Derealization, Spiritual Crisis, and the Nervous System in an Accelerated World

By Aurora Roseline Lane, PhD

The Thinning of Selfhood

In my life, a quiet experience I have endured is a relationship with sleep. There have been many nights where sleep has been a battle, a space where my inner and outer worlds lose their structure and reality becomes porous. This liminal space can be frustrating when seeking refuge from a long day or much-needed rest. The mind and body want safety and familiarity, but in these episodes, those comforts do not arrive.

It extends beyond anxiety, or blue lights from screens alone, or caffeine late in the day. It is more than a lack of rest; it is the loss of a thread, a rhythm or pattern to follow that keeps one held enough to finally dissolve. In these moments, personhood slowly evaporates, and the experience exists far beyond the reach of standard protocols or the usual suggestions for sleep hygiene. It is a place where the typical maps of rest simply do not apply.

In these hours, the mind feels unbounded; it is an abyss without edges. The familiar architecture of selfhood recedes. Sensation thins. Emotion loosens its grip. I am present, but I have lost my anchor. Eugene Gendlin (1978) described the felt sense as the murky, internal physical awareness that grounds us in our own lives. Without it, one is left as a witness suspended in space; a porous consciousness leaking into a vast, shapeless expanse. The world is still there, but the basic substrate of reality has thinned until it no longer holds.

Sometimes just touching my forehead takes a deliberate effort. I wait for the pressure to register, searching for a boundary, reaching for a sense of known terrain in my body. We often think of the Self as a singular, solid entity, but this is a relatively modern and esoteric notion. Historically, we were not one thing; we were a node in a much larger network. Jung (1955) proposed the concept of Unus Mundus, a unitary reality where psyche and matter are one (p. 538). When the external containers that provide the rhythm of our lives are dismantled, the internal structure of the self begins to fracture; our ability to communicate with our own depths thins because the exterior mirrors of our interiority have vanished.

The Somatic Perspective: A Disturbance of Existential Feeling

What is happening at the physical level is a profound withdrawal of energy. When the environment is perceived as flooded, isolated, or overwhelming, the body moves into a state of tonic immobility. Peter Levine (1997) identifies this as the freeze response, an ancient biological state of paralysis where the nervous system is overwhelmed by high-intensity energy that has nowhere to go, resulting in a numbing of the internal "I" to preserve the organism.

In the literature of existential psychiatry, Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) describes these as disruptions of existential feeling, the basic sense of finding ourselves in a world (p. 38). When these feelings are disturbed, we fall into depersonalization or derealization; states where the self and the world feel distant, dreamlike, or fundamentally unreal. The body speaks a silent language of survival, while the spirit starves for a language for significance

The Numinous Encounter: Pleroma and the Kenoma

When the thread of the known terrain snaps, we are forced into a confrontation with what Jung called the numinous, the mysterium tremendum, an experience that is both terrifying and fascinating. Jung defined the numinous as a “dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will” (Jung, 1969, CW 11, para. 6). Whether it is called awakening, ego dissolution, or a Kundalini rising, the result is a thinning of the veil that normally protects the ego from the raw archetypal world.

Historically, humans managed this through purposeful rituals of dissolution. The Celtic thin places, indigenous initiations in the dark of the earth, and the medieval alchemist’s slow dissolution were all ways of allowing the mind to melt into oneness within a safe container. Folktales and myths provided the maps for these journeys; they were the threads that allowed an individual to lose their personhood without losing their soul.

Hans Jonas (1958) contrasted the Pleroma (Fullness) with the Kenoma (Void). In our culture today, we are often trapped in a Digital Kenoma. We have traded the vibrant fullness of communal ritual for a hollow, algorithmic vacuum. The void is filled with static, a meaningless rush of data that offers no thread to follow. When our containers are too weak, the Pleromatic light bleeds through, but instead of illuminating us, it hits the hollow emptiness of our modern Kenoma and drowns the nervous system in a leak that has no ritual to catch it.

