On sanity vs. insanity and spiritual awakening
As Jed McKenna says ‘Sanity is a numbers game’. During a spiritual awakening its incredibly important to both redefine, and actively maintain a functional sanity.
This is a basic article to cover common difficulties with defining sanity vs insanity during spiritual awakening. I have advanced articles on managing psi abilities as well. As with all articles on the site, please view our disclaimer regarding psychological or or medical information.
Photo by Kelvin Magtalas on Unsplash
“Before I had studied Ch’an [Zen in Japanese] for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance, I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.”
— Qingyuan Weixin, Chinese Ch’an master
Spiritual awakenings fuck with your sense of reality. That’s what they do, that’s what they are supposed to do. Most people’s sense of reality is bullshit anyway.
That said, if you want to navigate as spiritual awakening successfully, it is essential that you have a rock-solid sense of sanity versus insanity. By rock solid, I mean teflon, unshakable, immovable, aggressive, and continual. If you want to wake up, sanity is something you will have to actively do for the rest of your life.
Socially and scientifically defined norms of sanity vs insanity work for most people because the vast majority of people are asleep. If you have a spiritual awakening and you want to stay sane and functional, you have to get a hell-of-a-lot more precise — and a bit more flexible at the same time.
You can think of the human brain as a filter on reality. It’s kind of like several layers of smoked glass that together filters out higher spiritual reality. With spiritual work you can buff out the glass. Then more light shines through it, and you can see out through it clearer. Depending on which pane you worked on is what you see at first, but eventually you see through all of them really clearly.
But sometimes with physical mental illness the glass breaks or fractures without any spiritual work and you see through it really clearly, but the physical brain is not healthy or stable and can’t interpret what it sees properly or function in other ways.
Sometimes buffing out the glass with spiritual work breaks a few panes and they need time to heal. Or the additional transparency takes time to integrate, like when you see something really unusual and do a double-take because you have no cognitive heuristic to rapidly interpret what it is. So to have awakened spiritual knowledge you must have a healthy physical mind, but one that is changed to be more flexible and open.
Let’s unpack this in more depth.
The goal of sanity in spiritual awakening
“Rather than being unthinkable, however, suicide should be supremely thinkable. It is the thing that most needs thinking about. At the very least, we would want to break the logjam and make some decisions about it for ourselves. If you want to have some fun with Spiritual Autolysis, begin with the question: Why shouldn’t I kill myself right now?”
-Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare
This is a tough article to write and read. But it’s absolutely imperative that you think about sanity and insanity practically, logically, and openly if you want to be successful in a spiritual awakening.
By definition, an awakened person has stepped outside of social norms for acceptable thought and experience. Furthermore, in some types of awakenings such as kundalini, it becomes physically impossible to reverse this step. So sanity becomes a do-or-die scenario. I want you to succeed. Let’s start by redefining sanity and success, as it looks in a spiritually awakened person.
Let’s clearly define the goals for a stable, completed, spiritual awakening. At the end of an awakening you should be able to:
Clearly differentiate between consensual (3D) and non-consensual (5D or subjective) reality
Talk to people who are awake or asleep at their level of consciousness
Come down from spiritual highs safely without residual existential depression
Have integrated psi senses that do not overwhelm or distract you from everyday activities
Conform your behavior to setting (e.g. don’t talk to your spiritual guides out loud at the grocery store)
Sequester yourself or successfully explain spiritual phenomena that other people might not understand (e.g. spontaneous kriyas, mudras, and automatisms)
Maintain a healthy sleep-wake cycle (e.g. deep sleep of at least 2 - 3 hours a night, every night)
Maintain healthy stable long-term relationships with neighbors, significant others, family, and workmates
Function. By that I mean attend to your activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) unless limited by physical illness of some sort.
Attend to and release emotions such as anger, sadness, and joy appropriately.
Be comfortable with the experience of being embodied, and not want to go ‘somewhere else’ other than where you are.
Given that an awakened person will never return to average societal definitions of sanity, they have to make up their own standards and learn to meet them. When people say they are ‘integrating’ a spiritual awakening this is what they are talking about. Learning how to do these things intentionally. Because during an awakening these are skills that you have to relearn and develop.
Now in periods of kundalini surges, or peak spiritual experiences, people might not be able to meet these norms. But these are pretty good metrics of success when it comes to someone who is spiritually awakened and sane. And you can put them on your bathroom mirror and make them reasonable goals.
When someone is really integrated, and nearly complete their awakening they will display superior functioning. Which almost looks like having a dual core processor in your brain where you have one foot in both worlds (5D and 3D). In this case they will:
Ideally function well. Provide for themselves, have meaningful long-term friendships, and a meaningful way to create in the world. They might not be buying winning lottery tickets, but they will likely have better than average luck.
