After awakening, something paradoxical can happen: the mind quiets, the inner world loses some grip, and yet the system starts doing something that looks almost spiritual—blankness, calm, contentless space.
And it can be confusing, because it’s close to the territory. It can even resemble unbound consciousness.
But the speaker’s warning is direct: traumatized systems can mistake dissociation for presence. The result isn’t liberation. It’s a subtle shutdown that feels calm but not okay—an “escape” that costs you contact, intimacy, and adaptability.
This talk is an orientation for that specific crossroads: what dissociation means here, why it’s socially reinforced, how trauma echoes through consciousness, and the felt markers that tell you whether you’re present or gone.
This Is a Big Topic, Especially After Awakening
Awakening, trauma, and dissociation is a very big topic. It could be broken into many videos or even courses.
In this talk, the speaker makes it introductory and focuses on a few points that come up again and again in working with people—especially after awakening, after a shift in identity.
He starts by clarifying what he means by dissociation.
What “Dissociation” Means Here
There are pathological versions: depersonalization, derealization, severe trauma patterns, and even dissociative identity disorder. He explicitly says that’s not primarily what he’s talking about.
He’s talking about something broader—something that happens to everyone.
A key claim: mind identification or thought identification is a stable state of dissociation. It’s socially endorsed, socially upheld, and constantly reinforced through human communication—including body language. It doesn’t feel pathological to most people. It actually helps people function in groups.
He notes that language and thought likely have evolutionary advantages (planning, communicating in groups, using objective symbols). But the internal experience of being the thinker may be an “error,” or as Jung framed it, an unstable stage in the evolution of consciousness.
So dissociation here includes the shared, agreed-upon inner-world orientation: self-talk, self-referential thought loops, planning conversations before they happen, and the constant reinforcement of doership, agency, time, space, problems and solutions.
The Symptoms of “Normal” Dissociation
Even though it’s socially reinforced, it has symptoms.
He points to anxiety and depression, and then violence—self-violence and violence toward others. He points to “quiet desperation,” and to the amount of unhappiness beneath the surface of ordinary life—even when people present as fine.
He frames this as a “disease we don’t call a disease,” and then notes that some people are sensitive enough to feel one symptom intensely: dukkha / unsatisfactoriness—a very specific sense that something is “off” in self-perception, self-reflection, self-consciousness.
For sensitive people, that “offness” becomes unavoidable and then intolerable, until they find a way to address it.
Kensho: The First Shift Breaks the Mechanism
This is where awakening enters.
People come into contact with a teacher or a teaching that resonates enough to give the sense: I can address this. That recognition leads into inquiry into suffering and identity—how you’ve been taking yourself to be someone based in thought—and that inquiry leads to a shift: kensho, the first awakening.
He describes it as when the mechanism for stable dissociation starts to break. At first it can feel totally broken—like it’s just not there.
He shares the Zen framing: his teacher said after kensho it feels like the ego is obliterated, but it’s not; it’s off in the periphery and it comes back “with fire.” That return can feel like massive suffering, now seen clearly, including the recognition of how much you cause your own suffering—which adds intensity but also gives a kind of hope.
This is where shadow work begins in earnest. Trauma enters the foreground.
The Post-Awakening Risk: Mistaking Dissociation for Presence
This is the heart of the talk.
He says many people do this to some degree, and some do it far more than others: they mistake dissociation for presence, even for non-dual presence.
Why? Because once thought-identification loosens, dissociation becomes easier to access. And dissociation can overlap with unbound consciousness: it can feel contentless.
But the speaker insists: dissociation does not feel like equanimity. It doesn’t have contact. It feels out of contact. It doesn’t have a deep okayness. It has a blankness, a subtle “offness,” sometimes a quiet urgency.
Unbound Consciousness vs Dissociation
He places dissociation on a spectrum near unbound consciousness, but distinguishes them.
Unbound consciousness, practiced well and balanced, is a neutral equanimous experience where you’re neither pushing nor pulling on thought.
Dissociation feels blank, “not there,” contentless—but without the okayness and settledness of presence.
He emphasizes that traumatized people may not realize they’re doing it, because dissociation has been a lifelong escape from intolerable feeling.
Relief for a Moment, Horrible for a Lifetime
Here the speaker names the addictive quality: dissociation can feel good for a moment—instant relief from an uncomfortable feeling—but horrible over the long term.
He uses a comparison: like benzos—one moment of relief can become chronic dependence and long-term misery. The analogy is about short-term relief vs long-term cost, not about medication advice.
The Key Distinction: Presence Feels Whole; Dissociation Feels “Off”
He offers a practical litmus test.
Ask:
- Does it feel whole?
- Does it feel intimate?
- Does it feel complete, stable, adaptable, fluid, spontaneous?
- Is there a deep okayness?
These qualities usually aren’t present in dissociation.
He gives the typical dissociation report:
“Nothing’s happening. I’m not here. I’m not in the body. There’s no body. It feels calm.”
Then he asks: “Do you feel okay? Is there deep okayness?”
Often the answer is: “No. Something feels off.”
He also offers a somatic marker:
Do you feel the body—core sensation?
Often in dissociation the answer is no, or sensation is peripheral rather than central: cold tingling in hands, sensations at the back of the head, rather than warmth or intensity at the center (heart/gut/midline).
Presence, as he describes it, is adaptable and alive. Dissociation tends not to be.
How Trauma Creates the Pattern
He explains dissociation as the echo or ghost of earlier trauma.
A child goes through something overwhelming. Often they’re not allowed to emote properly—taught not to scream, not to feel fear, not to feel rage—so they lose access to natural capacity. Overwhelmed, they “go nowhere”: dorsal vagal shutdown, dissociation.
That pattern can echo through adolescence and adulthood: a voice in consciousness that says, “I can’t handle this. Too much. Overload.”
Because sensations and emotions still arise, dissociation becomes the strategy: “I’m going away.” It works for a moment. It becomes pathological as an adult pattern, especially when applied to experiences that aren’t threats—like ordinary fluctuations in emotion.
A Practical Check: Did Calm Come From Integration or Cut-Off?
He offers a simple way to investigate it in real life.
If you feel suddenly calm after intense emotion, ask:
- Am I calm because the emotion was fully felt and integrated—flowing, evolving into equanimity, maybe even incorporating other emotions?
- Or did it just cut off—and I’m not here?
He notes this can happen with positive emotions too, not only “negative” ones: someone with a dissociative tendency can dissociate from joy as well.
Spiritual Bypassing as a Different Flavor
He briefly mentions another version: spiritual bypassing—dissociating into spiritual concepts and terminology to discount your experience (or someone else’s), avoiding responsibility, avoiding feeling.
That’s a related but slightly different pattern.
The Bottom Line
He closes this portion with a clear line:
If the spaciousness, emptiness, nothingness feels fundamentally uncomfortable—if you feel intolerable, not okay, not adaptable to life’s eventualities—then it’s probably dissociation or some version of it.
And it’s tricky, because it can almost be mistaken for enlightenment.
But it isn’t.