"To produce a schizophrenic break you need to collapse the ego, preferably as rapidly as possible. There are different ways of defining the ego but I define it thusly: The ego is a structure of the personality that is made up of what we believe to be true about ourselves, others, the world around us, and our place in it. We form these beliefs as based on our relationships, our experiences, the roles we play and the activities we engage in. All of these combined, create our ego -- which is, for most of us, our sense of who we are. I prefer to think of the ego in this regard as the little self.
When the ego collapses, fragments, or disintegrates, shadow and archetypal contents flood in from the personal and collective unconscious. Those are Jungian terms and I use them because it's the best model I've found thus far for explaining this experience to others. During psychosis, what is experienced and what is seen by the people around you, are fragments of the collapsed ego (one's shattered sense of self), shadow material (which produces fear, terror, paranoia, shame, etc.), and archetypal material, such as the sense that one is Jesus Christ, or Buddha, or God... or has just seen one of those figures get into a cab on 49th street.
Yet, each of those religious icons are also symbols of center which is where the larger Self resides. If you make it all the way through the unconscious to the center -- for a little while at least -- you don't just play God, you are God, because there is nothing left at that point to separate the I-from-The-Thou. Within an Eastern framework, this might be called Self-realization or God-realization. In the West, it's called delusions of grandeur.
There are a number of spiritual traditions that work to slowly polish these layers of selfhood away so as to come into contact with the pure source of the Absolute; meditation in the Buddhist tradition or contemplation in the Christian mysteries are two such examples. There are also various drugs that temporarily displace the ego allowing the numinous to shine in -- the use of peyote among Native Americans; LSD among university professors; ayahuasca among shamans of the Amazon. In addition, there are ritual activities one can engage in: kundalini yoga, drumming, chanting, sacred forms of dance, tantric love-making or creating a work of art. Note that none of these activities produce neurological dysfunction, they simply remove the ego -- one's sense of the little self -- from the larger equation.
Falling in love can displace the ego. Losing someone you love can displace the ego. Shock and trauma can displace the ego. Retiring, or losing a job or role you had strongly invested yourself in can displace the ego. All of us have likely had these kind of experiences and we're familiar with the feeling that life feels a bit shaky for a while afterwards. We don't quite know how to be who we believed we were if we're no longer "Joe's wife" or "Director of Internal Affairs" or "Mary's best friend". If we thought of those people, roles, belongings as positive (i.e., we were attached), we experience their departure as losses. We may need to replace them in some form; a new spouse, new friend, or new job, before stability returns and we are back to being "ourselves" once more.
In a matter of months I lost my self-identity as a daughter, my self-identity as a mother, my self-identity as a wife, my self-identity as a worker, and I also lost my community and my two best friends -- external forms of support that otherwise could have helped provide some structure in the midst of those losses. In addition, trauma was interwoven through those events: trauma from my past, trauma in my present, and a trauma that came to be in which many people died and I felt responsible in some twisted way for their deaths. I wasn't, but something doesn't have to be true to believe that it's true.
You cannot try this at home because you require the co-operation of the entire Universe which strips you of most everything that you have loved or believed in, in one relentless blow after another with hardly any time in between to catch your breath, until you really and truly, absolutely cannot stand anymore. This is how you produce rapid ego collapse, which in turn, produces an acute schizophrenic break -- no faulty neurological wiring required."
Source: Spiritual Recovery
