What is true enlightenment and spiritual experience? How we can scientifically differentiate it from mental illness? Can the new science of neurotheology help in solving this mystery?

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I’ve been scouring Elinor Greenberg’s answers looking for a clue into exactly what distinguishes personality disorder, from spiritual enlightenment, and came across this gem of an answer and concept: Elinor Greenberg's answer to Do people with personality disorders in general have a weak sense of self?

The object constancy frame is perfect for diving into the difference. Previously, my best distinction is to identify what I had been calling ‘limbic deactivation’, well limbic deactivation isn’t a scientific term, merely one I’d come up with to explain all Cluster B personality disorder.

Object constancy provides a framework for truly understanding not just personality disorder, but also the process of attaining nonduality. The different personality disorders represent different ways that self construction breaks down.

When such people discover the spiritual technique of surrender, particularly if they use a powerful technique like self-inquiry, the self-discoveries are going to necessarily revolve around the basic attitudes that are being dictated to them by their PD.

This isn’t to say that spiritual techniques aren’t useful for someone with a PD. In fact, they can be very useful. But a spiritual technique is only useful in pointing out valid targets for the tool of spirituality, and the tool of spirituality is surrender. Surrender is the only thing that makes spirituality worthwhile. It’s the only thing with any kind of transformative value at all, everything else is just entertainment.

And lack of object constancy and whole object relations will utterly wreck any quest to build up a non-dual point of view.

Seeing beyond the surface layer of things is not easy and requires a lot of effort over long periods of time. If you’re constantly wrecking all that work through switching between seeing yourself as great or as horrible, if you’re unable to see the finer gradations of self through the binary representations that are constantly being generated, how long do you think a satori state is going to last once you finally find one? These emotions chase satori away.

Object constancy is something that a spiritual person needs to constantly work on in order to maintain longer times in trance, and to more quickly gain insight from experience. The spiritual life is an exceedingly dense one.

Without the ability to nail something down in your mind, to be able to work with it despite how you’re feeling about it in any given moment, your spiritual endeavors are doomed from the very start.

It’s like trying to learn how to become strong while being painfully afraid of lifting weights. Sure, you can get to a certain level of strength just doing bodyweight exercises. But nobody has ever won a strongman contest while being afraid to put their hands on heavy things. Object constancy is just as crucial when it comes to identifying and eliminating the perceptive distinction between seer and the seen. It’s impossible to stop seeing the seer if you’re waffling back and forth on whether the seer is good or not.

And if you try to shortcut the process, say by dropping a bunch of acid, then the net effect is going to be to amplify your personality deficiencies, not to reduce them. Surrender is the only truly viable spiritual technique, everything else is mere entertainment. If it’s not surrender, it better be leading up to surrender. Lack of constancy is the polar opposite of surrender.