# Help settle a little spiritual debate about DP / DR an outsider...



## d_z (Dec 6, 2013)

I wanted to better understand DP / DR person's experience of reality and how it relates to a type of spiritual practice...

To give a bit of background...

In one form of meditation (Burmese Vipassana) that I have a fair bit of experience with there is a very specific stage that initiates go through (we sometimes call it the Dark Night of the Soul) that seems somewhat similar to DP / DR.

Basically, the dark night is considered an intermediary stage towards achieving 'path'.

Getting path results in a presistant effortless increase in well being, new perspective into your subjective perception of reality, and increased mental concentration ability.

But the intermediate stage of Dark Night is where the practitioner faces their fears / anxieties etc. And brings up a lot of negative perception.

In this model it is possible and indeed fairly common to get to the intermediate stage without any practice. But getting to path usually takes time.

Anyways we were having a little discussion over here as to how these things relate to DP / DR.
http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/4952453

And I was curious...

Does this seem like accurate description of DP and DR to you:



> Depersonalization is when the "watcher" is outside the body and is not the realization that there is actually no watcher. It is not the same thing as 4th path though it can include the experience of agencylessness since the person perceives themselves to be outside of themselves watching themselves do things without any input on their part.
> 
> Derealization is when the visual aspects of reality start to look unreal or "cartoonish" (like feeling like you're in an episode of the Simpsons).


Or is it more like this (taken from someone's experience of DP on this forum):



> Imagine that you're looking at a familiar room with familiar people. One day you realize that there is something "fuzzy" about the boundaries/outlines of everything you see.
> 
> Soon you begin to see the movie projectors above the ceiling. You see rays of colored lights being beamed to every object in the room. You follow the trails.
> 
> ...


The second one seems like an experience of reality very similar to what we would call Dark Night or the intermediary stage I was talking about earlier.

The other one is something quite different.


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## CharlieFreak (Nov 19, 2012)

My opinion is DP is a process where one realize the negative aspects of their personality/thought process. They free themselves of the issues in their past which breeds a more positive perspective on things. The clarity is in connecting with how the individual truly feels. This breeds inner peace. DP is not ego loss. It is a process of moving past insecurities. I do feel that this clarity can lead some to a more spiritual state if they chose so.


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## missjess (Jun 1, 2012)

Luke that is the realization I came too when I conquered dp the first time ...I became a new person and I seen myself as a spiritual being instead of the shell it was great..

It's rlly hard to function tho with dp so it's a pretty cruel awakening disorder....like not being able to coordinate body movements properly etc


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