About 70% of descriptions of depersonalization disorder are nearly identical to monks’ descriptions of awakening. The same shift of identity — from personal to universal — gets a completely different story wrapped around it. One group says “this is bad, I don’t like this.” The other group, having worked toward it for twenty years, says “this is a huge relief.”
This reveals how profoundly stories shape our experience. The same underlying shift of identity can be experienced as liberation or as disorder, depending entirely on the story framework. Even “awakening” has a story to it — the story of relief, of finally having arrived, of decades of effort paying off.
This observation also suggests that the shift itself is more natural and common than either the spiritual or clinical frameworks acknowledge. Joe’s nine-year-old daughter casually reported experiencing “something greater looking out behind your eyes — like vastness” all the time. What we pathologize or idealize may simply be a natural human capacity for identity dissolution.