Hello all, sorry for the long post, I tried to keep it as concise as possible, but I have a lot to say about my experience. First, some background: I have always been a very depressed, socially anxious, quiet, asocial person who has constantly questioned everything. I am studying biology and philosophy in university, and have never been interested in religion, hippie, or new age interpretations of the world, nor have I ever sought out or been aware of the concept of spiritual enlightenment; my goal has always been to figure out this confusing existence on my own, even if that meant denying everyone including myself. A week prior to my experience, I started going to therapy due to an extreme stress and skepticism I started having toward reality. All I could think about were the various bizarre contradictions we are faced with on a daily basis that we are expected to ignore in order to keep on living: how is it possible that we exist? Why does society strive for ideals that are impossible to reach? Am I an impossible ideal? Who am I? Over the course of a week, I began going back to old and repressed memories that I would regularly ruminate on, really trying to question their source. I always believed I was the way I was due to the bad circumstances in my childhood; poverty, abandonment, abuse, etc. But memory by memory I started to realize I didn’t really care about my misfortunes in life as a child. Something negative would happen, such as my mother leaving, then the people around me would start telling me how horrible this is and how troubled I must be, and I would believe them and start to identify with this misfortune and express it in my personality (through music, looks, humor). Then I went further. Did I ever really feel anything, or was it a response to social expectation, like a child who falls down and only cries because the parent watching you expects you to. Unless the pain was directly experienced in that moment, then the pain was artificial. My pain only came afterward when I had concepts of who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to have as dictated by others. I started to think I was a psychopath! I eventually backtracked to a moment when there wasn’t any expectation for me to be a person: my first memory when I was about 3 years old. I remember sitting in a flower bed, looking at ants with a magnifying glass wondering “what dis? How it get here?” and then looking around with astonishment thinking “what am I? How did I get here??” I realized that this, at its very core, was me. Everything after this stage was a path of others telling me what I should be, do, learn, feel, strive for; the various ways I was supposed to suffer. But what was I then? Nothing but curiosity and experience. There was no future, no past, no direction, no doubt. Doubt was gradually planted into me every step of the way, to ensure I developed into a “normal” kid. I spent several days contemplating this. Things were finally starting to make sense, my entire ego was starting to make sense, as well as the contradicting behaviors of society. As I lay in bed that night, the dots began connecting faster and faster as so many of questions were starting to be answered by this new outlook (e.g. what is the point of preference? It seems like we create preference simply so we can identify ourselves with something, and in the end, we’ve just limited the enjoyment we can get out of life!) But there was something grand, something unifying about this pattern that I was on the edge of, as if ego and personality were an excuse for people to guard the pieces of this same overarching puzzle. I lay there in my bed, my heart pounding out of my chest, my head full of pressure as if it were about to explode. I remember thinking to myself “if I ask one more question I am going to die”. I was scared out of my mind, but I decided I was ready to die and that the truth was worth it, so I took the last step and let the questions answer themselves. Suddenly, in an explosion of euphoria I dissolved. Without words, the questions in my mind began to resolve themselves in an infinite cascade of logic (and not logic?). I was everything. I was nothing. I was the universe. I was God. I was all of those things, and none of those things. Language could only ever be a cliché metaphor for the truth, and before the truth I was only language. There was no meaning in that life, because concepts can only be clichés until they are directly defined by experience, and now was the only time I have ever truly experienced anything. As Leo put it, the phenomenal and the noumenal had collapsed into one without the conceptual world acting as a buffer. Logic and mathematics weren’t abstract anymore, they were the shape that glued reality together. I didn’t sleep that night, I couldn’t sleep. Sleep didn’t make sense anymore, I could only close my eyes and go into a deep meditation. When the climax settled down enough that I could function again, I wrote about 20 pages in my journal in a single automatic flow, without thought or revision. I closed my eyes and could see the words scrolling through my vision. I went to the beach and truly saw the ocean for the first time, truly saw color for the first time. I couldn’t distinguish between me and the ocean, or a rock, or my girlfriend (any time I’d refer to “me” I’d unintentionally say “we” instead). I felt a profound duty to help all people and animals and environment, and I knew the ambitious path I had to take to get there. (I remember I accidently mashed an ant on my counter, and I spent the next 30 minutes trying to nurse it back to health.) Most strangely, and I haven’t read about this phenomenon before, I had the ability to control my perception of time. It was as if all I had to do was briefly set my mind on a task, such as take a shower, and then execute that task. I would then watch myself automatically do that task sped up with the utmost flow. There was already a path to take, purely determined, and all I had to do was watch it unfold like pressing