Ego death
What happens when you disconnect your selfies from the rest of the system? This action is commonly referenced as "ego death" and is treated as a spiritual awakening. Let's discuss it. Do you really open a third eye, or is there something else going on?
Technically, by shutting down some parts of your memory and deactivating data channels, you acquire a lower level of consciousness. It's not a superior god-like awareness that somehow elevates your existence, but a rudimentary one.
Subjective mental clarity reflects the fact that you have less data than usual. It's almost like an intellectualization; you just cut a different subsystem off the grid.
Working with patterns of behavior, we can't utilize this trick in any meaningful way. Our primary point of interest is a set of programs on your personal hard drive, and now it's not only unreachable, but surrounded with mental traps.
Most practices that lead to ego death are hardly different from binge drinking. You sit or dance with your eyes wide shut, don't see any problems, feel "better", and reinforce behaviors based on ignoring and inaction. It's a therapeutic deadlock to avoid.
You may try to change your life in this state of mind, but lack of information blinds you. Any progress is illusionary. When an outdated database with your real self-identity gets back online, it'll hit you with a cache invalidation problem on steroids. You won't be able to trust your own memory.
Perhaps the only useful side effect that we can get here is a redirection of computing power towards explorations of the external world. Some people manage to miss the fact that there is a whole universe around them. It comes as a revelation.
As it turns out, you're a part of the cosmos. It affects you. You affect it. The forces of nature both guide you and give you the right to change the world in return. Such mindset can cause existential terror in faint-hearted ones, but it becomes truly liberating if you're not afraid to play with fire.
Understanding of your role in the universe can be used as a supporting tool in therapy. It's an alternative to statistical guessing that helps to see old programs as insignificant ones and discard them en masse without even looking at them.
It's a powerful technique, yet I can't help but notice that you don't have to hide from yourself to see the evidence of the obvious. The main ideas behind this enlightenment are common knowledge in many "primitive" cultures.
Just look at the stars!
When was the last time you did that?
Do that tonight.