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Comment by davebryand | Hacker News Reader

This is the state that most of us committing our lives to spiritual practice seek to achieve. All of these overlap with symptoms of Enlightenment, although the enlightened being has conscious control over all internal processes, so they are not only able to feel joy and love, they've reached the source of those emotions.

* Detachment from self, feeling as though one is watching a movie about oneself.

* A sense that one is not in control of one’s thoughts and actions.

* Reality may seem dream-like or unreal.

* Distorted sense of time.

* Perceptual alterations like visual snow, halo around lights.

* Emotional numbness, unable to feel joy or love.

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What you are describing is getting high, not spiritual practice. Nothing wrong with getting high per se, but it can be extremely dangerous if you confuse those states with "Enlightenment".

The experience of transcending one's ego identity may feel similar to dissociation or depersonalization at times. But the end result of awakening is not a dissociative state. It's being fully present to all of your emotions, not numbness at all, but simply not attached to them in the sense that they don't automatically dictate your response. You still feel all the things that apply to your normal sense of self, but you're able to observe them and act from a different place.

There is a real risk to people getting lost on the spiritual path and ending up in places like nihilism or dissociation. Be careful.

The definitions of equanimity and disassociation sound really similar, but they are very different things. In Equanimity, you feel a connection to everything, with the sense of self and ego diminished or completely removed. In Disassociation, you feel disconnected from everything, floating free and completely alone. To be honest, I've never experienced equanimity, so I'm going off the descriptions I've read and had explained to me, in my own attempts at mindfulness meditation. Disassociation, I've experienced multiple times. It tends to happen when one is in an extremely stressful emotional state, and it's a big relief when it happens in that context, but it's a self-defense strategy, and not a healthy state. I suspect you could achieve it accidentally when trying for equanimity, but it isn't equanimity.

There are lots of different ideas about enlightenment, but the one I'm most familiar with, Soto Zen, is the exact opposite of what is described there. If you're getting halos, feeling out of control and experiencing emotional numbness you're doing it (specifically Soto Zen) very, very wrong.

Yeah, this wasn't a great post. What I intended to convey was that I found it interesting that some of these, at least categorically (time flexibility, detachment from self, and dream-like reality) are central to Awakening. Of course, in Enlightenment, there is conscious control over all of these elements, so that being experiences none of the negative aspects described here.

For a very specific understanding of what "spiritual practice" means.

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