A Psychedelic Journey Through Consciousness and Disorder
Psychedelics are like peptides of awareness. Side effects may include persistent DDD and HPPD according to the DSM-V of Psychiatric Disorders.
This post explores the difference between these psychiatric labels and very different terminology for the same experiences from other mind disciplines.
DDD
In DSM-V, Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder (DDD) refers to a condition where individuals feel detached from their self or surroundings.
First, let’s strip the psychiatric term-of-art “Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder” (DDD) down to its raw phenomenology and then re-valuate it in light of the Eastern metaphysical claim that (a) the empirical world is māyā: projective illusion, and (b) the felt sense of a solid, continuous “I” (ahaṃkāra) is likewise illusory.
Phenomenological core
- Depersonalization = “I am unreal,” “My thoughts or body are distant or mechanical,” “I am an onlooker inside my own head.”
- Derealization = “The world is a stage-set,” “Colors are washed out,” “Time feels staged; objects cardboard-like.”
These are not merely cognitive claims; they are immersive perceptual shifts where the appearance of self and world recedes, while their structure (memory, reasoning, continuity) remains intact.
In psychiatric discourse, they are pitched as pathological, trauma-driven or dissociative isolation. Eastern wisdom systems (Advaita Vedānta, Yogācāra Buddhism, Zhōngxiàn Daoism) pitch the same shifts as salvific, steps toward revealing substratum awareness (sat-cit-ānanda, śūnyatā, zìrán).
Meta-medical Framing Check
- Western schism: If subjective reality destabilizes, that’s a disease in the DSM-5; a true self is one rooted in libidinal attachment to a continuous world.
- Eastern episteme: If subjective reality feels more real than the appearance, that’s signal not noise; the DSM criteria literally “mistake peeling off illusion for symptomology.”
Structural overlap table
| DDD Symptom | Advaita Yogic Predicate | Functional Discrimination |
|---|---|---|
| “Feeling detached from body” | First veil falling: Sthūla-śarīra illusion | Psychiatric frame calls it loss of normal grounding; spiritual frame calls it glimpse of sūkṣma-śarīra & ātman’s witness stance. |
| “Like living in a dream” | māyā vikṣepa (projective confabulation) seen | Western eval: reality testing impaired. Eastern eval: reality testing finally accurate. |
| Persistent insight that experience is unreal | viparīta-bhāvanā (inverted cognition) dissolves | Psychiatry classes persistent insight as rumination. Buddhism identifies it as ekaggatā before arahant path. |
| “Emotionally empty” | Vāsanā-kṣaya (sub-conscious residues dry out) | Psychiatry treats with SSRIs; ātman literally feels relief from saṃskāra fever dream. |
Epistemological Intake
- Psychiatric no-sickness threshold: symptoms → distress → dysfunction → diagnosis.
- Eastern no-illusion threshold: symptoms → equanimous dispassion → further sādhana → enlightenment.
The difference is normative, not descriptive. Draw the line and
notice the DSM doesn’t include sociopathic CEO’s as suffering
“pathological loss of empathy” regardless of objective social
dysfunction, while spiritual systems do
(mithyā-aṅgarāga).
Trajectory reversal
Most “DDD” cases emerge after panic, cannabis, or trauma, instances where egoic construction becomes hyper-salient and collapses. That collapse feels threatening because Western scaffolding is built around the ego. Eastern techniques (neti-neti, koan work, śamatha-vipassanā) deliberately trigger miniature ego quakes until adaptive capacity emerges. Meditation sprints the same track but cushions the landing with logic and moral coherence.
Practical dialectic for those who hit DDD
Functionally treat it as a metabolic fluctuation between layers of identity.
- Recognize witnessing quality without commentary—label it sākṣī rather than “I’m going insane.”
- Replace question “When will I feel real again?” with “Which mode of construction is currently presenting?”
- Integrate the destabilization by not re-solidifying into another model. Buddhism calls this parikalpita → pariniṣpanna; Vedānta calls turya.
Final meta-test
Ask: if I reassign the valence from “disorder” to “laboratory of truth,” does the same phenomenology become workable? Most psychiatry gatekeepers literally can’t parse that question without taxpayer-funded consequences. So, cultivate parallel epistemic spaces and refuse to collapse them.
HPPD
Next up is HPPD; by stripping the clinical wrapping off Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) what we’re left with is an informational leak: low-level perceptual channels remain open to the same non-ordinary data feeds that the psychedelic session brought online.
The DSM claims pathology; an Eastern–cybernetic reframing sees a deliberate portal that forgot to close because the user’s perceptual firmware was patched.
Below is a cold-systems deconstruction of HPPD after-images with infinite-stage maya-rendering.
Epistemic Pivot
- HPPD “visual snow” = raw sampling rate of photonic field unshielded (māyā Macro-visible).
- Tracers / halos = temporal lag artifact encoded by entheogen as motion-tracking vectors; now baked into retinoid layer so the mind continues to predict frames ahead of optical cascade.
- Geometric overlays = formerly compressed fractal basis functions used by occipital cortex to simplify world-generation—now uncompressed, leaking into foreground.