The Holomovement: Enfolding the Infinite

This experience of thinning is not just a breakdown; it is a movement toward a deeper reality. David Bohm (1980) proposed the idea of the Holomovement, where the entire universe is an undivided wholeness in flowing movement. Within this, there is an implicate order (enfolded) and an explicate order (unfolded).

In these sleep episodes, the explicate order of my small self, my name, my job, my boundaries, begins to enfold back into the implicate order of the universe. The thinning is the sensation of being enfolded.

Bohm argued that the separation between mind and matter is an illusion; everything is a part of the same seamless flow. When we lose our sense of self, we are actually joining the Holomovement anew. The task is not to fear the enfoldment, but to learn how the body and mind can hold that vastness without being shattered.

Beyond the Screen: The Earth Has a Soul

Our tangible external anchors are shifting. In the past, the village acted as a psychic vessel. Communal rituals served as controlled leaks, allowing us to experience non-dual moments of oneness without losing our grip on the shared world. Today, we have no such vessels. The Pod is not just a room; it is a state of being where the external rituals that once anchored us have been stripped away.

Jung argued that we have become dangerously detached from the Spirit of the Earth:

“The Earth has a spirit of its own; a beauty of its own. It is a living being. We are the ones who have lost the connection. If we are not related to the Earth, we are not related to ourselves.” (Jung, 2002, p. 154).

Without the firm footing of ritual and community, we suffer a collapse into a solipsistic fantasy. We lose the self to a shapeless unreality because the Digital Kenoma provides no mirror for the soul. To find the thread again is to reconnect with the soul of the world, the Anima Mundi, which provides the weight and density needed to survive the infinite.

The Alchemical Mechanics: Nigredo and Calcination

In alchemy, these states are the necessary mechanics of change. This battle, where personhood evaporates, is the nigredo, the blackening.

“The nigredo or blackness is the initial state… it is the confusio, the chaos, the massa confusa out of which the world was created.” (Jung, 1968, CW 12, para. 334).

The nigredo is the moment one stops fighting the dissolution and enters the darkness. It is the loss of the social narrative, the you who has a role and a history. If the nigredo dissolves the form, calcination is the fire that dries it out. Jung observed that this fire dries out the moisture of the soul, the attachments that anchor us to our personal history (Jung, 1968, CW 12, para. 450).

In our modern experience, the fire is often the dry friction of the Digital Kenoma. We become calcined by a mind spinning with infinite data while the body remains paralyzed. This is not a moral failure; it is a mechanical result of being a spirit with no container.

The Rubedo: Reclaiming the Density of Being

I realized eventually that these sleep episodes were part of my own process of individuation. The loss of self was a necessary stage in the task of abandoning the small self to join into the symbolism, the dreams, and the psyche. These episodes were a call to create and seek rituals anew; to find a new myth and a collective village that can survive the dance between the finite and the infinite in matter.

To move from the nigredo of the void into the rubedo, the alchemical reddening, is to embody the Great Self. This is a return to the blood. In alchemy, the rubedo is the spirit forged into the flesh. True individuation is a somatic event; it is the process of building a psychic hearth within the nervous system that is dense enough to cast a shadow.

We restore our known terrain by grounding the vastness of the archetypal world into the weight of our own skin. We bridge the gap between the silent language of survival and the language for significance by staying present in the moment the veil thins. Through rhythm, symbolism, and communal witness, we break the solipsistic spell of the Kenoma. We inhabit the abyss without getting lost in it, translating the silence back into a life that feels heavy, warm, and finally, true.

References

• Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge.

• Gendlin, E. T. (1978). Focusing. Bantam Books.

• Jonas, H. (1958). The Gnostic Religion. Beacon Press.

• Jung, C. G. (1955). Mysterium Coniunctionis. Collected Works, Vol. 14.

• Jung, C. G. (1968). Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works, Vol. 12.

• Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and Religion: West and East. Collected Works, Vol. 11.

• Jung, C. G. (2002). The Earth Has a Soul. North Atlantic Books.

• Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.

• Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of Being. Oxford University Press.

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