It's safe to say that the majority of people seeking help when they experience depersonalization simply want to resume life as they once knew it, or live the kind of well-adjusted, balanced, or "normal" life they instinctively know exists. This doesn't mean they have to ignore or deny the deeper meanings depersonalization may potentially hold.
Said one recovered depersonalized individual, a mother in her 40s,
"depersonalization changed my perspective forever, in an existential way. But when I first experienced it, all I wanted was a way out. It took me a long time to realize that I wasn't going insane. I'll always envy people who just live within the framework of normalcy. Yet sometimes, I feel a little sorry for them, especially when they're overly self-confident. They think they know who they really are."
Instances in which depersonalization can be channeled into creative or visionary outlets remain quite rare—so is true enlightenment, despite the fact that there are millions of practicing Buddhists. Fear, as Amiel noted, is certainly an inhibiting factor. And depersonalization is intensely isolating and fear provoking by its nature. Without the assistance of a knowledgeable "guru" to serve as a guide, a person must make their way through these fearful waters without a clue as to where they may be headed or when they may-sink.
With this in mind, is depersonalization akin to some kind spiritual enlightenment? Are mystical experiences, meditation, and depersonalization the same? Recently, compelling data has begun to emerge, providing these issues with more material for discussion.
In 2001 Andrew Newburg of the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center published two single photon emission computerized tomography studies, one looking at Franciscan nuns and the other at Tibetan Buddhist meditators. In both groups, intense meditation was associated with increased brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, dorsolatera] and medial orbitofrontal, and the ciiigulate gyrus—areas involved in cognitive control and focused concentration on the self. Also of interest in both studies, the activity in the prefrontal cortex was inversely related to activity in the superior parietal lobe, possibly reflecting the altered sense of body and space experienced during meditation. As discussed in chapter 6, these are the areas involved in the experience of depersonalization. Does this new data tell us that spirituality, or depersonalization. is com-pletely in the brain, or is the brain letting in something else from outside?
There's no clear answer on this. As Newburg has pointed out, If we take a brain image of a person when she is looking at a picture, we will see various parts of the brain being activated, such as the visual cortex. But the brain image cannot tell us whether or not there actually is a picture "out there" or whether the person is creating the picture in her own mind. To a certain degree, we all create our own sense of reality. Getting at what is really real is the tricky part.2
As such studies continue, certainly more will be learned. But changes in brain activity that come about as the result of deliberate meditative practice seem to be experienced far differently from those that are neither desired nor voluntary. Once again, from a medical perspective, the DSM-makes its position clear here as well: "Voluntarily induced experiences of depersonalization or derealization form part of the meditative and trance practices that are prevalent in many religions and cultures and should not be confused with Depersonalization Disorder."2"
Much has been learned about the negative aspects of depersonalization, and, in time, more is likely to be learned about any positive attributes as well. Certainly, no matter how much they ruminate, suffer, or seek help, most depersonalized people are likely to learn firsthand what Frederic Amiel ob-served at the outset—we simply are not what we think ourselves to be.
Everything and Nothing
Perhaps the best way to leave this topic is with one of the greatest and most mysterious figures of the arts, William Shakespeare. What went through the mind of the man who wrote "to be or not to be?" Why does Richard ill say that inside himself he plays the part of many, and what prompts lago to curiously utter "I am not what I am"? The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose poetry and prose is rich with esoteric meaning and intuitive perspectives on the nature of existence and nonexistence, a real self versus no self, provides his own speculation as to the mystery of Shakespeare, with thought-provoking relevance to the subject at hand.
In the short story, Everything and Nothing, which we excerpt here, Borges tells of a man 'who played many parts as an actor and assumed many roles primarily because he cannot realize his own identity.
There was no one inside him.. .behind his face . . . there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone had failed to dream. . . .
At first he thought that everyone was like him. but the surprise and bewilderment of an acquaintance to whom he began to describe that hollowness showed him his error, and also let him know, forever after, that an individual ought not to differ from its species. . . .
At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his "nobodiness" might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to; he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person.
