Is Enlightenment Controlled Psychosis?
You always want to take everything apart to see how it works and mod it? Try insight practice to disassemble your personality organization! (And hopefully put it back together too.)
Psychopathy and Having a Small Self
Let’s talk about psychopathy!
M.E. Thomas likes the definition of psychopathy as having a small self. Very small. Virtually absent. Maybe no self at all. I imagine it like a nitrogen molecule: tiny and extremely stable.
Insults don’t land, because there is no one there to be insulted. Punishments don’t land, because they are threats to who exactly? There’s no one there. Pain and all the emotions that build upon the nociceptive system signal threats, but they are meaningless signals if there is no one there to be threatened. Affective empathy is probably something about mirror neurons interacting with that hijacked nociceptive system? Well, that won’t work for the same reason.
It’s a neat model, but I think it’s incomplete.
Many people with psychopathy report feeling disappointment when others would feel guilt or shame. That’s just one example of many common self-conscious emotions even of small selves. So this self, while quite small, seems to be of a particular, predictable shape.
Neither is being small the only way that a self can achieve the above features. Adamantane consists of 26 atoms and PG5 even of 200 million atoms, and they are considered highly stable too. My own self is probably huge by comparison, but it has resiliency built in, so while it’s surely less stable than a microscopic self, it’s much more stable than countless smaller selves that are not well optimized for stability.
But whatever, let’s run with the small self model!1
Note that everything is a mess, so antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is a big grab bag of stuff I don’t understand, small selves among them, and there are plenty of small selves who don’t meet the criteria for ASPD. “Psychopathy” (or “sociopathy”) is also a big messy mess that hurts my brain. If you define it as a score of > 25 or 30 on the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, there are plenty of small selves who don’t meet the threshold and probably also some big selves who do. Define some cutoff on the more sophisticated Psychopathic Personality Inventory instead? Same problem.
So when it comes to these small or otherwise unusually stable selves, we’re talking about some kind of construct that overlaps with psychopathy more than it overlaps with most other concepts that I’m aware of, but not a subset or superset.
Here an overview of one cross-section of the mess. James Fallon’s The Psychopath Inside is also an accessible guide to the neuroscience of psychopathy as of 2013.
Tyler, White, Thompson, and Blair have identified three pathways in children toward aggressive behaviors – via decreased empathy, increased threat response, and impaired decision-making. (The fourth pathway leads to ADHD and substance abuse only.) James Blair also held this fascinating lecture on the topic.
The first path strikes me as quite straightforward – children can’t empathize, so they neither notice admonishments from their caregivers nor can they put themselves in others’ shoes because their own perception is so different. That leads to systematic deficits in social learning that they need to compensate for with more explicit rational thought, which can take even the smart cookies among them decades to accomplish, depending on their environment. I imagine they start out with those features (and maybe a high pain tolerance and unusual behaviors) from the earliest ages.
The second path is more confusing as (1) James Fallon is probably not one of them, and (2) one of the authors of the 2008 study, James Blair, hints at some kind of dissociation that some children learn at ages beyond the ages that he has studied. So this group can become just as functional as the first group, but via some other mechanism. I wonder whether the presence of other conditions that are associated with an over-active amygdala (anxiety, impulsivity, paranoia?) can serve as a quick and dirty way to guess which type we’re seeing.
The third path is a complete mystery to me.
All of this still leaves me confused, because these setups are probably just what enables psychopathy to emerge – but with a good enough upbringing, these children can probably develop normally sized squishy and resilient selves like everyone else.
A shitty upbringing, however, will force the child to do whatever they can to protect themselves.
The first type will fall back on their unique protective skill for collapsing into a tiny impenetrable point of a self or some other small, indestructible structure. I imagine this as a more linear progression early in life.
The second case is more puzzling. Maybe the child will first develop borderline symptoms, find that their self is untenable and an endless source of suffering, and sequester it into a dormant alter like in other specified dissociative disorder (OSDD). The alter that fronts is an alien self, shaped by expectations or necessity. If it ends up being unstable, we call it pathological narcissism (PN), and if it ends up being stable, we call it psychopathy. That is, this type of psychopathy is not etiologically different from pathological narcissism – it’s just that society has decided to give it a different name that lumps it together with another etiologically different kind of self, because, by dint of selection pressures, these end up looking similar in many cases. (Small selves are the most likely/frequent way that a random or unknown process can produce a stable self.)
