Unsettled: The Dissolution of the Ego and the Loss of Humanity

[Adrian colby]

this is not a beginner’s post, not a motivational piece, and not an attack on non duality or spirituality — it’s a reckoning that I’ve started to face in the last year.

Several years ago, I had a clear non-dual awakening through contemplation and meditation, later contrasted with a psychedelic experience. Identity collapsed, reality became dreamlike, and the familiar non-dual insights followed. This post is not about that experience. It’s about what happened after.

My awakening didn’t occur in a vacuum. It unfolded during the pandemic, amid global uncertainty, political polarisation, and widespread psychological destabilisation. That context mattered, because it shaped how insight was interpreted — and, in many cases, misused.

Awakening did not end suffering. Although it initially seemed promising, immersion in a new “spiritual” worldview and years spent understanding cognitive mechanisms, rewiring habits, and reconditioning responses didn’t actually improve my lived reality. Instead, they exposed unintegrated emotional and nervous-system layers that non-dual insight alone could not resolve.

I watched spiritual communities repeatedly mistake conceptual understanding for embodiment, psychedelic experience for integration, and “love and light” language for compassion. Non-duality became a belief system — one used to bypass lived experience, gaslight emotional pain, and justify disengagement from relationship and community.

What followed for me was unexpected: heightened emotional sensitivity, intense longing for connection, and repeated nervous-system overwhelm. What I had previously labelled as “ego” turned out to be unmet regulation needs and attachment patterns that had been bypassed by intellect — autism that could no longer be masked once the adaptive personality was exhausted.

Non-duality made it easy to dismiss pain as illusion. But lived experience doesn’t disappear simply because the self has been seen through. Ignoring this led to shutdown, relational strain, and what I now recognise as autistic-style meltdowns under overload.

At the same time, I watched pre-rational “truth-telling” merge with online misinformation ecosystems, fear narratives, and identity-based scapegoating. What masqueraded as awakening often regressed into us-versus-them thinking — precisely the opposite of integration.

I began to see the same pattern repeatedly: seekers entering non-dual frameworks without integrating the relative, becoming self-absorbed, disconnected, and increasingly inhuman. Humans have regulatory systems designed for belonging, co-regulation, and being with others. I watched so-called “spiritual seekers” repeatedly gaslight people out of their lived experience, meaning, and purpose. I watched absolute responsibility invoked at the relative level — something I tested myself — only to realise that while absolute responsibility makes sense at the absolute level, enforcing it in human relationship collapses mutuality and places the burden of others’ discomfort onto one’s very existence. The only logical endpoint of that is self-erasure.

For me, this wasn’t abstract. Years of spiritual work and responsibility-taking did not translate into greater safety, belonging, or stability. In some cases, access to healthcare narrowed, policies hardened, and spiritual peers responded not with compassion but with bypassing and blame.

Awakening without embodiment, community, and nervous-system integration leads to nihilism, burnout, and loss of humanity — especially under societal stress.

Non-duality may be an underlying structure of reality, but reality itself is relational. It’s worth remembering that, no matter how intoxicating the glimpse.

The ego did not disappear — it had to be there. Without it, there would have been no sustained inquiry, no epistemological discipline, no ability to articulate psychological mechanisms or confront propaganda, trauma, and unconscious reactivity.

What I noticed — in myself and others — was how easily non-duality collapsed into nihilism. Layers of reality were deconstructed and then dismissed as “mere illusion,” as if they no longer mattered.

When personality dissolves completely, there is nothing left to generate discernment. No capacity to interpret emotion, no drive to desire a trajectory, no will to justify existence. Thought stops. Contemplation ceases. There’s no joy or sadness — just a disconcerting stillness. Not peace, not depression, but exhaustion. The end of seeking. The cessation of the movement to resolve, explain, justify, or improve.

It feels destabilising — like reaching the midpoint of life, where ascent ends and a slow return toward stillness begins.

Nothing I wanted to experience in life has happened. What I believed would be joyful turned out to be fantasy, and every attempt to actualise meaning or purpose has failed, regardless of strategy or direction. I find myself again at a self-erasure moment, forced to acknowledge a reality where years spent fighting for a life beyond survival — a life of thriving — appear to have been undone, with the added possibility of exclusion and danger.

I stayed the course for years out of curiosity, just to see what might happen. But if this life continues toward stripped rights, inauthentic relationships, no contact beyond screens, obsolete skills, and depleted energy — then I don’t feel sad. I simply don’t see the point.

I followed what moved me: spirituality (serious deconstruction, philosophy, self-observation), music, reinvention of prior skills, writing and singing to articulate insight, and above all, love and connection. I tried to bring humanity back to unity, even within a small circle. For a time, it seemed promising. But when I stripped away fantasy and looked honestly at the present moment, there was no one there. No one showed up. No one tried. No one loved back with even a fraction of what I offered.

For the past two years, it has been pain and isolation.

At this stage, I’m no longer interested in chasing insight, peak states, or metaphysical understanding. What’s emerging instead is a quiet need for slowness, embodied regulation, and real human connection. It feels less like nihilism and more like surrender — not to truth, but to rest.

Like everything is slowing down and preparing to stop. Returning to stillness. Including life itself.

 

it has become increasingly difficult to respond, write, or even express the experience coherently. Executive function has noticeably declined. Writing this piece has taken weeks — something that would once have been completed in a single sitting, driven by focus, urgency, and determination, even at the expense of sleep. That capacity seems to have vanished.

It feels as though the will to care, to justify, or to resolve anything has quietly withdrawn. Not replaced by despair, but by indifference toward explanation itself. I no longer feel compelled to organise experience into meaning or narrative. Whether this represents a surrender into pure being, a nervous-system shutdown, or a kind of existential exhaustion is unclear — but it is deeply unsettling.

What remains is not insight, motivation, or purpose, but a static sense of existence without traction. No impulse to seek, no urgency to fix, no energy to create coherence. Just presence, slowed almost to a stop. It does not feel like peace — and it does not feel like suffering either — but rather the absence of the machinery that once generated movement, striving, and justification.

 

Of course I have written the bones of this and used an AI to clean it up but even using AI is becoming exhausting as it often changes and even erases the meaning or context of my writings. As I’ve run out of energy again, I will leave it there. It communicates the guts of what I am trying to say.

 

[Adrian colby]

Yet again I rest my case…. Silence is all that meets me. Not just here but anywhere.

[Ishanga]

@Adrian colby That is well written...

I sometimes feel this way as well, but I intentionally create meaning and consciousness within ordinary life, if I didn't then nihilism would take over for sure..

Non Dualism, nothing is happening, no one is here or solipsism "I am the only one here", they in some aspects are correct but are Absolute perspectives, these are what I call Top Down Methodology, it works for some, but if You do not engage or admit the Relative, as You mentioned above, it all falls apart sooner or later..

We are Human, we are Beings as well, Human is the relative part, the relationships, the family, the meat and bones, most of us are coming from that angle, and conditioned heavily to be this way, it is a survival mechanism as well as a way to promote self preservation of the species, otherwise how would we have made it this long being so weak?

But in Reality we are the Being aspect, the Absolute Aspect, we are Embodied Absolute, full of Life Potentials, but it has to be integrated with the Human relative side, and the expression of that is completely unique, so that is the beauty of it all, its not to imitate some Guru You follow and be a robot of that image or persona, it is too be YOU and express it that way completely, while being based in the Being aspect, that is why they call Life Leela in India or divine play, Life is a game of sorts to play out, not take too seriously and have fun, not suffer it all the time, that is a complete waste of this Life!!