fast-forward on the Sims. When I went out in public I had to have a metronome playing in my ear so I could calibrate myself to the speed of a second and not scare people with my fast movements. This was extremely bizarre, and I don’t really know how to explain it. (Possibly my sense of time sped up because my brain didn’t have to constantly refer to the ego while making decisions; maybe the normal process of planning ahead, remembering the past, and executing in the present gives us a sense of time that is slower. I don’t know, I can elaborate more on this if you ask). This absolute joy and satisfaction with life lasted about a week, but eventually things started to break down. I had not ate or slept this entire week since I was so engrossed in everything other than my body. The ego would start to slip back in, and try to conceptualize a thought that was beyond words. “Obviously this can be explained with string theory. Obviously this is M-theory. This is religion, or some psychological phenomenon.” Worst of all, “this is mental illness.” My ego violently tried to take back my identity with the concept of doubt. I would read something online, or watch a video: obviously EVERYONE is talking about the truth; the struggle in the storyline of a movie, this is my struggle, this is the universe’s struggle. The movie is talking directly to me, to itself. This sounds like mental illness, doesn’t it? People in the streets, talking about each other, gossiping about each other, gossiping about me. This sounds like mental illness, doesn’t it? I’d try to explain my theories to my girlfriend and my therapist, it sounds like gibberish because my mind has made connections between concepts that only make sense in the nondual state. Schizophrenia? I am extremely elated because everything I experience is giving me immense joy and a sense of energy. Mania? This is when paranoia set in. Obviously, if I were an immoral person this state would be extremely dangerous. I am extremely perceptive of the flow of communication, if people knew this they would think I’m trying to manipulate them. If they knew how happy I was they would be jealous. If our capitalist society knew I didn’t need to buy from them they would disregard me. If people saw my odd behaviors they would think I’m unpredictable and fear for their lives. I am the gene that could break evolution, and it only makes sense that the masses would benefit from destroying me. And that’s what they did. My therapist called an ambulance when I tried to explain this to him. He diagnosed me as psychotic and manic and they took me to the hospital on an involuntary hold. Things got really, really bad. Confined to my hospital bed, my perception of time spiraled out of control. My mind would race through the infinite at top speed, arrive to the conclusion “but this is illogical, you are crazy” and then iterate this loop over, and over, and over. The form of logic began to express itself through a rapid flow of arm movements and hand gestures, and I appeared as a crazy man flailing his arms around wildly. They tied me down to the hospital bed so I couldn’t move. The doubt that was instilled into my mind manifested itself in the form of pure evil. With the variable of doubt, nothing can make sense. Everyone around me was trying to hurt me, all I wanted to do was help them but no one can trust my oddities. And I can’t trust them. I can’t trust myself. I am Jesus nailed to cross. I’m in the 1940s, doctors are trying to lobotomize me. I am in the future, people are trying to dismantle me. I am in a coma and I’ve been trying to wake up for hundreds of years. I am the singularity of a black hole. I am the chaotic void before the big bang. I am pure universal destruction. My thoughts and perceptions began to leave me until nothing was left but abstract colors and shapes, completely removed from this world. I spent what felt like 100s of years in absolute hell, in every sense of the word. I regained consciousness 4 days later, while sitting in the dining room of a mental hospital. I looked down and saw a violent abstract painting that I had no memory of painting. I was profoundly confused and disoriented, and it took me another 3 days before I could fully understand where I was and what had happened. When I went home they had me on antipsychotics, which just made me want to eat and sleep all day. I had to drop out of the semester, and I had slipped into a deep depression for the next few weeks. I thought I had the truth, and then I lost it. Maybe it wasn’t the truth after all. I recently weened myself off of medication and I am feeling much, much better. Despite the hell of the situation, I feel that what I got out of the beginning has improved my life drastically. I haven’t felt depressed, my anxiety has gone down considerably, and I don’t ruminate over the past. I thought I was absolutely nuts until I started reading and watching Leo’s content about enlightenment, there is a lot that coincides with what he’s saying I’m starting to feel like what I had experienced has more in common with enlightenment than mental illness. After all, if mental illness has changed my life permanently for the better, why should it be perceived as an illness? The experience I was having wasn’t the damaging part, it was the stigmatization and paranoia about mental illness that society instilled into me. It was doubt about who I really am, who we really are. The same doubt that was instilled into that 3 year old child all those years ago. I want to go back to those first moments, before the doubt set in. But first I need to learn more and become more disciplined in rejecting doubt. I’ve read a lot about how to get there, but no one really talks about how to stay there, how to adapt and function in this new world. Hopefully you guys can help me out a little. =) What do you think? Was this mental illness, enlightenment, or something else? Do you think others going through psychosis are getting a glimpse of enlightenment without the proper understanding to interpret it?