Or maybe something else entirely happens: The child develops impulsive and aggressive behaviors due to some early trauma and becomes afraid of themselves. The aggression of a child is also fairly impotent, so it might provoke much more threatening reactive aggression that the child is afraid of. Or the child just thinks, or is lead to think, that they are a danger to themselves or others. Either way, the solution is again to sequester the impulsive and aggressive self into a dormant alter and leave the fronting to some minimalistic, stable self with stronger impulse control. In this case, the unstable case may look more like obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), because the person is defending against the consequences of their actions rather than against emptiness or fragmentation of the original self. Such dissociation is never quite perfect, I imagine, so aspects of the dormant self will shine through and require constant management until it can one day receive the reparenting it deserves.
James Blair mentioned that this dissociative mechanism only develops in adolescence and various people with pathological narcissism and/or psychopathy who I’ve asked also point to a time in their adolescence when they created it.
It stands to reason that treatments for ASPD will work better for the first type, and treatments for ASPD, OCPD, NPD, and OSDD will work better for the second type (e.g., mentalization-based treatment), so the distinction might have clinical relevance too.
M.E. Thomas and I had a chat about this recently.
Seeing Ourselves Through Others’ Eyes
Next, some background in personality organization and the development of the self. Please skip this section if you’re familiar with psychodynamic theory. I asked Gemini to write the beginning of this section according to my outline.
Have you ever wondered how we develop that fundamental sense of “me”? That feeling of being a distinct person with your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences? While seemingly innate, this sense of self is profoundly shaped by our earliest interactions, particularly through a process psychologists call contingent marked mirroring.
Imagine an infant feeling distressed. An attuned caregiver might reflect this distress back – perhaps with a concerned facial expression and soothing sounds. This reflection is contingent because it matches the infant’s internal state in timing and intensity. Crucially, however, it’s also marked. The caregiver isn’t actually distressed themselves (or if they are, they contain it); their response is exaggerated or modified slightly, perhaps using a specific tone of voice (“Ohh, you’re so upset, aren’t you?”). This marking signals to the infant: “I see you feeling this, this is your feeling, not mine, and I understand it.” As figures like Heinz Kohut suggested, this mirroring fulfills a vital selfobject need, making the infant feel seen, validated, and real. It’s a fundamental building block for a cohesive sense of self.
This process, particularly the “marked” quality, is also vital for developing the capacity for mentalization, as described by theorists like Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman. Mentalization is the ability to understand ourselves and others in terms of internal mental states – thoughts, feelings, intentions. Marked mirroring helps the infant differentiate their own internal world from the caregiver’s. They learn that their feeling is theirs, reflected by, but separate from, the other person. This lays the groundwork for understanding that others have their own minds, distinct from our own – the basis for healthy relationships and social understanding.
But what happens when this mirroring process goes awry? A lack of attuned, contingent, and appropriately marked mirroring can have profound consequences for personality development. If a caregiver consistently fails to reflect the child’s state, or reflects inaccurately, or reflects their own anxieties without marking, the child struggles to build a stable sense of self and to understand internal states. This can lead to difficulties across a spectrum of personality organization. While a relatively healthy individual develops a robust, flexible self, deficits in mirroring are strongly implicated in:
Neurotic Organization: Individuals might have a relatively stable sense of self but struggle with internal conflicts, anxieties, and less adaptive defense mechanisms stemming from partially unmet developmental needs.
Borderline Organization: Characterized by significant identity diffusion, difficulties with emotional regulation, unstable relationships, and challenges in mentalizing. This is often linked to inconsistent, chaotic, or neglectful mirroring experiences. The lack of a stable internal representation of self and other makes interpersonal reality confusing and frightening.
Psychotic Organization: In the most severe cases, profound early failures in attunement and mirroring can contribute to a fragile hold on reality itself, difficulties distinguishing self from non-self, and impaired reality testing.
