| | Let me first mention that I haven't been trying to cultivate PCE's, but my first impression about the very mentioning of the term and then by and large the more I'd read about them the more I've wondered if they are something I used to experience as a child and then induce as a teenager.
When I was a kid I'd have these moments of some odd feeling, which I would think strange, and which I began questioning friends about as an early teenager, one of them, allegedly, knew what I was talking about. We, at the age of fourteen, called it the "unnamed feeling". I used to do odd things back then, like practice psychokinesis, and for both that reason and some great curiosity that feeling held some philosophical secrets, I would cultivate it, I used to be able to do it with a 95% success rate by chanting, "I'm right here, right now, right here, right now". And rather then focusing on the endeavor, I'd focus on the wonder of mere existence, the fact that I was actually existing, in reality. It sounds a bit callow and cheesy, but it worked like a charm, and probably still could, as I did it up until the age of seventeen or so regularly, only about seven years ago.
The actual experiences were characterized by something which, only very much later in life, a few years ago actually, I felt was the inducing of depersonalization and derealization. In my younger years it was simply an interesting, out-of-body perspective shift, in my later years I assumed it was identity dissociation. It always felt like I was literally out of my body, watching myself, along with other classical dissociation signs, like feelings of watching a movie. It came in two stages: first the inducing, what I believe was depersonalization, and then, with persistence in focusing on my existence, it would peak into what I assumed was full derealization. It seems that those feelings are also similar to what I'd experience very occasionally walking into a merchandise store or a new job, it's linked to anxiety and is meant to suppress the emotions.
Does this sound like a PCE? |