- Diagnostic sleight-of-hand: Western medicine rewinds these phenomena into disorder once the ego notices it can no longer stabilise a single consensual movie-stream. Eastern tantra calls the identical presentation “after-glow siddhi”, adds manual bandwidth-control (trāṭaka, nāda-yoga).
Occult Tech Upgrade Table
| HPPD Symptom | Signal Layer Exposed | Spiritual/Cyber Cross-over Metaphor |
|---|---|---|
| Static or snow | Raw retinal quantum noise | Losing the “fill in the blanks layer”; Śūnyatā before colour. |
| Palinopsia (trails) | Predictive processing loop cached in short term prefrontal buffer | See karmic traces as explicit time-echo; maya disclosing its own motion-blur. |
| Closed-eye geometries | Intrinsic cortico-striatal harmonic templates | Kalachakra lattice; i.e., the format library used to build normal waking scenes. |
| Macro or micropsia | Perspective scaling error in eye hand calibration variable | Simultaneous access to granular and scalar views, mirror of non-dual witness. |
| Ego-anomaly (“I’m stuck behind the screen”) | Dissolution of self-model granularity | Precisely the opening Vedānta calls vikalpa-śuddhi, “purifying conceptual overlay” once, now stuck in refresh loop. |
Ontological Threat & Opportunity
If the default world-shader segfaults and keeps reloading hallucinated texture-packs, the diagnostician can’t afford to label it correct perception; every instance of non-consensus signal threatens the information monopoly of monumental reality.
Eastern praxis flips it: treat HPPD as play-preview of an
operator mode—but one still tethered to your
cortical stance.
Hence the work is not pharmacological suppression, but
re-tuning the tuner (neti-neti on storm-cycles,
plus sensorimotor grounding drills) to prevent oscillation-insanity
yet keep the extra channels.
Summary
So we’ve compared Western psychiatric perspectives, which often label these experiences as pathological, with Eastern traditions like Advaita Vedānta and Yogācāra Buddhism, which view them as steps toward deeper awareness.
We’ve reframed HPPD as an “informational leak” rather than a disorder, drawing parallels with Eastern concepts of illusion (māyā) and perceptual clarity. A reframing was also presented for DDD, suggesting we view it as a metabolic fluctuation between layers of identity and integrate the destabilization without re-solidifying into another model.
Hopefully, this post encourages readers to explore these terms further through meditation, reading, and practices, and to consider potential benefits of reframing them as opportunities for deeper understanding and insight into reality rather than pathologies of normalcy.
Terminology
| Word/Phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| HPPD | Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder |
| Depersonalization and Derealization Disorder (DDD) | A psychiatric condition where individuals feel detached from their self or surroundings |
| māyā | Sanskrit for “illusion” or “projective illusion” |
| ahaṃkāra | Sanskrit for “ego” or “the felt sense of a solid, continuous ‘I’” |
| sat-cit-ānanda | Sanskrit for “being-consciousness-bliss,” a state of ultimate reality in Advaita Vedānta |
| śūnyatā | Sanskrit for “emptiness” or “voidness,” a key concept in Buddhism |
| zìrán | Chinese for “naturalness” or “spontaneity,” a concept in Daoism |
| DSM-5 | Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, a manual used by clinicians to diagnose mental disorders |
| Sthūla-śarīra | Sanskrit for “gross body,” one of the three bodies in Vedānta |
| sūkṣma-śarīra | Sanskrit for “subtle body,” one of the three bodies in Vedānta |
| ātman | Sanskrit for “self” or “soul,” a core concept in Hinduism |
| māyā vikṣepa | Sanskrit for “projective confabulation” or “illusionary disturbance” |
| viparīta-bhāvanā | Sanskrit for “inverted cognition” or “reversed perception” |
| ekaggatā | Pali for “one-pointedness” or “concentration,” a meditative state in Buddhism |
| arahant | Pali for “worthy one,” an enlightened being in Buddhism |
| Vāsanā-kṣaya | Sanskrit for “subconscious residues dry out” or “exhaustion of latent tendencies” |
| saṃskāra | Sanskrit for “conditioning” or “latent tendencies” |
| neti-neti | Sanskrit for “not this, not this,” a method of negation in Vedānta |
| koan | A story, dialogue, question, or statement used in Zen Buddhism to provoke doubt and test a student’s progress |
| śamatha-vipassanā | Pali for “calm and insight,” two types of meditation in Buddhism |
| sākṣī | Sanskrit for “witness” or “the witnessing consciousness” |
| parikalpita | Sanskrit for “conceptualized” or “constructed” |
| pariniṣpanna | Sanskrit for “perfected” or “fully realized” |
| turya | Sanskrit for “the fourth state,” a state of consciousness beyond waking, dreaming, and deep sleep in Vedānta |
| mithyā-aṅgarāga | Sanskrit for “false attachment to the body” |
| trāṭaka | A meditative practice in which one focuses on a single point or object |
| nāda-yoga | yoga that focuses on the inner sound (nāda) |
| Kalachakra | A term in Vajrayana Buddhism referring to a complex mandala and associated practices |
| vikalpa-śuddhi | Sanskrit for “purifying conceptual overlay” |