I'm wondering too.AnalyticalEngine wrote: ↑Sat Jun 26, 2021 12:14 pmIf more advanced levels are more encompassing of earlier levels, I wonder if this is why people talk about ego death experiencing being useful to personal or spiritual development. In the same vein of K4 INTJs forgetting what K3 was like, pretty much everyone has forgotten what K1 was like. Thus reexperincing it via altered conscious states like drugs/advanced meditation/dissociation is remembering what was once forgotten and can lead to further insights on the nature of what/who one is.
First, it seems fairly common in poststructuralist writing to declare the "death" of something as soon as anyone has built some bigger theory that subsumes previous understanding. God is dead. The ego is dead. The author is dead. (Maybe this is me declaring the death of the saying that "something is dead".) Constructs all the way down (not that this can't lead to useful insight). What death means here is that whatever died has become a script in a bigger theory---it has lost its random/live generator function by becoming explainable and thus predictable. An NPC of the universe so to speak. Not all that interesting.
What concerns me (greatly) is that I (being on top of Mt Stupid in this regard) can't distinguish between those who talk-about [whatever died] and those who actually experienced [whatever died]. So I do not know whether psychedelics or meditation techniques actually "kill" the ego temporarily or whether they just debilitate you and collapse [the ego] to reveal whatever underlying structures, you're bringing to the table anyway. However, seeing the underlying layers w/o the filter may reveal deeper aspects (subroutines) of the ego. I'm just not sure it will reveal reality (the solution) as much as it will cause one to ask questions.
Crude analogy would be how the COVID lockdown and the inability to shop caused WL5s to question consumerism and comparative advantage in terms of their life-strategy or identity.
Now WRT the questions, it's absolutely crucial that those are the right questions asked and not the wrong ones lest one venture into a hole of stupid. And this is why I'm not sure "tricks" are advisable. (The argument for this comes from a position of assuming that the ego is a complex entity and thus changes should follow the rule of small reversible changes only.)
PS: For a shallower (IMHO) but more actionable perspective, consider eneagrams for stress-functioning. That's the only framework I know that treats functioning explicitly. Most here are Fives, so https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-5/ but there are 8 more.
Functionality can range multiple degrees within a day. It's practically useful to recognize where you're at at any given moment. It's a nice map.