I think I had an insight a couple days ago but I’m not sure if it was something already there that I simply noticed, or if some change actually occurred.  Does everyone’s personality simply arise and pass away all the time, or is it previously entangled with the primordial sense of self before we have a meditative insight?   While I was gladdening the mind reading, I reexperienced something that happened to me on LSD 4 years ago.

[flash back]What happened was I was chilling listening to music while at the peak of my trip and all of a sudden something melted/fell away (I now believe the feeling was a smooth energetic release in the head).  At the time I thought “oh hey there goes my ego” and then I started thinking about how everyone in the world was “just an ego” (I think a better word for it would be personality).  I want to be clear that my primordial sense of self did not fall away.

So now recently I was gladdening the mind while reading (The part about psychedelics in Sam Harris’s Waking Up) and the same energetic melting/falling away happened and I recognized this to be the same experience I had all those years before on LSD. 

 I now believe the thing that fell away is/was my personality.  I think a more accurate way to describe it would be to say my personality unentangled itself from my primordial sense of self (taking this from Culadasa on the latest DY podcast).  Now the personality just arises in consciousness and passes away.  This has persisted since my reading experience.  I believe this untangling has been a gradual process since I started meditating and just culminated recently.  And for all I know this has always been there and I just now realized it, maybe even before the initial drug trip.