Ideally, have stable positive emotions with the ability to experience a wider gamut of emotions than average. They might not be always happy, but they are going to be happier than the average bear, and they can also cry when its relevant.
Ideally, code-switch seamlessly between subjective experiences of non-consensual reality and objective reality. A highly functional shaman can talk to someone’s ancestors mentally while talking to them physically without ever letting on there are two conversations at the same time.
Now I want to move on to some tougher conversations, what happens when someone isn’t meeting the sanity criteria in a spiritual awakening?
Socially defined norms of sanity vs. insanity
Socially defined norms of sanity can be loosely defined as something that would make the social circle of greater than four people reject you if you reported it candidly. (Yes I use this definition all the time as I quite systematically test various social reactions to my observable psi phenomenon. Good to know where the boundaries are so you can cross them intelligently :)
Most people have a pretty limited notion of sanity. People who are asleep tend to define insanity as behavior or beliefs outside of accepted conventional norms. One or two standard deviations are fine, but perceptions or thoughts outside of acceptable 3D reality (consensually observable space-time) are off-limits. As an example, a vague belief in aliens is normal, but a report of being on an alien spaceship is crazy. Although one logically follows from the other, it’s not about logic, it’s about normalization.
Sanity norms are aggressively socially enforced. For instance, research documents about 52% of children have an invisible friend who reportedly display characteristics of spirit guides, and 63% of people describe psi phenomena of loved ones after death. Despite the pervasiveness of these subjective experiences do you think half of your friends would admit to this? These experiences are socially off-limits in the West, suppressed by parents and family and rarely disclosed outside of intimate relationships.
By definition, all psychics lie outside of these boundaries. Which means that to be psychic in the West is to either suppress or conceal your innate nature, maintain a narrowed social circle, or question your sanity constantly. I frequently compare this to being gay in a homophobic society. When you express a natural variation in humanity but the people around you are both suppressing that expression, and treating you as insane if they find out you have it, you tend to internalize this. (Conveniently being gay is another nonvisible difference that until 1975 was pathologized as well by mental health professionals.)
When gay people ‘come out of the closet’ in unfriendly societies like Mormonism, or the religious right-wing they have usually spent years and years of internal turmoil first. They are rock solid on being gay at that point and willing to fight for it. Same goes for psychics. If someone says they are psychic in the West, they mean it.
In a spiritual awakening it’s important to be aware of the boundaries of social norms for sanity and respect them. The most obvious reason is to maintain relationships and access to the workplace. But also if you violate them too routinely you are going to get investigated at some point by a mental-heal professional. Which brings us to scientific boundaries for sanity.
Scientifically defined norms of sanity vs. insanity
This is not to scare you, but it’s terribly important to respect the effect scientific consensus has on societally enforced sanity.
In the West a doctor is the only person who can take away your freedom and incarcerate you for up to five days without due process or breaking the law. This is a lot of power. I’ve been on the other side of it, institutionalizing people from the ER with the help of the police and it is no joke. Average Joe Public has no idea that a doctor can do this, that anyone can request it, and that it’s up to one doctor to decide in the short-term — often with the help of police. After one to five days a mental health court gets involved to maintain institutionalization with more specialized mental health experts. Additionally a doctor can order suppressive psychiatric medication like haldol that acts like a chemical straightjacket if someone is being physically disruptive.
Certainly doctors are trained to use ethics, reason, and just-cause — the accepted cause for involuntary commitment is the assessment that you are a danger to yourself or others. But doctors are human and they can overextend their reach. They are more likely to overextend their reach in cases of extreme poverty, language barriers, or minority ethnicities — situations where it’s harder for them to assess someone’s hold on consensual reality. Family members and psychologists can also have a significant effect on institutionalization, as alternate decision-makers their assessment of your stability and capacity for harm can be the turning point.
Understanding this is is important if you are undergoing a spiritual awakening because you can have abrupt changes in personality and perception and its very common for family members to freak out. In these situations there is absolutely no benefit to describing your experience to even your closest friendships. If they aren’t awake themselves, they really, really aren’t going to get it. Best to deal gently with family and medical professionals if you can within their accepted paradigms.
Now I’ve seen several people who were acutely mentally ill, and unquestionably a danger to themselves and others institutionalized in the hospital, and treated with antipsychotic medication they did not want. I absolutely believe it was the safest, most effective therapy for them at the time. These people were mentally ill, not psychic. I also know a shit-ton of psychics who reports all kinds of unusual phenomena and are kind and beneficial to themselves or others. These people are mentally healthy and psychic.
