Dr. Alok Kanojia

Probably the best way to observe your mind is actually psychotherapy.

You'll get better insight into your mind there.

But if you want to move beyond mind, and I don't mean that in like, oh, let's move beyond mind.

What I mean is that if you look at your experience of existence, there is more to you than thoughts, emotions, and ego.

And so if you wanna get to that and step outside of your ego, meditation is the best thing for that.

And there are lots of studies that suggest that meditation shuts off the default mode network.

Default mode network is our sense of like self.

There are also many studies that show that you can predict

the therapeutic benefit of a psychedelic trip based on an ego death experience.

So if someone has an ego death experience when they're using psychedelics, there is a greater likelihood that they heal from it, which has to do with deactivation of the default mode network.

I don't know the answer to that question, but I would say that most of the studies that I've seen are in psilocybin.

But that's just because there are more studies on psilocybin, I think.

Arguably, MDMA will do it too because MDMA is an empathogen and will help people form bonds and kind of changes their perception of the self, right?

So meditation is the best way to dissolve your ego, like that I believe.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the meditation that I like the most for this kind of thing is meditations around something called shunya.

Shunya means void.

So if you really look at like all of the attributes of you, right?

So I'm a man, I'm a husband, I'm a son, whatever, boyfriend,

All of those things are like qualities.