These developmental disruptions often manifest as diagnosable personality disorders (like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, often linked to specific mirroring failures, or Borderline Personality Disorder).
Crucially, this isn’t all set in stone by age three. While early experiences are foundational, personality development continues. The quality of mirroring and attunement experienced throughout childhood and particularly adolescence continues to shape and refine the sense of self and the capacity for mentalization. Significant relational experiences, positive or negative, can continue to influence personality structure even into adulthood, offering hope for therapeutic change but also highlighting vulnerability to later relational difficulties. In essence, learning who we are is a lifelong process, deeply rooted in how others reflect us back to ourselves.
Thanks, Gemini!
Below is an overview of where experts think various personality disorders usually fall in terms of the level of personality organization. I can’t quite square this with my limited observations, but it illustrates the general idea. In particular, many patients move up the ranks all the way to neurotic or healthy personality organization while retaining their general personality style, so it seems odd to me that they should start out in predictable places.
I’m particularly confused by the position of antisocial personality disorder. Gemini explains it as a mix of (1) a wide definition of what these authors mean by “psychosis” and (2) them probably having met different people with psychopathy from the ones I know.
Caligor, Kernberg, et al. typically place severe Antisocial Personality Disorder within the lower levels of Borderline Personality Organization, meaning it’s closer to the PPO boundary than higher-level BPO conditions (like some forms of narcissism or borderline PD) or Neurotic Organization.
Why is it near the PPO border? Not because individuals with ASPD are typically delusional or hallucinating (like in the state of psychosis). Instead, it’s because of the severity of their structural deficits:
Profound lack of an integrated superego (conscience): This reflects a major developmental failure.
Severe identity diffusion: Often masked by superficial charm or grandiosity.
Reliance on primitive defenses: Omnipotent control, projective identification (attributing their own aggression/mistrust onto others), devaluation, denial.
Impaired Reality Testing (Subtle): While they might test physical reality well, their grasp on social and interpersonal reality – understanding others’ internal states, social norms (beyond rules to be exploited), the impact of their actions, long-term consequences – can be profoundly distorted by their lack of empathy, manipulative stance, and grandiosity. This is considered a form of reality testing impairment within the model, even if it doesn’t look like classic psychosis.
The “lack of an integrated superego” seems directionally correct but overstated to me, especially for people with psychopathy who are out of what the author M.E. Thomas calls the “playground phase,” and the primitive defenses are not actually primitive defenses if the person uses them consciously and knowingly rather than out of a state of psychic equivalence.2 Doesn’t make it better of course, but it extends the range of antisocial PD way up in the chart.
And I wish people stopped using the term “malignant narcissism.” There are many of these folks who are in therapy and are already doing better than a good chunk of the non-disordered population.
The Path to Enlightenment
Daniel Ingram (Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha) has some handy graphs to illustrate the first 11 of 16 stages (ñanas) that practitioners usually have to master. They’re explained in the video, but I’ve selected a few below and in a later section.
The Arising and Passing Away stands out to me as a phase that is realistically early along the path, comes with intense positive feelings like grandiosity, allows some people to hallucinate vividly, is addictive, and crucially comes after the Three Characteristics.
The Three Characteristics are impermanence, dissatisfactoriness, and no-self. A big thanks to Gemini for the explanations:
Impermanence (Anicca): This isn’t just the philosophical idea that things change; it’s the direct, raw perception that every single component of your experience – every sight, sound, sensation, thought, feeling – is constantly flickering, vibrating, arising, and vanishing moment by moment. You see clearly that there’s nothing solid or lasting anywhere in your entire field of perception; it’s all relentless flux.
Dissatisfactoriness (Dukkha): Often translated as suffering, but more accurately, it’s the inherent stress, friction, and unreliability built into all conditioned experience, even pleasant stuff, precisely because it’s impermanent. It’s the fundamental tension felt when trying to find lasting satisfaction or control in things that are inherently unstable and uncontrollable; you directly perceive this stressful quality woven into the fabric of arising and passing phenomena.
