The 'ego' is the instrument for living in this world. If the 'ego' is broken up, or destroyed (by the insurmountable contradictions of certain life situations, by toxins, chemical changes, etc.) the person may be exposed to other worlds, 'real' in different ways from the more familiar territory of dreams, imagination, perception or phantasy. The world that one enters, one's capacity to experience it, seems to be partly conditional on the state of one's 'ego'.
Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a drive to control the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world. If one estimates human evolution from the point of view of knowledge of the external world, than we are in many respects progressing. If our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world, and of oneness of internal and external, then the judgement must be very different.
Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world — the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities. As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world has already grave risks. [...] The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. […] As we experience the world, so we act. We conduct ourselves in the light of our view of what is the case and what is not the case. That is, each person is a more or less naïve ontologist. Each person has views of what is, and what is not.[…] We live in a secular world. To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy. Having lost our experience of the spirit we are expected to have faith. But this faith comes to be a belief in a reality which is not evident. [...]
— R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 1967