Do Depersonalization and Derealization exist?

[Aaron p]

This is quite a key point for me, because it's hard to identify the difference between regular mental health issues and insights of power and authentic spirituality.

 

For example what is the difference between Depersonalization (the category of mental illness relating to the sense that you are not real) and an awakening into the truth of no self (the realisation that you are not real). 

And the same for the sense of a real external reality...

I'm hoping to get an objective answer.

----------------------------------------------------

Leo, is the defining factor you use to distinguish these two [similar sounding] phenomena, purely a matter of remaining functional as a human?

[Leo Gura]

Sure they exist. But they are totally different states of consciousness.

There are so many totally different higher states of consciousness and awakening.

The purest awakening has nothing negative or dysfunctional about it. You will not be regretting it or feeling negative.

If you're feeling at all negative about awakening, rest assured that there exists something higher than whatever you got.

Even within non-depresonalized/non-derealized awakening there are many different kinds, qualities, and degrees. And I'm not even sure depresonalization/derealization deserve to be called awakening. It's hard for me to say because I have never experienced those. Alls I know is there's nothing to be negative about. God is all upside.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Leo Gura

[LSD-Rumi]

@Aaron p They happened to me once, they are stupid, you are so depressed that you feel not engaged with the world around you.

[TheNovice]

Noself is like when the mind is so sharp you can see that you are an illusion.
Depersonalization is like being so mentally numb and disconnected that you feel like you are an illusion.
It is a change in perception but it is not awakening or anything like that.

[UnbornTao]

Enlightenment is always positive. It's about what's true. Freedom and some form of healing usually arise after enlightenment experiences. Your nature is recognized to be inherently free and blissful. It isn't about insanity and the like. That might occur in one's process but shouldn't be confused with your consciousness in the matter. Intense emotional reactions always come up with intense contemplation, they are temporary and should be allowed to arise. Likewise, Beneficial states shouldn't be confused with consciousness of the absolute.

Enlightenment is becoming conscious of what's already true! The truth is and has always been the case, so there's no need for fear or resistance. What you describe are activities the mind does.

I'm speaking intellectually, not from direct experience.

Edited June 18, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Moksha]

Depersonalization is like a magician reaching into the hat and failing to find a rabbit, without realizing that he himself is part of the trick.

It's confusing to the mind, and is the limit of its comprehension. Why did the illusion of individual existence suddenly stop working? The rabbit ego is nowhere to be found, but the dream still hasn't been dispelled. All the magician mind can do is dive head first into the hat, desperately trying to lose itself in the void of its unreality.

Escape from the illusion requires direct realization. The curtain goes down for intermission, and the lights turn on. It is the grace of the absolute allowing itself to awaken, without losing awareness even as intermission ends and the act goes on.

[Loving Radiance]

23 hours ago, TheNovice said:

Noself is like when the mind is so sharp you can see that you are an illusion.
Depersonalization is like being so mentally numb and disconnected that you feel like you are an illusion.
It is a change in perception but it is not awakening or anything like that.

I'm am still dealing with DPDR and I can confirm this.

[Loving Radiance]

@Moksha Beautifully put. Thank you!

[Aaron p]

i remember how you said one time, @Leo Gura, that awakening can be done incorrectly very easily and in many different ways. I suppose its a matter of ones own intuition to determine healthy growth vs unhealthy growth (or premature stress)...

Edited May 29, 2023 by Aaron p

[Leo Gura]

@Aaron p There's a lot of traps in this work, for sure.

[Breakingthewall]

25 minutes ago, Aaron p said:

i remember how you said one time, @Leo Gura, that awakening can be done incorrectly very easily and in many different ways. I suppose its a matter of ones own intuition to determine healthy growth vs unhealthy growth (or premature stress)...

awakening can only be done in one way: directly. you have to want it, love it, desire it. and you will make your way to it

[Inliytened1]

On 5/28/2023 at 1:10 PM, Leo Gura said:

Even within non-depresonalized/non-derealized awakening there are many different kinds, qualities, and degrees. And I'm not even sure depresonalization/derealization deserve to be called awakening. It's hard for me to say because I have never experienced those. Alls I know is there's nothing to be negative about. God is all upside.

Depersonalization is enlightenment minus becoming God or realizing you are God.   I experienced Depersonalization and realized instantly that it is identical.   This was an insight or an epiphany.   The only reason I knew Depersonalization itself wasn't enlightenment is because if it was, all the people suffering it would be awake.  So in a nutshell - God realization is depersonalization with the added bonus of God realization.   But otherwise it's Identical.   

God is not all upside.  God realization is bliss but also the epiphany that you are completely by Yourself and that there are no other conscious entities anywbere is blistering and shocking..  This shows that a non-dual state does not have always have to be all upside.   To say that is to once again limit the limitless.