No-Self (Anatta): This is the direct insight, gained through careful observation, that there’s no fixed, independent, core “self,” “agent,” or “observer” hiding somewhere behind or within your experiences. What you mistakenly label “I” or “me” is actually just a rapidly changing collection of interdependent processes (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, sensing, intending) occurring without any central controller or owner; the illusion of a solid self is seen through as just more arising and passing phenomena.
Surfing in Psychosis
Insight practice strikes me as a structured curriculum to unlearn everything we’ve learned in our first few years of life to function in the world – interpreting sense inputs (impermanence), reinforcement learning by assigning valence to states (dissatisfactoriness), and the self – and regain access to psychosis.
That sounds dangerous – and sure enough there is all that Dark Night territory after the Arising and Passing Away – but it seems that countless people have passed through all the stages and have mastered them to the point where they can surf through all the levels of personality organization at will, and jump around in other directions too, once that are not pictured in the diagram of personality organization.
Throughout the book, there are countless (160) times where the author warns that a practice in “morality” is critical for making it through this journey. I think “morality” translates to “healthy personality organization” – respect for physical reality, respect for the autonomy of others, respect for relationships, respect for social obligations, etc. He’s very thorough with these warnings because he seems to be the sort of fellow who errs a bit on the side of externalizing defenses, so as he dismantled his neurotic (?) personality organization, they came out in full force, and his life was soon in shambles. We evolved a self for a reason.
Maybe we start out in a state like Fruition, pass through a Dark Night of misery and confusion, experience some kind of Passing Away and Arising, finally learn the opposite of the three characteristics, and become able to function in the world. Then we (usually) forget the whole thing because our hippocampi aren’t up to snuff yet.
A (trustworthy and rational) friend of mine who can remember everything for some reason said that, at first, time was every expansive, that the first year or so of his life felt like 50–100 years. And it was horrible. I asked Gemini which ñanas that might’ve been:
The Later Phase of A&P (Udayabbaya Ñana): While the initial burst might feel great, the A&P involves seeing both arising and passing. As the “passing away” aspect becomes more prominent, or if the sheer intensity and speed of phenomena become overwhelming rather than blissful, the experience can turn negative, chaotic, or frightening. The rapid flashing continues, creating the sense of dense subjective time, but the interpretation or feeling-tone shifts to negative.
Transition into Dissolution (Bhanga Ñana) or Fear (Bhaya Ñana): Sometimes, the rapid phenomena characteristic of the A&P might persist briefly as the mind shifts focus towards the breakdown (Bhanga) or reacts with fear (Bhaya). In this transitional phase, one could experience the lingering speed and density of the A&P (causing the time dilation) combined with the emerging unpleasantness of the subsequent stages. The mind sees everything falling apart incredibly quickly, and reacts with distress or terror.
Intense Fear (Bhaya Ñana) or Misery (Adinava Ñana) Episodes: While often associated with time dragging or feeling stuck, extremely intense episodes within the “Dark Night” stages (Fear, Misery, Disgust) can sometimes be so overwhelming and packed with difficult sensations or thoughts that, in retrospect or even during, they create a distorted sense of time similar to what your friend described. The sheer intensity of the suffering within a short objective period makes it feel subjectively much longer.
So … while the “classic” description of the A&P peak is positive, the underlying mechanism of perceiving phenomena with extreme rapidity can absolutely be paired with deeply unpleasant, fearful, or miserable feelings, leading to the subjective experience of a lot of terrible things happening in what was objectively a short amount of time. This often occurs as the insights deepen past the initial blissful phase of the A&P or during the subsequent challenging stages.
Gemini seems to think that we’re most likely again around A&P territory.
Afterwards my friend describes becoming conscious. For him it was gradual and culminated in full consciousness around ages 1–2.
Another friend of mine described becoming conscious as a sudden event that happened while they were running through a room. And I think they said it flickered a bit, went on and off a few times, though probably in much longer intervals than the word “flicker” would imply.
Considering that they describe suffering before they were “conscious,” I imagine they are referring to the formation of their selves and not mere phenomenal consciousness.
Psychopathy and Enlightenment
So are my psychopathic friends and acquaintances enlightened? They don’t seem to assign much meaning or valance to physical or emotional pain. They just note it (in mindfulness terms) or accept it (in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy terms), and stop paying attention at will.
