I think you’re right. When I was a teen, I had what I would later realize was a partial spiritual awakening. I say “partial” because I really didn’t understand what was going on and it took about 10 years, a full college degree, and a few years of studying meditation and philosophy before I began to understand what I had gone through. Naturally, at the time I assumed I was just mentally ill, but now I know that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t triggered by philosophical searching but by life circumstances. Over the course of days of self-isolation, feeling the most intensely emotional and existential pain possible, I kept reducing my experience down, trying to figure out some foundation where I could rest.
I realized over days that nothing could possibly be verified because I cannot exit myself and look back reflexively to verify my own experience. Everything I saw, heard, tasted, touched, or thought could be a hallucination, an illusion. For all I knew, I could be an old man in a padded cell, banging his head against a wall and hallucinating the life of the teenager I thought I was.
I was obsessed with the old man and terrified of him. The dread grew worse and worse.
Finally one day, it clicked. I realized that I might be an old man banging his head against a wall, my reality might collapse at any moment and I might wake up in my padded cell, but it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter because this hallucination was my reality, and I had no control over whatever reality might actually exist, so I might as well just forget about it and live my life as if it were real. Essentially, I came to the Cartesian conclusion of “Cognito ergo sum” I think, therefore, I am. The fact that something is having thoughts proves that something (me) exists, and that is the only factual knowledge I will ever be able to gain with certainty. I realized that the only thing I could ever know for 100% fact, was that I existed. I couldn’t prove the existence of anything else, only I and I couldn’t even know what I was.
No drugs were involved in the above story. Just pure, good old-fashioned, philosophical inquiry. I will say, that during this period I got very close to ending this little experiment called life. Sounds dark. Has this had a lasting impression on me? Oh sure, but I don’t really think about it much anymore, I’ve lived with the conclusion that I’m a mystery and that I can’t prove that my own mother isn’t anything more than an illusion for so long, that I don’t really think about it anymore. When it comes to other people, they are either literally me (hallucinations, projections of my own God mind as some mystics and psychonauts would assert) or they are actual individuals, in either case, my conclusion is that I should be nice to people either out of self-love or love of what is not me.
Back to the “partial spiritual awakening” thing. I’m not awakened or enlightened, not by a long shot.