Borges explains 'how this man found happiness for a time in playing others on stage, but inevitably "when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody."
For 20 years, Borges adds, the actor created characters to play on stage, and once in a while, hinted at his own particular selflessness through the words of one of his creations. But in time, the actor is overwhelmed by being so many different people on stage, while never really being himself. He stops writing and assumes the life of an English bourgeois, concerned only with money and daily maintenance of his affluent lifestyle. Even his last written item, his will, is commonplace, showing no sign of the literary genius that once flourished under its author's pen.
In the end, Borges provides an answer to this life of being no one, in a manner that reflects the enigmatic wonder of clepersonalization itself:
History adds that before or after he died, he discovered himself standing before God, and said to Him: I, who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself.
God's voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dreams are you, who like me are many, yet no one.
***
Contrary to popular assumptions, the Christian tradition goes beyond phenomena like St. Paul's being "blinded by the light." It also includes centuries-old mystical experiences involving the elimination of the individual self.
This is somewhat different from the personal, conversant relationship with Christ that fundamentalists espouse today. In the 1860s, the writings of an obscure Jesuit priest, Jean-Pierre de Caussade. were published, more than a century after they were written. (He would certainly have been tried for heresy during his lifetime.) Commenting on the no-self experience, he wrote in 1731;
"Often indeed God places certain souls in this state, which is called emptiness of the spirit or of the intelligence; it is also called: being in nothingness (etre dans le rieri). This annihilation of our own spirit disposes wonderfully to receive that of Jesus Christ. This mystical death of the operations of our own activity renders our soul apt for the reception of divine operations"10
More recently, Bernadette Roberts's The Experience of No-Self reflects this type of being, and hearkens to Amiel's desire to be an ''empty vessel" filled with the presence of God. Roberts's writing describes her personal struggle with mysterious moments of deep, silent "stillness" that from early childhood she interpreted as the presence of God. To explore the source of this stillness, she entered a convent. But whenever she meditated in an effort to recapture it, she felt herself losing her identity, and suffered, intense fear because of it.
"It was a fear of being engulfed forever, of being lost, annihilated, or blacking out and possibly never returning. In such moments, to ward off the fear, I would make some movement of abandoning my fate to God—a ges-ture of the will, a thought, some type of projection. And everytime I did this I would gradually return to my usual self—and security. Then, one day,this was not to be the case."" Roberts writes of the no-self experience as a voyage, a "passageway" wherein panic reactions, emptiness, and depression are merely part of the trip to the final unity with God at the other end of a metaphoric tunnel. She was not unfamiliar with the psychological theories behind her strange feelings of emptiness, however, and recalled a book in which a psychologist described psychological "dissociation without compensation."
At the time I could not imagine what he was talking about, but felt sure it was something terrible and was glad I had never known any condition as dire as this sounded. But here, during the Passage, l recalled the statement because it seemed to epitomize my present situation. . . . I took it for my own condition of being completely cut off (dissociated) from the known, the self, without any compensating factor to take the place of the void so encoun-tered. It meant a state of no feelings, no energies, no movements, no insights, no seeing, no relationships with anything, nothing but absolute emptiness everywhere you turn. (p. 66)
After 9 years, she left the convent, married, and raised four children. The pervasive, periodic inner silences came and went, until, while visiting a monastery near her home, she experienced the stillness again and awaited "the onset of fear to break it up." But "instead of the usual unlocalized center of myself, there was nothing there, it was empty; and at that moment of seeing this there was a flood of quiet joy, and I knew, finally I knew what was missing—it was my self" (p. 23, emphasis in original).
Roberts's "passage" ultimately led her to a complete perceptual shift.
"When I visually focused in on a flower, an animal, another person, or any particular object, slowly the particularity would recede into a nebulous Oneness, so that the object's distinctness was lost to my mind. . . . it became impossible for the mind to perceive or retain any individuality when all visual objects either faded from the mind, gave way to something else, or were 'seen through'" (p. 36).