Same for loss and death. They just accept it.
A level of acceptance that’d make even Marsha Linehan proud and/or jealous!
Daniel Ingram illustrates this with a series of reports from practitioners at different levels. I’ve reproduced the first and one of the later ones here:
The first example is of someone who is completely buying into the content. “So, in my practice I have been working through my Big Issue, you know, really trying to deal with it. It just seems to come back up again and again. Every time I sit on the cushion, I find myself thinking about my Big Issue. This Big Issue is such a big part of my life, such a huge issue. I am afraid that if I look too closely at my Big Issue it will overwhelm or destroy me. I wish my Big Issue would just go away. I have been doing so much practice, and yet I still have to deal with this darned Big Issue.”
…
Just for fun, I will give two more examples from even more advanced practitioners and how they might describe their practice. “I sat down on the cushion and began noticing the three characteristics of the sensations that make up experiential reality. There were physical and mental sensations, all arising and vanishing quickly and effortlessly. I could perceive perhaps five to fifteen sensations per second, primarily in the abdominal region, but there were many other little sensations coming into awareness from all over, colors on the inside of my eyelids, sounds from other meditators’ breathing. Occasionally, there were some quick sensations interspersed with these about the Big Issue, like little phantoms vanishing in a sea of flickering color and form. They caused no interruptions to my investigations, being just more sensations for investigation.”
But all the while, they and their world are suffused by an overwhelming feeling of grandiosity – that they are grand and nothing can go wrong – probably experienced in psychic equivalence mode. That’s related to the pain/pleasure graph above. More research is needed, but my guess is that it’s the A&P that they’re in, and Gemini also thinks that’s the most likely ñana for grandiosity. Lovely, but still a long way to go to Fruition!
I wonder whether the need for sleep can shed some light on the ñana any particular person is in. M.E. Thomas likes to sleep as much as I do (10 h if I recall correctly), which runs counter the A&P hypothesis, but another friend mentioned sleeping more like 5–7 h, which is in line with it. I also know someone who sleeps only some 3 h per night and displayed grandiosity, but it might’ve been an exaggeration. (And a selection effect, because I thought of him trying to recall people who don’t sleep much.) Measurements of the body temperature may be similarly interesting.
The “powers” seem to refer to controlled hallucinations – visual and of the non-mentalizing variety, for example convincing oneself that some feeling or impression of another is unquestionably true. They are strong during the A&P already, which indicates that it dips deep into the borderline level of organization.
It might be very educational to have your relationship issues with your parents manifest as two large, slobbering demons who hurl flaming stuffed animals at you while you are traveling out-of-body on your way to the Grand Canyon, but it can often take lots of time and reflection to figure out how these sorts of experiences make a practical difference in our lives.
What about other personality disorders? Daniel Ingram’s description of some parts of the Dark Night remind me of borderline or narcissistic collapse. The graph on “serious mental illness” illustrates this. Arguably they are closer to Fruition, but at what price? Instead of defending against the emptiness, can they transcend it and reach stream entry? Maybe! I don’t know what all these words mean!
How many people have been diagnosed with having bipolar II rapid cycling when they are just going through the A&P to Dark Night cycle I have no idea, but it has happened to a few friends of mine who, later, suddenly were fine when they got further along in their practice.
…
Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest as anything from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses, such as narcissism and delusions of grandeur (which I am sure you recognize at points in this book, parts that were likely written in this phase). Dark Nighters may act with a disarming mixture of dedicated spirituality, social conscience, compassion, and reactive darkness.
…
Certain stages are more prone to reducing or exacerbating tendencies to mental illness. Mind and Body, as it provides a clear space around thoughts, tends to make people saner, and for this reason really helps with psychological work. The A&P is distinctly prone to exacerbating manic phases, grandiosity, and moments of agitated psychosis. Dissolution is so chill that mental illness again becomes less likely, though it does have demotivating elements. The Dark Night is well-known to possibly exacerbate depression, social isolation, schizoid tendencies, and anxiety. Re-observation is the peak of the risk for mental illness, particularly regarding paranoia, psychosis, and suicidal ideation. Equanimity tends to reduce mental illness tendencies, given its open spaciousness and general sense of well-being.
