How do you know your enlightenment / spiritual awakening isn't just mental illness?

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I have made this question and invited a few of my contemporaries to answer it, because I think it’s a very important topic. Enlightenment, the discarding of ego mechanisms, has a shadow side, and that shadow side should have some light shed on it every now and again because if you don’t, it’ll start to run the show.

The key to me, is emotional relatability. Personality disorder affects the limbic system and turns off many of they key components that provide for our ability to communicate and understand others. It makes it practically impossible to have emotionally-healthy relationships.

It also makes it impossible for you to relate to others when it comes to this space. In my personal experience, I have noticed that when I am dealing with normal, everyday people, not people who fancy themselves enlightened, I use a technique of mirroring to connect with and deepen the interaction. But crucially, I take care to reflect a person’s good, healthy attributes back at them.

This has been so effective for me that it’s become completely automatic. It also, usually works with people in the spiritual or enlightenment space.

There is one place where it fails, hard, to produce deeper connection. What happens is curious. The back and forth reflection produces awkwardness and not intimacy. I soon realize that interacting with this person simply isn’t going to ever create a deeper connection.

So I have to stay on the surface so that the interaction doesn’t turn negative. In some cases I’ve had to stop spending time altogether with that person. If you are reading this wondering whether I’m talking about you, I’m not. These experiences are from real life.

In the cases I have had time to deeply analyze, I have had to use the language and concepts of personality disorder.

My mirroring technique takes deep advantage of the limbic system’s “theory of mind.” When you express an emotion, it flows into me and I experience it too. You then see this expressed on my face and in my actions and it bounces back at you. It doesn’t matter what kind of emotion, if you’re feeling bad, I’ll feel bad with you. It creates a cathartic response, when shared, it lifts us all up.

When it fails, it usually fails along the lines of “this other person cannot recognize that I’m expressing positive emotion at them.” The feedback loop is broken. Sharing stops. And finding the break in the feedback loop becomes the focus of further interaction. I want to understand how the limbic system works so that we can have better interactions with each other.

Did I misread you? What led me to do that? Did I automatically assume something I shouldn’t have? Did I miscommunicate? Is there a disconnect between what someone believes I should have done and what I felt like I needed to do? It doesn’t matter to me who “messed up,” what matters is that I don’t lose the ability to find out something new.

This, to me, is enlightenment. When your life moves inexorably towards better and better interaction. Where surrender and catharsis become normal. Where acknowledging people’s positive features and patiently accommodating their not-so-positive ones is the rule and not the exception.

I can turn my mirroring technique around, and provoke negative emotions in people. It is a technique just like the normal, positive one. I use it when people start getting confrontational. It can go all the way to physical fighting if I let it.

But it doesn’t have to escalate, it doesn’t even have to stick around longer than a moment. I’ll let some of the energy out when I feel like someone needs a little ‘fighty’ energy. If you’re feeling stuck and are afraid of other people, I’ll add in a little bit of controlled conflict. Like a tennis ball, their minds often pick it up, and it unlocks that part of their mind so they can use it to help solve their problem. It’s fun watching their mind suddenly start coming up with possible solutions in that direction. Then we’ll walk it back to an assertive solution that works for all.

What I would never do is to deploy confrontational energy in the pursuit of getting someone to see, acknowledge, and surrender ego elements. It’s so ridiculously clear to me that absolutely nothing of substance is gained by that kind of interaction. I let loose on Artem Boytsov recently because he seemed like he could take it and I wanted quick insights. And because he does it so often to others. I mean, it can bring people to a weird kind of insight but it’s not a holistic or nice one, it’s one twinged with the feeling of being violated. Over time and many interactions I just realized I need to give up negative mirroring and only use the positive kind.

And so if I see that someone’s only capable of deploying negative mirroring, then I have to start using the language and frameworks of mental illness in order to comprehend what that person is doing.