Joe Rogan on Ego Death

So you asked about dumb moments though, but I had one where I had this cascading sense of flood of love. I was thinking about my family, I was thinking about my son and my wife and my parents. It sounds so banal. And one of the things that happens is that these platitudes that love through the everyday years, and psychedelics, you know, softens those habits and helps you get out of those grooves. And for me, that was really useful. And it's only, I think it's the experience of ego dissolution that allows you to, because your ego enforces those habits, and you get a little break. There's a beautiful metaphor. One of the scientists I interviewed in the book, a Dutchman working in Imperial College in London, he said, think of your mind as a hill covered in snow. And your thoughts are sleds going down that hill. And after a while, after a lot of thoughts have gone that hill, there'll be these grooves and they're going to get deeper and deeper. And at a certain point, you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves. That's who we are as we're like, you know, at this age. And what psychedelics do, he said, is flatten the snow, lots of fresh powder. And you can then take the sled any way you want to go. That's a great way of describing it. I've always talked about predetermined patterns and grooves that people fall into. So it's amazing hearing him say it that way, but that's a much better way of describing it like snow, the sliding these thoughts down these already existing patterns. That's amazing. That's, you know, what you said about love and being cynical, that's so important too, because there's something that's, something that people are, they avoid sincerity. There's something about it that makes you too vulnerable or too open to criticism or too open to ridicule. And we're worried about being sincere. And I do think that that's one of the primary benefits of psychedelics. Yeah. We live in an ironic culture and we defend ourselves against strong experience or self-exposure by adopting this stance that's ironic and cool. And psychedelics is not a cool experience. It's the opposite. Well, it's cool when it's over. But yeah, it's serious stuff.