Strikingly similar to Roquentin's awakening by the chestnut tree, this type of changed perception is hard to manage. For Roberts, terror returned intermittently, but with a vengeance: "The silence within was not seen as freedom from self, rather, it was seen as an imprisoned self, a frozen, immovable self that was all part of the scene, part of the insidious nothingness choking the life out of everything. Even now it had frozen my body on the spot. How-could I survive another moment?" (p. 48).
Then, while on a retreat, she made an effort to face it once and for all. Seeking to eliminate this demon through her usual meditative practices, the final experience is described much like an exorcism, or an orgasm.
My head grew hot, and all I could see were stars. My feet began to freeze. Finally I fell back against the hill in a convulsive condition with my heart beating wildly. . . . It took me a while to realize my body was lying still on the hill, because initially, I seemed not to have one. I knew a great change had taken place. . . .God is neither the see-eror the seen, but the ''seeing." . . .
After a long passage, the mind had finally come to rest, and rejoice in its own understanding. . . . Now it was ready to take its rightful place in the immediacy and practicality of the now-moment.
(p. 92)
The View from the East
Ultimately, the stage was set for Roberts's depersonalization by a specific religious upbringing, intentional meditative practices, and reinforcement from clerics who were familiar with the traditions of Christian mysticism. This raises the issue of whether the depersonalization experience can be influenced by existing cultural biases. What happens when an atheist or non-Christian experiences essentially the same thing? Roquentin's encounter with the chestnut tree provides one answer. Suzanne Segal's Collision with the Infinite provides another.12
For many DPD sufferers, Segal's experiences hit closer to home than Roberts's perplexing spirituality. Segal's book centers on an event that occurred while boarding a bus in Paris in 1982. She was 27 years old and pregnant. As a young woman Segal had been involved with the transcendental meditation movement, which was trendy in the 1970s. After several years, however, she became disillusioned and left the organization entirely.
She then studied at the University of California-Berkeley, where after 2 years she gained a degree in English literature. She moved to Paris where she married and gave birth to a daughter. As she waited in line to get on the Paris bus, a life-altering event occurred. Suddenly she felt her ears pop, and was at once "enclosed in a kind of bubble" which cut her off from the rest of the scene, and left her acting and moving in the most mechanical way. In Collision, she describes that moment in detail:
I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called ''me" was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. "I" was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body's eyes. (p. 49) Walking home from that bus ride, she felt like a "cloud of awareness" was following her body. The cloud was a "witness" located behind her and completely separate from body, mind, and emotions. The witness was constant and so was fear, the fear of complete physical dissolution. The next morning, when nothing had changed, she wondered if she was going insane, and if she would ever be herself again.
What Segal then refers to as the "witnessing" continued for months, and her only relief came in sleep, into which she "plunged for as long and as often as possible." She explains, "In sleep, the mind finally stopped pumping out its unceasing litany of terror, and the witness was left to "witness an unconscious mind" (p. 53).
Recalling her earlier experiences with transcendental meditation, it occurred to her that this might be some kind of "cosmic consciousness," something her guru had described to her as the first stage of "awakened awareness." But it seemed impossible to her that this hellish realm could have anything to do with an enlightened state.
After months of the presence of this mystifying witness, it disappeared. Segal writes, leaving her in a new state that was far more baffling, and consequently more terrifying, than the experience of the preceding months. "The disappearance of the witness meant the disappearance of the last vestiges of the experience of personal identity. The witness had at least held a location for a 'me,' albeit a distant one. In the dissolution of the witness, there was literally no more experience of a 'me' at all. The experience of personal identity switched off and was never to appear again" (p.54).
Although internally Segal knew that she had changed radically, no one else noticed. She functioned as smoothly as ever, "as if there were an unseen doer who acted perfectly" (p. 65). She even managed to earn a doctorate in psychology in the years to follow. And yet, she writes, "The oddest moments occurred when any reference was made to my name. If I had to write it on a check or sign it on a letter, I would stare at the letters on the paper and the mind would drown in perplexity. The name referred to no one. There was no Suzanne Segal anymore; perhaps there never had been" (p. 55).