But I have also witnessed a grey zone in the middle, in people in the early stages of a spiritual awakening, when the ego persona was not able to expand rapidly enough to stabilize an emerging consciousness. That’s a condition called spiritual emergency and that’s where someone can have a little more control over what happens. Which is why it’s so important to understand where the boundaries of sanity lie and how to deal with mental health professionals who are asleep.
If you’re having a spiritual awakening, medication for insanity can have unexpected effects. It might suppress awakening symptoms. If you’re having a kundalini awakening it can be disruptive to the kundalini process. It’s really not uncommon for people to have a stint in the psych ward in the early stages of kundalini and I’ve even recommended it once — but it might not be as helpful as other forms of treatment. The Spiritual Emergence Network was formed by psychiatrists for this exact purpose, differentiating a break from reality from a spiritual breakthrough. The psychiatrists in the network are a good place to start if you need to work through whether you are ill, having a spiritual awakening, or having both. A caveat, when I’ve talked to them, most of them aren’t awake themselves — that said they can be helpful in a crisis and I’ve learned to rely on allies as much as other awake people, there just aren’t that many of us.
Western doctors have a bible of insanity called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). This is a consensus of a panel of experts, and by definition, that means it’s created by people who are asleep. This is what doctors and mental health professionals use to define sane vs. insane. But it’s very important to include function when you are considering the DSM. By definition someone has to be dysfunctional before the DSM even starts to apply. That means someone has to score low on a global assessment of functioning (GAF). In other words, focus on functioning first, and conformity to accepted norms second.
It doesn’t matter if you are batshit cray cray if you can hold down a job, pay your bills, talk to your neighbors nicely, refrain from hurting yourself and others, follow the law, and take care of your ADLs and IADLs.
And yes, you might need to remind people of this more than once.
Defining insanity in spiritual awakening
“In order to present the teachings of spirituality properly, you have to have a very good understanding of basic sanity.”
— Chogyam Trungpa, Cynicism and Magic
Let’s define insanity clearly and precisely. Lets say its unhealthy lack of function caused by dissociation with consensual reality. Let’s lower the barriers to function, because geniuses and people who are highly psychic can struggle with relationships and tend to isolate .
So lets define function as meeting activities of daily living (ADLs, sleep, eat, use the bathroom), and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs, go to the grocery store, pay bills, get money of some sort).
So insanity by this definition would be someone who can’t meet their ADLs or IADLs and is also unable to conform to societal definitions of sanity even when threatened by institutionalization.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I was a medical student, a scientist, a skeptic, and agnostic when I had a sudden kundalini awakening. I was completely unprepared and had extreme difficulty at first reconciling my subjective experience of an expanded consciousness and sudden-onset psi abilities with my previously held beliefs about the nature of reality. This was basically just cognitive dissonance, holding two contrary beliefs at the same time in awareness is exhausting. At several points in my awakening I considered committing myself for insanity. But each time I had to run down the list:
Was I functioning
Was I able to talk to people rationally and only about 3D reality
What were they going to help me with?
I kept getting the same answers.
I was highly functioning (I passed all my medical school exams, scored genius level on a standardized IQ test, and gained entrance to an Ivy league university during the peak of my awakening).
I was able to have superficial conversations at the grocery store, with acquaintances, with work/schoolmates, and with family without mentioning my experience. Although my intimate relationships were severely curtailed I could manage in human society.
No one in psychiatry I had ever spoken to or trained with could help me with the issues I was facing.
I wasn’t hearing voices or getting messages to harm myself. I was coping with societal patterns about the oppression of women (historical fact), realizing I had been a shithead (psychology maturity continuum 101), dealing with childhood trauma (well documented in child-services complaints), and realizing science was bullshit (also empiric science). So most of what was upsetting me wasn’t a problem of insanity, it was a problem of expanded sanity.
Even my psi and physical symptoms could be validated on empiric research or in other medical modalities. For instance acupuncture maps displayed the currents I was feeling in my body, and many people report mild psychic phenomena such as seeing auras.
In other words I wasn’t insane. But I had to go down the checklist, more than once over the years to decide that. Which is why I’m giving my checklist to you.
Sometimes you just need reassurances that you’re okay.
On sanity vs. insanity during spiritual awakening conclusion
A spiritual awakening will definitely make you question your sanity. This is both logical, normal, and healthy. When questioning your sanity you should focus on function. When other people are questioning your sanity, you should also focus on function. To be more sane, you should focus on function. Getting a theme here?
There is a lot to process in spiritual awakening, and one of the things you need to process are the difference between societal definitions of sanity, scientific definitions of sanity, and what it is to be a sane spiritually awakened person.
I’ve tried to make both of these tasks easier for you in this article. I hope it helps.
