Egtot is a portmanteau word of my invention a few minutes before starting to write this article. Egtot is a combined and shortened version of ‘ego’ and ‘tot’.
Ego is Latin for ‘I’ meaning oneself or ‘me’, and in personality theory and psychoanalysis, ego refers to the identity of oneself via a reconciling (in implicitly infinitely different personal ways) of the conscious and unconscious (and/or subconscious) mind or brain - or thoughts and feelings.
Tot is the German word for death, and of similar derivation to Old English ‘dead’ and Dutch ‘dood’.
Incidentally thoughts and feelings are actually visceral (referring to the internal organs of the human body, from Latin, viscus, meaning a human internal organ).
We nowadays can or should extend the meaning of visceral to the skin too, because our skin is very definitely a feeling sensing (and the largest) organ of the human body.
The original Latin obviously did not recognise this, or obviously did not include skin in the scope of the meaning of viscus.
Expressions such as, “It made my skin crawl,” remind us of the emotional reactions we can feel via our skin.
ASMR - Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, “…a tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia, it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson…” (Wikipedia, 8th May 2023), is another example of our skin being highly emotionally responsive.
So too the physical and metaphorical, “hairs standing up,” on the skin, notably example, “on the back of my neck,” especially in a fearful reaction, perhaps in the dark, or experiencing something that frightens us, like a scary movie, and yet also perhaps a pleasant emotional reaction to experiencing intense emotion prompted by stirring music or dance, poetry, and sporting occasions which entail sharing with others an intense uplift of spirit.
Death is a taboo, which means it is uncomfortable for many people to address and discuss. Suicide and homicide are more extreme taboo extensions of death.
The nature of our soul, and what our consciousness and unconsciousness, or ego might have been before we were conceived and began to form in our mother’s womb, are also taboos, because these concepts, thoughts, feelings and deep uncertainties are extremely uncomfortable and frightening for most people; especially people in early life-stages (because emotional growth is more about ‘life-stage’ than age in years).
And in fact small children are naturally relatively fearless, vulnerable and trusting, unless they’ve been abused or terrorised in some way.
Babies are born with a few very simple natural innate (genetically ‘hard-wired) fear responses, but they do not react fearfully in the ways that most older children, teenagers, and especially adults do, to common ‘fears’ in modern life.
Babies tend to live in ‘the now’, whereby the past doesn’t matter because it cannot be changed, and the future hasn’t happened and cannot be predicted.
Babies generally have not become addicted to sugar or other drugs (although sadly some become addicted in the womb via the mother’s addictions).
Babies have probably been traumatised to varying degrees in the womb (for instance hearing their parents or other people arguing or fighting, and becoming stressed by sharing cortisol and other stressful hormones via blood from the mother). The cutting of the umbilical cord immediately after their birth is also stressful for babies.
Personally I was a ‘forceps delivery’ as a baby. This was a trauma. Hospital experiences can be immensely traumatic for birthing mothers and babies.
But generally, babies are far less prone to fear responses than older people.
Anyway, back to ‘Egtot’…
The point about ‘death of ego’ is simply:
From childhood we all tend to become more fearful, especially about things which are uncertainties, because they are in the future.
We tend to have an ego-driven outlook on life, even though most of us are not egomaniacs.
This means that most of us react to our external experiences, and to our internal (visceral) thoughts and feelings (about our external experiences), in a self-centred or somewhat selfish way.
We see and make sense of our external experiences, and especially other people, according to how we feel about our ‘self’ and our ego and our relationship with our own ‘egtot’, rather than the realities of what’s actually happening, and what the feelings of others might be.
Egtot is my attempt to explain what happens when we let go of our ego and sense of self, and we embrace our mortality, so that we are comfortable in uncertainty and with our own dying, because in many ways we have already died.
We are in many ways reborn, free and peaceful, fearless and loving.
And so then to acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, abundance, self-love and self-care, freedom from our past conditionings and traumas, cooperation, compassion, love, fearlessness and peace.
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