I imagine bipolar II rapid cycling is a common misdiagnosis of borderline, and other forms of bipolar are common misdiagnoses of pathological narcissism, so all of those deserve scrutiny.
Enlightenment and Psychopathy
But what about the reverse? Are arahants psychopaths? Since insight practice from the 2nd jhana or the 4th ñana (A&P) onwards relies on an unlearning of selfhood, it strikes me as very psychopathy-like according to the “small self” definition.
But of course they only meet the criteria of my favorite definition while practicing. If they hex someone while on the cushion, it doesn’t matter because I have yet to be convinced of the efficacy of “extraordinary magick”; and off the cushion, they won’t hex anyone via “ordinary magick” (e.g., slapping them) because their practice in morality is strong. Or is it?
It’s quite intriguing to read what Daniel Ingram and Jeffery Martin have to say about that.
Daniel Ingram:
Another thing about teachers is that they only know what they know. If we use the scopes of the three trainings to examine this, we may find that some teachers may have a good grasp of some of these scopes and not have a good grasp of the others. In fact, mastery in each area guarantees nothing about mastery in the others. … I know some paragons of morality that are not that well developed in meditation. I know some extremely strong meditators who are not that well-developed in morality. In other words, it is easy to imagine that just because someone may have meditation skills in one specific area that they might magically know and be good at all sorts of other things. I have great skepticism about these sorts of assumptions and plenty of real-world evidence upon which to doubt them.
It is easy to imagine that just because they are ethically impeccable that they have some understanding of deep wisdom, and conversely it is easy to imagine that just because they have some deep wisdom they will be moral. As the ongoing Pragmatic Dharma experiment has shown in spades, it is easier to develop strong concentration and insight than it is to develop strong morality, or simply basic kindness for that matter. There are those who have a strong degree of mastery of all three, and those are people to seek out and learn from whenever possible.
Beware assuming that those who know ultimate reality to whatever degree can’t have unskillful relationships to money, power, drugs, and sex. Call me a prude, a traditionalist, or whatever, and not to presume to tell anyone else how to live their life, but I assert that, in general, it is best to avoid having sex with your dharma teachers. This goes doubly if secrecy is demanded or if you are involving yourself with someone who publicly claims celibacy or is in another “closed” relationship. … Those who claim that this is to benefit you or that it will lead to special wisdom are just selling something. It’s easy to avoid this trap if you learn a bit about your own investment in being or feeling “special”, which often touches on difficult-to-identify and significant psychological wounding. You have been warned.
In a later section, he dismantles many “models of awakening” that make all sorts of claims about ethical benefits of enlightenment. None of them hold up to scrutiny. Just as there are lovely and less lovely people with personality disorders, there are lovely and less lovely people who can control their psychosis. Two orthogonal dimensions.
There are those who are “technically” unenlightened (meaning that they have never completed even one progress of insight or attained to any direct understanding of emptiness or non-duality) who nonetheless live lives that would be considered unremittingly exemplary and even saintly by the very highest standards of human generosity, compassion, and conduct. I have been fortunate enough to meet and work with a few of these people and continue to stand in awe of them. Just so, there are those who are “technically” awakened, who nonetheless can appear exceedingly ordinary, seem to be of distinctly questionable character, disposition, and moral virtue, or seem sometimes downright debauched, nasty, and insufferable. I have met a good number of these, and that I have met more of them than I have those I would consider truly saintly leads me to the data-driven conclusion that it is easier to master insight practices than to master ethical and kind behavior. I say this not to excuse anyone but just to point out that we should all continue to strive to be moral people, and this is evidenced in our behavior with one another.
Benefits of enlightenment for climbing are also fictional:
The old Theravada texts … list the thirty-two interesting physical qualities of the Buddha, such as having forty teeth and having arms so long that he could touch his knees without bending down.
Jeffery Martin’s research on “persistent non-symbolic experience” (PNSE) sounds similar. He conducted a series of interviews with enlightened people, which include some head-scratchy tidbits. But note that he’s also written books on reiki, so his grasp on healthy vs. psychotic personality organization might not be perfect.
