'Loss of self' through meditation versus dissociation: what's the difference?

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Great question. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately at the juncture between spirituality and pathology. I’ve come to realize that the same technique, surrender, can be applied in two different ways. A hard way and an easy way.

Rather than explicate one more time on the structure of the brain and the anatomical significance of it from scratch, allow me to point you to a previous answer of mine which lays out the gist. Vincent Guidry's answer to What does it mean to be devoid of empathy? When a person tells you his problems what do you think?

The hard way to surrender is through empathy. The easy way to surrender is by shutting it off. What makes it harder is the fact that it requires more effort because more of the brain is involved. Surrender is a big release of emotion that jumps everywhere and unlocks parts of the brain that hadn’t been in contact with each other before.

After a surrender, the thinking mind restarts and reconstructs a new self concept out of the new way the brain is operating. Eventually normalcy is returned and the person is ripe for another surrender event.

Pathological surrender, on the other hand, seeks to remove emotion from the process of surrender. Remember, emotion is just the brain doing stuff outside of conscious awareness. Any time you’re irrational, it means the brain is going places that the cognitive mind can’t reach and therefore can’t make sense of.

Pathological surrender seeks to remove all irrationality by shutting down the ability of the limbic system to inform the rational mind. For two reasons, this speeds up thought and grants the individual a sense of being powerful and in control.

First, since only the cognitive mind is contributing to the sense of self, the brain activity stays localized to one place. Any new concepts have to be related to already-learned concepts and what results is a kind of ‘hall of mirrors’ in which everything the person does is governed by things he can’t understand, because the cognitive mind can’t literally understand everything. This reduced brain function is lightning fast to relate concepts against each other and coming to conclusions.

Second, because the limbic system is the brain’s evolved mechanism for dealing with the unknown, the mysterious, shutting it off removes all perception of such. There is this pronounced sense of being in command and control and having knowledge of everything, because the very part of the brain that tells you that this isn’t the case has been purposely shut off!

This is why practicing humility is an extremely important part of spiritual technique. Without engaging the limbic system in your spiritual process, your surrender will shut it off rather than engage it.

The limbic system is so important to mental functioning that when sufferers of what’s called “Cluster B” personality disorder become aware of the fact that they have a personality disorder, among the first things they become aware of are the things you hear most often in that space. The mask, and cognitive empathy. Trauma or failure of parts the brain to develop cause the individual to redevelop the missing functionality of that part of the brain, in the cognitive mind, where anything can be constructed.

The mask gets the individual to the point where they can function in society, and cognitive empathy allows them to thrive in it. The full development of cognitive empathy seems to only become available to those who manage to find self-awareness of their disordered personality.

If parts of the limbic system don’t work, then spiritual surrender will only work up to a point. What needs to happen to the person is generally termed ‘healing’. Spiritual surrender techniques slowly re-engage the low-functioning parts of the limbic system that were deactivated.

If the limbic system is completely shut off, what’s commonly termed ‘psychopathy’, one cannot even form spiritual thoughts. It is thought that nothing can heal this condition, but I suspect that interventions are possible and may even be discovered as our knowledge of the brain deepens.

If spiritual surrender techniques are carried on by a person with a fully-functioning limbic system, then rather than healing the person, the person is able to use their entire brain to grapple with the great mysteries of life. This is what eventually produces the ultimate goal of nonduality. It is only once you’ve found yourself that you can then lose it. You cannot lose what you never had to begin with.