Edited June 1, 2023 by Inliytened1

[Juan]

1 hour ago, Inliytened1 said:

Depersonalization is enlightenment minus becoming God or realizing you are God.   I experienced Depersonalization and realized instantly that it is identical.   This was an insight or an epiphany.   The only reason I knew Depersonalization itself wasn't enlightenment is because if it was, all the people suffering it would be awake.  So in a nutshell - God realization is depersonalization with the added bonus of God realization.   But otherwise it's Identical.   

You have zero clue of what depersonalization is. I could even write a book of how horrendous it is to be in that state of mind to the point of suicide, you don’t want to be there, everything feels so doll and fake. Separation with everything escalated to who knows what percentage, you could become even antisocial for how much disconnected you are with yourself and the world, you have a big ass victim mentality, physically you are here but mentally you are elsewhere, is not a pretty place, it’s hell, not identical at all to awakening or God Realization.

One thing is to experience this in order to awake, another thing is being on that state 24/7 for months and years. 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Juan

[Inliytened1]

41 minutes ago, Juan said:

You have zero clue of what depersonalization is. I could even write a book of how horrendous it is to be in that state of mind to the point of suicide, you don’t want to be there, everything feels so doll and fake.

I've been there for a time.  That's a paradoxical statement because there is no one to be there.  So "i" do have a clue.   But don't mistake it for depression.   True depersonalization is dissociation from the self - it is a complete lack of the sense of self -  it is the abyss.  It is not suicidal tendencies- because that which is no self cannot end itself.

Edited June 1, 2023 by Inliytened1

[Juan]

22 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

I've been there for a time.  That's a paradoxical statement because there is no one to be there.  So "i" do have a clue.   But don't mistake it for depression.   True depersonalization is dissociation from the self - it is a complete lack of the sense of self -  it is the abyss.  It is not suicidal tendencies- because that which is no self cannot end itself.

It wasn’t depression at all bro. It got to the point that I even had to go to a psychologist and got indeed diagnosed back then to my, “my” (however you want to phrase it) condition. It doesn’t need to have suicidal tendencies but like Leo mentioned it has many qualities, degrees, etc. And yes it is a full dissociation from the self, now the degree that I’m talking about here, it was beyond of not being capable to even sustain myself.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Juan

[Juan]

@Inliytened1 Here is a more nuanced examples of depersonalization & derealization, from experience: 

• Disconnected from yourself and environment (literally, you can feel in your bones)
• We could have a conversation and my mind is elsewhere and this is beyond my control (not even meditation or yoga helps)
• Emotionally disconnected
• Visually (this is hard to explain if you haven’t experimented changing your state of consciousness), things look doll, fake, like you feel so separate from everything, hard to explain if you’re emotionally stable now
• Hard to sleep
• Sure when you’re in this state of mind you can also get depress and I loosed some hair
• People will see something is wrong with you, they are even afraid of you at times
• Mental disturbance (incoherent thoughts)
• Ungrounded, you even feel uncomfortable touching grass
• Hard to look at people faces (cuz you know something is not ok with you), this is connected to feeling shame

And the list goes on…

Edited June 1, 2023 by Juan

[Water by the River]

Bernadette Roberts wrote a book on her experiences with True No-Self: The Experience of No-Self.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadette_Roberts

Some comments on the topic and Bernadette Roberts book in the link below:

 

Inliytened1 quotes above also provide an excellent perspective on the topic.

Selling Water by the River

Edited June 1, 2023 by Water by the River

[Juan]

@Water by the River there is a HUGE difference about depersonalization/derealization in spirituality and mental illness. Speaking from experience that I had to live in that hell on 2019 and had to start working with ayahuasca in order to get better and get actual awakenings. As a mental illness it’s hard to sustain yourself, you can’t fit into society easily, as a spirituality you’re more “normal” and can still function to keep going with your life. 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Juan

[Water by the River]

1 hour ago, Juan said:

there is a HUGE difference about depersonalization/derealization in spirituality and mental illness

Sure, fully agree. Thanks for highlighting that. ( :

A functioning healthy working character floating around in oneself it not a bad thing. I generally like the model of Ken Wilber on these topics (below). 

Any kind of healthy realization/transcendence should make one more loving and productive. If it kills the functioning character, makes one disfunctional, insane or mean, it is not the healthy version of realization/transcendence, but the sick one. If at all.

• differentiate, transcend and integrate (the healthy model of growth and transcendence),
• but disassociate/split off, don't transcend, and of course don't integrate (the sick version of failed growth and transcendence), and, uuum, mucho problemas.

Daniel Brown once said: How can one spot deep and mature Realization? With the conduct with which one lives ones life. Yours truly believes that this is the ultimate compass, beyond blabla-bravado, conceptual castles in the sky, the lastest new awakened state of the day, claims of superiority of whatever-kind.

Anybody who claims otherwise: Why not? Too difficult? For whom?