All aspects of having an individualized sense of self had vanished for [some] participants. Prior to this location some aspects of an individualized sense of self remained, and participants could occasionally be drawn into them.
One of my friends with self-diagnosed ASPD reported that, in the early days of his ASPD practice, mentalization prompts from his therapist used to momentarily break his dissociation. (He practices it to manage his BPD.)
Participants reported that for the most part thoughts just came and went, and were generally either devoid of or contained greatly reduced emotional content. … The reduction seemed limited to self-related thoughts.
Maybe this is the process of shutting down mentalization.
Despite an overwhelming change in how it felt to experience both themselves and the world after the onset of PNSE, the outward appearance of the participants changed very little. … If someone were an environmentalist prior to PNSE, typically they remained so after it. If they weren’t, they still are not.
That’s in line with the orthogonality of concentration, insight, and morality that Daniel Ingram preaches.
Other times the PNSE participants are just outright wrong about their experience. When asked if they were stressed, they would say of course not, they were experiencing inner peace. But their friends and family said they were totally stressed.
That doesn’t follow. The old person is still there and is stressed; just being stressed is no fun, and so the practitioner doesn’t interpret the feelings in any valenced way. I can also choose not to interpret distressing things that I see or hear if it seems unhelpful in the situation. I suspect they still take some kind of toll on my body though, e.g., if I start stimming.
There was also a Slate Star Codex article on the sex scandals of enlightened people, which confirms what Daniel Ingram warns of too.
I’ll conclude with an excerpt from a goofy dialog between Concentration, Insight, and Morality that he included in his book.
Morality, Concentration, and Insight are sitting in a bar having a discussion. A large stack of empty shot glasses sits in front of Concentration and Insight. An organic chia kombucha sits in front of Morality.
MORALITY: You navel-gazing, self-absorbed, good-for-nothing freaks! I go out and work hard all day long to make this world fit to live in while you two sit on those sweat-covered cushions and cultivate butt-rot! I go out and make good money, keep food in our mouths, a roof over our heads, deal with our stuff, and you go out and spend our money up at that freak-house you call a meditation center when there is important work to be done! I want to work on my tan!
INSIGHT: Who are you calling “self-absorbed?” I can’t be self-absorbed by definition! If it wasn’t for me, you would be so stuck in dualistic illusion that you wouldn’t know your ass from your elbow, you conceptually-fixated, emotionally-mired, bound-up-in-manifestation-looking, twelve-sandwich-eatin’…
CONCENTRATION: Yeah! And by the way, Mr. Oh-so-worldly, you should learn to lighten up sometimes! Work your fingers to the bone, whadda’ya get? Bony fingers, that’s what. And that goes for you too, Mr. Enlightenment! If you didn’t have my skills, you’d be shit out of luck, unable to focus, and dead boring to boot! Who brings up the deep joy and wondrous mind states around here? I do, that’s who, so you two should just shut up!
…
INSIGHT: … I’m the one with the clue! There ain’t nothin’ in the world like what I know, and without it, your whole pathetic little sense of identity would be bound up in a world beyond your control. I am your salvation, and you know it!
MORALITY: Beyond my control, my ass! I make things happen in this world, great things! I'm the one that really gets us somewhere! I make a difference! Who cares if there is no self when people are starving in Africa?
INSIGHT: Who cares is exactly my point! There is no separate, permanent self that cares!
…
CONCENTRATION: Dude, do you see those angels floating through the wall?
MORALITY: Where in the hell did I find you freaks?
INSIGHT: Short memory, eh? You found us when you realized you couldn't do it on your own. You needed us to really be able to do the job you wanted to do, to really make a difference and be as happy and effective as you could be.
MORALITY: Yeah? And when can I get rid of you?
CONCENTRATION AND INSIGHT: When you have mastered us completely.
I wonder whether there’s a progression from borderline (no alien self), over pathological narcissism (unstable alien self), to psychopathy (stable alien self).
In psychic equivalence mode, you unquestioningly assume that your mental state – attitudes, feelings, believes, etc. – are objective facts: If you feel angry, your anger is justified; if you feel worthless; you are worthless; if you feel omnipotent, you are omnipotent; if you fear that others want to poison you, others want to poison you.