ChatGPT, Am I Delusional? 👀
Notes from the in-between: awakening without the aesthetics, and why your soul defies ROI.
I've been struggling with verbalizing my experiences lately. It's not exactly a language problem but more of a conceptual challenge (or maybe I am having an extended stroke?). I am experiencing bodily knowing and in my limited words, I am unable to truly convey what I felt in the moment.
I think maybe if I keep experiencing this, I will eventually either come up with the right words or accept that some experiences transcend conventional language altogether.
Maybe it doesn't even matter but there is a deeply coded desire to communicate when you discover something that you feel to be so significant. So, you want to share. Not necessarily immediately because you'll be heavily mocked due to your woo woo experiences that take place without an ayahuasca trip - which seems to be the only hip way to talk about spirituality in 2025.
Maybe I'm here to remind myself that maybe not everything I experience needs to be communicated from the get go, because it's often still taking shape even in my consciousness, and when I try to convey it to an audience that has no reference points and I do a poor job of choosing the words, then it still is frustrating no matter how spiritually significant whatever you're trying to convey is. If you are early in your journey, the responses you receive might still slightly annoy you because clearly you were still out there trying to get something out of sharing this experience. So, be wiser and maybe don't share it - at least not yet?
Also, if you are early in your journey, even your brain will be flattening the experience because it somehow cannot be processed in the same way that majority experiences are being processed. This is how you end up in a lonely delusional place of "Did I make this up?" 90% of the time – no, you didn't.
You just got bullied into that conclusion because of your fixation to track/report and do an ROI analysis on a soul level experience. That'll never compute.
So why do I still crave seeing some sort of progress? Maybe before I ask that, I need to go back and define progress so that my following attempts aren't futile. What is progress? I think it isn't as earth shattering, high-contrast as we see in fast-paced media (think any of your on-demand romcoms), which makes you feel like yours cannot possibly be progress because EWW!!! I mean even the “after” version of your story doesn’t look that shiny, so maybe you are failing?
The truth is, we have this hope that somehow there will be a shiny result from whatever work we are putting in and the irony is that all we end up with is usually the dawning realization of how much more work we still need to put in. Look, I am committed to the journey, but I could also use an easy win – couldn't we all?
I think that exact way of thinking (“I deserve an easy win!”) is why there is an industry where people are selling you spirituality. I am not talking about books but talking mostly about "join my webinar / buy my package" type of quick-fix spiritual solutions. It is disheartening because there actually is a beautiful journey your soul is predisposed to take, but the way we're going about it feels underwhelming. Or maybe this is another way my ego — she is spiritual now btw, only wears organically sourced cotton in white and painstakingly meditates — tries to control my reality.
At some point, you get sick of your own BS and decide that no matter how you feel inside, unless you can act from a giving place, you will not act. In every other scenario, there is grasping. There is an attempt at manipulation. And, I never considered myself as someone who'd "manipulate" but any time you're trying to control something, that is manipulation – and maybe we all have different methods for this, whether with guns blazing, sex, money.... It's all manipulation, and I am done with that. I want to be so completely done with every version of it, you don't even know. So when my ego tries a new way to ignite my addiction to control things, I have to consciously bring her back to "No, we're not doing that." And, I still can't catch all of her attempts. I've just realized she is also changing her tactics as I try to transcend mine.
Anyways, I digress. The reason I wanted to mention the inability to verbalize what you viscerally experienced is that this very limitation compounds the problem – your brain is flattening it. The experience was rich with data, colors, light, and depth, but when you attempt to communicate with your existing tools, it diminishes to "meh". It's like trying to export those breathtaking RAW images from your iPhone only to see them degrade to Blackberry-era resolution. Colors fade, depth vanishes, and what was once a vibrant 65 MB masterpiece compresses down to a grainy 5 MB caricature. This is precisely what your brain is currently doing to any spiritual experience unless it reaches that fictional level of romcom glossiness it's been conditioned to expect . It needs some glow, or else ffs – what are you even doing?
So, this is my elaborate and perhaps complicated way of saying: you're not alone if you've experienced this phenomenon, and please stop doing it. Stop flattening your soul-level experiences, as I do daily on ChatGPT seeking reassurance that I'm not going full delulu here.
The fact that you experienced it is evidence enough. Let the people and experiences meant to understand it find their way to you. And, they will.