
Some people said they were “unsure” that they ever had an ego death experience; these people’s scores correlated a bit more closely to the “no” average scores (r=0.9) than the “yes” scores (r=0.8). Weirdly, the no and yes scores correlated at r=0.85?
Meditation vs Psychedelics
What about psychedelic vs. meditation users? Sample size here was kinda low - only 30 meditators! Still though, let’s see.
Meditation users’ highest rated image was:
And psychedelic users with their large voting block selected our fractal friend again:
And again, what about the difference? What was the biggest gap in ratings between the psychedelic and meditation users?
Meditation users’s top absolute favorite matched up with the top compared to psychedelic users, with meditation users rating this 15.4 points higher, on average:
And psychedelic users favored this one the most (by 21.5 points), compared to meditators:
Gender
Women (n only =~85 per image or so) rated this image the highest:
And men rated this one the highest:
What about the biggest difference between genders?
Compared to men, women rated this one the highest, with a gap of 8.2 points:
And compared to women, men rated this one higher, again with a gap of 7.9 points.
Highest standard deviation (how much variance there was in the responses) was the good ol’ fractal spiral:
And the one everybody agreed on the most (smallest standard deviation) was:
There’s some elements of the survey I haven’t explored, that you’re welcome to check out in my raw data yourself - stuff like subtypes of psychedelics, age, and the whole category of people who were unsure if they’d experienced ego death at all.
Also, disclaimer: this is a fun/casual survey, not a rigorous one, and if you point to this to say something like ‘lol aella thinks she can draw conclusions from a small bin size’ you are bad and should feel bad and should pay more attention to the surveys where i actually try to be really precise
We are approaching a point where anyone will be able to experience a fully immersive VR ego death. Will it ever be a sufficient substitution?
What if you were to experience it when you are very young? Would it be helpful for living in our future? Or will it just make people more depressed?
An interesting complementary experiment to this would be taking text descriptions of ego death, across cultures and points of time (shamanistic rites, sufi poetry, doors of perception etc), and chucking it into midjourney to see what comes out and how similar or different they are.