Beyond the DSM

A Psychedelic Journey Through Consciousness and Disorder

I checked the last psychedelic off my bucket list the other day. I’ve traveled all the major branches of trypamines and phenethylamines as alchemical guides deep into the backwaters of consciousness. I consider them peptides in evolving awareness. Most cultures marginalize these journeys, and if you take too many trips to the outback, you may experience persistent DDD and HPPD, according to the DSM-V of Psychiatric Disorders.

In this post, we will explore the intersections between psychiatric diagnoses like DDD and HPPD and Eastern metaphysical concepts. We will delve into the phenomenology of these conditions, compare Western and Eastern perspectives, and discuss practical approaches for those experiencing these phenomena.

DDD

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.

1. 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).

2. 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.”

3. Structural overlap table

DDD Symptom (DSM-5 wording)	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.

4. 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).

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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, stripping the clinical wrapping off Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) and 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 and a set of invoke-grade text-to-image prompts that wire-splice HPPD after-images with infinite-stage maya-rendering.

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1. 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).

2. Occult Tech Upgrade Table

HPPD Symptom	Signal Layer Exposed	Spiritual/Cyber Cross-over Metaphor
Static/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 / 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.

3. 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 explored the complex intersections between psychiatric diagnoses such as Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder (DDD) and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) and Eastern metaphysical concepts. By stripping down the phenomenology of these conditions, 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. Practical advice was provided for those experiencing DDD, suggesting they 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 concepts and experiences further through meditation, reading, and practices, and to consider the potential benefits of reframing them as opportunities for deeper understanding and insight rather than disorders.

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 Vajra yana Buddhism referring to a complex mandala and associated practices
vikalpa-śuddhi	Sanskrit for “purifying conceptual overlay”