Feeling Unreal

This week has been characterized by a pervasive feeling of unreality, a feeling such that the idea that there is an I experiencing a world is false.  This is to such an extent that my writing, "I" is weird, that a more accurate description would be "something."  That "something" has essentially all the characteristics of the "I" but without the identification.  There is something that is having these ideas and writing them down, and there is an awareness, a consciousness, of these ideas and the act of writing them down, but there is nothing much more than those actions and awareness.

This isn't a complete state, I have a pretty clear intellectual concept of "I" and an emotional state that is best described as, "pleasantly dreamy."  I have a concept of an entity continuing on into the future, and am capable of imagining that future, and even am making plans for that imagined future.

In trying to describe a state of mind there is always the difficulty of trying to translate from mind-to-different mind.  Each of us experiences the world through a different filter, using different tools to evaluate and arrange our experiences.  The best we can do is try to connect common experiences that fit our state as closely as possible and hope that there is a commonality in sensation felt in such an experience.

I felt very much like this a lot of the time as a teenager, particularly at school.  A little tired, a little bored, an empty mind in a relaxed body without real needs.  Imagine sitting in a conference room in a hotel during the third hour of an all-day training on a subject with which you are pretty familiar. You aren't really required to do much apart from be there.  Lassitude ensues.  For me, things start to look brighter, as if filled with light.  Time somehow disappears.

East and West have different viewpoints on this phenomenon.  I am reminded very much of a bit by Alan Watts in which in the West if someone says, "I have realized that I am God" that they lock you up for being insane, while in the East they say, "Congratulations!" 

In the West this sensation of unreality is called derealization, and in my case more depersonalization, "It consists of a feeling of watching oneself act, while having no control over a situation.^[1] Subjects feel they have changed, and the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, or lacking in significance"  It is described as psychotic, related to stress/trauma, and is part or parcel of a number of psychiatric disorders.

In the East it is described as a realization of the illusion of the ego, and is one of the great goals of spiritual development.    In Buddhism it is called Anatta, the perception of "not-self" and is vital to true understanding.  The perception that true reality is there is an I for which we must work, and toil, and protect, and desire, and need is in this view the root of suffering.  The realization that this perception is a creation of the mind rather than a fundamental reality is something that practitioners of Eastern spiritual disciplines actively try to acquire.

Psychosis/spiritual realization.

Something is feeling quite pleasant in a way that would disturb lots of people.