There are times when the “me”-ness of our everyday experience weakens. Life feels a bit like it is being lived in third person. Our selves feel a bit unreal, and reality itself feels a bit unreal. The former condition is referred to as depersonalization, and the latter as derealization.
Both of these phenomena involve a feeling of separation from one’s immediate experience. One goes from being blissfully lost in identification with the stream of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and emotions, to now finding oneself unable to inhabit them fully. A small gap has opened up in one’s consciousness, between the observer within us and the objects being observed. There is space for making a distinction between the experiencer and the experience itself. Quite often, the awareness of the presence of an observer within us is a new discovery; previously we had not even noticed it as a separate entity owing to our usual state of being totally lost in experience.
Compared to our own past recollections and expectations of how various things affected us, life feels different, because it is. One has been released from the constraint of always being somewhere along a predictable stimulus-response curve. It is as if a soldier in a marching band has inexplicably stepped off to one side of the parade to watch the rest pass by. Compared to our normal tightly-coupled ways of experiencing the world and oneself, such an estrangement can be profoundly unsettling and distressing. One might feel as if something has gone amiss, some train within us has been decoupled from the engine. Societal norms play into this feeling. One might feel anxious about not feeling as anxious as one is ‘supposed to’ about various things, or feel guilty about feeling relatively aloof. Without the context to interpret what is happening, any new and unfamiliar way of experiencing the world automatically feels as if something is wrong.
Various factors can give rise to depersonalization and derealization, but there is much confusion due the subjective and self-reported nature of the phenomena. Antidepressants are commonly cited for creating feelings of depersonalization that last for years. Cannabis can bring on temporary episodes of feeling out of touch with reality, of being unable to reside in one’s own body or experience. Trauma is often cited as a cause. The psyche throws a temporarily protective circuit breaker on conscious experience to cope with trauma. The dissociation or psychological dismemberment that follows can help blunt the experience of highly distressing situations and wrap one in a sort of fuzzy gauze while hiding away the painful memories into the unconscious. However, such psychic numbing may be qualitatively different from derealization and depersonalization, where there is no narrowing of observational focus and no loss of salience or distortion in memory. Depersonalization and derealization are about a loss of feeling, not memory. Yet, sometimes, being freed from intensity allows for subtlety, for feeling more nuance. A detached stance is more capable of noticing in the moment, not just the external stimuli, but also the inner sensations, thoughts, emotions, and feelings in the body of the observer.
Sounds uncannily similar to meditation? Indeed. Open Monitoring Meditation (OMM) is a style of meditation where one brings awareness to the entire stream of experience in the passing moment. As opposed to Focused Meditation (FM), where the attention is concentrated on a particular point of focus such as one’s breath or thoughts or a chant or a candle, in OMM one is open to observing all phenomena as they appear in awareness, without judgment. It may appear as if this is no different from not meditating at all, but the key is the presence of the observer, who stands steady as a quiet witness without getting carried away by the passing current of experience, including the monkey-mind’s incessant chatter and his tendency to unearth and randomly serve emotionally charged embers of thought. The desired state of mind while practicing OMM sounds a lot like what one experiences involuntarily in depersonalization and derealization. Although the former is intentionally sought after while the latter states aren’t, the difference may not matter, because once a space in consciousness has opened up, it tends to stay open. The witness within us has woken up.
A small gap appears between the experiencer and the experience. The witness within has woken up.
Many meditators take decades of diligent practice to reach the point where their efforts show up as visible changes to the default network activity in scans of their brain function. Yet, it can happen suddenly. Severe and sudden cases of onset of derealization and depersonalization may need to be investigated for other underlying conditions to be treated. Nevertheless, there have been many self-reported anecdotes of sudden onsets, precipitated by traumatic events or even occurring spontaneously. One of many such famous cases is of spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle, who went from being “normal” to having an episode where overnight he separated from his ego and underwent a spiritual awakening. Of course, these so-called spontaneous cases may simply be the end result of a long and hard process of exploration and seeking over many years, building up to an episode of temporary psychosis that finally overwhelms the ego, albeit in seemingly sudden fashion. Eckhart himself recounts how, while still in his previous tortured state, he assimilated his awakening sitting on a park bench for three years prior to the ‘sudden’ event. In other words, there’s the gradual method and there’s the sudden method, and as Alan Watts quipped, the former is for slow people and the latter is for the quick people, but in the end they may both be the same thing.
The onset of depersonalization and derealization isn’t the same as the beginnings of a spiritual awakening; it can be but doesn’t have to be. Without guidance, context, or a cultural container within which to interpret what is happening and build upon them with an intention to guide the course of life, the phenomena can simply linger dormant in the background for indeterminable periods, causing anxiety for the sufferer in the meantime. Yet, whether embraced or despised, a distanced perspective brings clarity to situations, both in the external and internal worlds. If the unity of a cohesive self, with the ego firmly in charge and marching around as the sole president of an empty nation – a trick we pull off increasingly convincingly upon ourselves in modern civilization – holds us back from discovering our true Self, then could a thwarting of this ego be such a bad thing? If we have a condition that weakens an illusion, is that more reality or less reality? Is it madness or is it sanity to find a slight release from the rigid and predictable ways in which we used to experience life?
What happens to our world view once the observer in us is activated? Lots of uncomfortable questions may arise about what aspects of our belief systems are social constructs worth keeping and which ones can be trashed. Perception is the backbone of reality, and when we question reality, we feel insecure in our previous choices, as if we are falling through mid-air with nothing solid to clutch. The fabric of our lives feels like it’s slipping between our fingers unfelt. We may respond with a regressive restoration of personas, by digging in and doubling down on what felt so true and solid in the past. We may try to ratchet up the stimulation, just to feel the familiar with the same intensity, instead of finding our intensity in embracing the unfamiliar. With aching nostalgia, we may long to distract ourselves again, to lose ourselves in the mundane trivia that we used to fill our lives with. Nevertheless, this painful process of questioning everything is precisely what is needed to undertake the necessary destruction for the acts of creation, and ultimately, to be free to choose a life of one’s own making.
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Vedic scripture known as the Mandukya Upanishads told a story of two birds, inseparable companions, perched on the tree of life. The tree of life refers here to either the body of an individual or entire creation itself. One bird eats the fruit, the other simply watches. The former bird, Jivatma is the living self, or the Individual soul, while the latter bird, Paramatma, is the witnessing self, or the Supreme soul. The entire gamut of the bitter-sweet human experience is represented by the Jivatma bird that is eating the fruit, and either enjoying or suffering. Jivatma goes about its life engrossed in bodily activity and experiences pleasure but also suffers anxiety and distress. The witness, the Paramatma bird, represents the fact that the same individual can also view the experience as an outsider and not get affected by the joy and sorrow which are temporary experiences. Meditation that wakes up the inner witness soothes our suffering as we recognize and welcome the presence of both birds in our tree of life.
The path to wholeness may lie through the disorienting mists of what feels so unreal but is ultimately just reality being seen for the first time.
