The body makes its own drugs and it turns out Self-Realization is the most supreme of them all, blowing its pharmaceutical counterparts completely out of the water. If I had known what I know now 30 years ago, my life would have turned out completely differently.

As strange as this sounds, enlightenment isn’t all that far away when you’ve given up on life. If you’ve hit rock bottom, it’s better to take this leap of faith than to reconstruct your ego and rebuild another “self” from the ashes of your life.

When you’ve given up on life and you’ve hit rock bottom, you really only have to change one small thing to attain enlightenment. You merely have to get rid of that last bit of “self” you believed yourself to be. This is good news because at rock bottom, you’re almost there.

There’s only one way to go when you’ve plundered all of existence and sunk down to the muck and mud at the bottom of the ocean of consciousness. You can stay nestled in that mess or rise up in victory, as Christ commands us to do. 

Similar to how a wandering traveler roams distant lands and crosses oceans, it’s better to keep going at this point.  You’ve gone so far into this thing that turning back would take too long. If you turn around now, you’ll have to recircle the entire globe.

You’ve detached from your experience and you no longer feel like a human being.

This is the fine line between complete self-destruction and enlightenment. I know because I’ve straddled that line for decades, never for a moment thinking I could cast my net to the other side and find the feast of my life.

There’s a medical term for this state of having lost everything and essentially divorced yourself from your own experience in a traumatic way. They call it “depersonalization. “

Nevertheless, this “depersonalization” is almost beyond the power of words to convey. I can describe it for you for days here but until you’ve felt this thing firsthand, you’ll never understand. 

Although the disorder isn’t very well studied, it is characterized by a persistent and insidious sense of unreality in both the subjective and objective worlds. The experience of unreality of one’s “self” is referred to as “depersonalization” while the unreal feeling of one's surroundings is referred to as “derealization.”

With these conditions in effect, one’s experience of reality is described as being surreal, obscure, shrouded. The most commonly used terms are “dream” and “unreality.” At times, however, it can be conveyed with an almost disharmonious lucidity. It’s like you’re on the brink of superconsciousness, riding out the edges of the cosmos venturing into untraveled soil.

Keep in mind, this condition is not a psychotic one. Far from it. Instead, those reporting symptoms are painfully aware that what they’re perceiving is not normal.  They still have some presence of mind and yet they’ve plundered into depths few souls ever traverse. They’ve described the feeling as if they’re a “robot” or as if they’re in a movie. And the experience is not uncommon. Far from it. Many people experience this at some point, on some level, in ways that are short lived or fleeting. Among college students, one study found around half of them had experienced it briefly. It is particularly common to those experiencing a strong hangover, jet-lag or severe stress.

Nevertheless, for about 1 or 2 percent of the population, this condition is their fixed state of being. It is persistent and painful. Often, it gets misdiagnosed as depression. Although depersonalization can appear as a symptom of anxiety and depression, it is something far beyond these comparatively infantile mental afflictions. Researchers are finding depersonalization is linked to the amygdala and insula, which are responsible for emotional and physical sensations.

In chronic cases of depersonalization, this part of the brain is less responsive and the patient becomes less empathetic with an increased threshold for pain. Because of this, some experts believe the condition is a defense mechanism, a sort of “trip switch” in one’s psychology that gets triggered by trauma and stress.

There is a general absence of feeling, a sort of detachment from reality similar to that of an enlightened being.

Enlightenment occurs when an individual severs identification with their mind and body, their physical form, and abides in their eternal spiritual essence, which is connected to all things. Enlightened beings realize the infinite “Self” with a capital letter while realizing their finite self, or their individuality, is not an essential thing in the physical universe. It’s not real. It’s hallucinated by the brain. The soul or ego each human experiences at the very least isn’t what it seems. Scientists and philosophers have known this for a very long time. Consciousness is one. However, it breaks away from this oneness to generate subjective experiences. 

One Psychologist, Dr. Bruce Hood explains this in the book “The Self Illusion.” Hood, like many other leading minds in the world, are baffled that there’s no center in the brain or anywhere in the body where a person’s “self” is located or produced. This supports the new science emerging that indicates the brain actually filters consciousness, and that consciousness or awareness is the ground of all physical things in the universe. Even time and space emerge from consciousness. As a result, science is finding the experience of being a “self” is something the brain fabricates for our own benefit and evolution as eternal spiritual beings that are individualized for a reason. Without this individuality, there would be no subjective experience. Moreover, the experiences we have in life would appear as meaningless episodes fragmented in consciousness. The brain merely weaves these episodes together into a narrative that is meaningful, whether that meaning is correct or completely baseless.  Similar to every other illusion generated by the brain, this illusion has a very useful purpose.

Without a self, the processing would be too much. And in the case of those who don’t always experience a “self” this is far more than a theory. It is a waking reality. There is no “I.”

The “I” that I believe myself to be is a construct of the mind. The brain filters consciousness down to a trickle, taking the infinite consciousness that pervades every atom of the universe and creates duality. Without this individualized entity that is “I” there would only be infinite consciousness and it would not be able to experience itself subjectively.

The ability for some, through deep trauma or major stress, to detach from themselves and their experience is further confirmation of the emerging science that’s going to revolutionize the world during this critical time. 

This is what woke me up, essentially, from a decades-long nightmare of depersonalization and made me realize, after having a powerful spiritual awakening that was very physical that I was not far from enlightenment, as strange as this might seem.

Depersonalization can be a burden, a painful burden — or if seen from this context, it can be used for one’s benefit and growth similar to a blessing in disguise.

One writer declares: “It’s a Dostoyevsky style illumination—where clarity cannot be distinguished from pain.”

You’ve dismantled your ego, or at the very least objectified it and stepped back. In my case, I let the ego run wild. I remember countless times feeling as if I was a passenger trapped in a vehicle gone made.

When your drug addiction has forced you to sleep out in the freezing cold, and your only concern is where you’re going to get that next dose to dull the pain, you’ve pretty much given up on life. You’re too proud to ask for help. And too powerless to take drastic measures to stop.

You’re stuck.

And you don’t feel like a human being anymore. Animals have more dignity and care for themselves better. You haven’t eaten in days and you stink from not having showered. You have no friends or family to turn to. The last person you talked to was a young woman on drugs herself who let you stay in her apartment so she could rob you of all your remaining belongings before calling the police on you to make a false claim.

There is no honor among thieves, and pain loses its edge when you’re in hell. This is why so many addicts realize the unreality of an eternal afterlife of torture so many of us are raised to believe in when raised in Christian families.

Even the worst pain becomes bearable if you endure it long enough because you have no choice but to endure it. You surrender to the pain and embrace it. It becomes your friend. And it changes you.

You’ve detached from your ego and you just watch it as it chases desires without restraint, self-will run riot. You essentially give up on life and become a passenger in a vessel run amok by a primitive ape brain that seeks pleasure to the point of self-induced torture.

After having suffered incomparable horrors caused by the ego, one truly begins to see how and why the egoic brain has to go.

Some believe this is the destiny of all humans in later generations, to transcend the egoic mind and abide in that inner state of powerful, life-changing awareness that opens one’s eyes to layers of reality that baffle the minuscule human intellect.