Selling Water by the River

 

The Meaning of Egolessness – Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber: Precisely because the ego, the soul and the Self can all be present simultaneously, we can better understand the real meaning of egolessness,

Egolessness-awaken - a notion that has caused an inordinate amount of confusion. But egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional self (that’s a psychotic, not a sage); it means that one is no longer exclusively identified with that self.

One of the many reasons we have trouble with the notion of egoless is that people want their egoless sages to fulfill all their fantasies of saintly or spiritual, which usually means dead from the neck down, without fleshy wants or desires, gently smiling all the time. All of the things that people typically have trouble with money, food, sex, relationships, desire they want their saints to be without. Egoless sages who are above all that is what people want. Talking heads is what they want. Religion, they believe, will simply get rid of all baser instincts, drives and relationships, and hence they look to religion, not for advice on how to live life with enthusiasm, but on how to avoid it, repress it, deny it, escape it.

In other words, the typical person wants the spiritual sage to be less than a person, somehow devoid of all the messy, juicy, complex, pulsating, desiring, urging forces that drive most human beings. We expect our sages to be an absence of all that drives us! All the things that frighten us, confuse us, torment us, confound us: we want our sages to be untouched by them altogether. And that absence, that vacancy, that less than personal, is what we often mean by egoless.

But egoless does not mean less than personal, it means more than personal. Not personal minus, but personal plus all the normal personal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints and sages from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years.

And they did so not because they avoided the physical, emotional and mental dimensions of humanness and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations. No doubt, they were also plugged into the soul (deeper psychic) and spirit (formless Self) the ultimate source of their power but they expressed that power, and gave it concrete results, precisely because they dramatically engaged the lower dimensions through which that power could speak in terms that could be heard by all.

These great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego (the functional vehicle of the gross realm) can and does exist alongside the soul (the vehicle of the subtle) and the Self (vehicle of the causal). To the extent these great teachers moved the gross realm, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified merely with their egos (that’s a narcissist), they simply found their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis, saints and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher Self, alive to the pure atman (the pure I–I) that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God.

Saint Teresa was a great contemplative? Yes, and Saint Teresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it). Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations. Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lao Tzu, Plato, the Bal Shem Tov these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim. And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down. No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God.

There is certainly a type of truth to the notion of transcending ego : it doesn’t mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into something bigger. (As Nagarjuna put it, in the relative world, atman is real; in the absolute, neither atman nor anatman is real. Thus, in neither case is anatta a correct description of reality.) The small ego does not evaporate; it remains as the functional center of activity in the conventional realm. As I said, to lose that ego is to become a psychotic, not a sage.

Transcending the ego thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not get rid of the small ego, but rather, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions and mind; they do not erase them.

Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live it with a certain exuberance. When identification spills out of the ego and into the Kosmos at large, the ego discovers that the individual atman is in fact all of a piece with Brahman. The big Self is indeed no small ego, and thus, to the extent you are stuck in your small ego, a death and transcendence is required. Narcissists are simply people whose egos are not yet big enough to embrace the entire Kosmos, and so they try to be central to the Kosmos instead.

But we do not want our sages to have big egos; we do not even want them to display a manifest dimension at all. Anytime a sage displays humanness in regard to money, food, sex, relationships we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us. We want out, we want to ascend, we want to escape, and the sage who engages life with gusto, lives it to the hilt, grabs each wave of life and surfs it to the end this deeply, profoundly disturbs us, frightens us, because it means that we, too, might have to engage life, with gusto, on all levels, and not merely escape it in a cloud of luminous ether. We do not want our sages to have bodies, egos, drives, vitality, sex, money, relationships, or life, because those are what habitually torture us, and we want out. We do not want to surf the waves of life, we want the waves to go away. We want vaporware spirituality.

The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as tantric, these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion. They enter with awareness the nine rings of hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found. Nothing is alien to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste.

Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally gestures of the One and Only Taste. To inhabit lust and watch it play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name. Body and mind and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present awareness that grounds the entire display.

In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not you yourself? When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?

 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Water by the River

[Razard86]

11 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

Depersonalization is enlightenment minus becoming God or realizing you are God.   I experienced Depersonalization and realized instantly that it is identical.   This was an insight or an epiphany.   The only reason I knew Depersonalization itself wasn't enlightenment is because if it was, all the people suffering it would be awake.  So in a nutshell - God realization is depersonalization with the added bonus of God realization.   But otherwise it's Identical.   

God is not all upside.  God realization is bliss but also the epiphany that you are completely by Yourself and that there are no other conscious entities anywbere is blistering and shocking..  This shows that a non-dual state does not have always have to be all upside.   To say that is to once again limit the limitless.

This is why I love you!!!! LOL!!! Bout time you came back to the forums!!! Finally!!!! Another voice of truth around here lol!!!!