She consulted psychiatrists in an attempt to understand what had happened to her. Some diagnosed her with depersonalization disorder. Others had no clear explanation. As she lived in this mysterious state day after day, she became increasingly filled with fear. "Everything seemed to be dissolving right in front of my eyes, constantly. Emptiness was everywhere, seeping through the pores of every face I gazed upon, flowing through the crevices of seemingly solid objects. The body, mind, speech, thoughts, and emotions were all empty; they had no ownership, no person behind them. I was utterly bereft of all my previous notions of reality" (p. 63).
She later reasoned that the fear that pervaded her life forever after the "bus hit" came from the mind's attempts to make sense of what had happened to her. She reasoned that the mind created fear because it had lost control of the illusion of the person Suzanne Segal.
In time, a further shift occurred. Driving though a wintry landscape, she observed, "everything seemed more fluid. The mountains, trees, rocks, birds, sky, were all losing their differences. As I gazed about, what I saw first was how they were one; then, as a second wave of perception, I saw the distinctions. From that day forth I have had the constant experience of both moving through and being made of the 'substance' of everything" (p. f 30).
She got in touch with spiritual teachers within the California Buddhist community and gained additional reassurance, which helped ease the non-stop fear she had previously endured. They also provided explanations in the form of Buddhist teachings regarding anatta (no-self) and shunyata (emptiness). Her kind of no-self experience was not only understood, something like it was actually being cultivated, through daily regimens of rituals and meditations by those wanting to follow certain spiritual paths.
Buddhism, she felt, provided a plausible explanation for it all. In simplistic terms, the Buddhist interpretation states that "personality functions" remain even when one's self has disappeared. These are known as skandhas or "aggregates," and include form, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness. Their interaction creates the illusion of self. They do not actually make up the self. There is no self, Buddhism claims*. When the truth of the skandhas is revealed, as suddenly happened to Segal at the bus stop, it is seen that there is no self, only the skandhas still functioning as they function; the truth is that they are empty, they don't constitute a self, but their interaction creates the illusion of self. In Tibetan Buddhism this is known as "realization of emptiness," in Zen Buddhism it is known as realizing "no mind." (There have been Western explanations through the years, notably the philosopher Alan Watts's Wisdom of Insecurity and The Book, in which he explains ancient Vedantic traditions of "oneness" and no-self through metaphors and in simple English.) Buddhism stresses that changes of consciousness be met in stages; devotion (saddha), discipline (sila), detachment (cagd), and depersonaiization (.panna). The rituals and self-preparation are essential lifelong processes, with depersonalization as the final goal. Understandably, an unplanned, unexpected fast-track to panna could be quite terrifying, even with some knowledge of Buddhism.
When Segal's "collision with the infinite" became widely known, she received numerous "congratulations" from spiritual teachers, both East and West. From India, the well-known guru Poonjaji wrote, "In between the ar-rival of the bus and your waiting to board, there was the Void where there was no past or future. This Void revealed itself to itself. This is a wonderful experience. It has to stay eternally with you. This is perfect freedom. You have become (moksha) of the realized sages" (p. 122).
Closer to home, one of Poonjaji's American-born disciples (who took the name Gangaji) reassured her: "This realization of the inherent emptiness— which is pure consciousness—of all phenomena is true fulfillment. In the face of conditioned existence, much fear can be initially felt. Ultimately, the fear is also revealed to be only that same empty consciousness" (p. 122).
Unfortunately for Segal, the fear which had disappeared eventually returned with renewed intensity. (Recall that this happened to Bernadette Roberts as well.) She stopped all public appearances and withdrew into virtual seclusion. She continued meeting with fellow therapists and, in time, revealed that she had suffered a long history of migraine headaches, and, to the sur-prise of many, she began to recover memories of abuse during her childhood.
She died in 1997 of a brain tumor.
Feeling Unreal Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self
Daphne Simeon, Jeffrey Abugel
* Idea "There is no self" - Buddhism claims to be a wrong view
see ATTĀ →
The Blow of the Void
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