One

The Pop experience is to have the ego container break, or just let down, and therefore one is a self with no ego (or the ego is not active then). This can happen due to stressful circumstances, or illness, or drugs, or wartime, or whatever. Having the ego collapse is not really enlightenment. But if it happens as a result of study, practice and intent, then it is a sign of actual spiritual progress.

If it happened due to external circumstances, then ego will come back. The Pop might make no real difference in the person's life. I was told recently that people who have Near Death Experiences due to anoxia or other physical situations do not really experience life-changing results from it. That lines up with what I would say: If someone hands you an honorary diploma, the knowledge does not get bestowed along with it. But if you work for the knowledge, the awareness, then you have it, whether you or anyone else knows what happened or not. Imagine if someone became non-dual in a place where there was no understanding of it: they might just feel a lot better about everything and outwardly seem pretty much the same, except happier. That's fine. It is not a contest.

But a Pop will probably be followed by a longer lasting and deeper event, that will permanently affect the person. For me, a couple weeks after the Pop when my ego let down, I had several hours of extraordinary consciousness, clearly beyond ego, and it was present for a couple days after that before I felt mostly like "usual" again. This was a permanent shift of perspective, and even when I got "lost in my head" again and felt miserable, I knew that there was an alternative, and that I had had it for quite a while recently. So it let all the excuses out of the bag. I knew I could do better. I call this "beyond" state Neo, after the character from the Matrix movies, which seems to exemplify it. Neo means new, and it is a rearrangement of the letters in the word 'one'. To me, Neo means to be all-one, a unified person, and not an ego.

But there is still a self. The Neo state is wonderful. It feels amazing, and probably looks to other people almost like hypomania. Some hypomania might be that. For me, it recurred at times for the next 2 years. Not often, but I often did come close. Eventually, I was frustrated, because I had a permanent change, but I did not stay in that state. I would burst up in to it, then slide back down a few hours or a day later.

How I describe it now is that there is a self without an ego around it. The ego perspective is gone. Everything that comes with that is gone: the desires and limitations and goals... But what we might say is required is gone also: values, morals, compassion (unless it was extremely strong before) and any other considerations of others. This probably sounds scary. Neos are still what they were, but the lens of social form is gone. They won't suddenly do bad things, but it feels like there is no restraining force, no superego, no judgmental part of the psyche left.

Being at one in the self does not imply being at one with others, either. After a couple years of me sometimes breaking through in to the Neo state, and knowing no one else who did, someone I met talked with me and teased it out of me. She had had it also, and she could see it in me - I am not sure exactly how. I thought: wow, a great new friend. Maybe she thought that too. I didn't imagine that we could disagree on anything. It literally felt to me like she was inside my soul, looking out through my eyes. And yet, we did disagree, and the relationship blew up over and over until she stopped speaking with me. So, Neo is not enlightenment.

The horror of it was when she disclosed having the power to Pop other people, and I was shocked and reacted badly about it. She argued that in the Neo state, she did what felt right at the time. Turning to my own experience, I realized that was true of myself also. We might as well both have said the same thing. We were one in that way. A Neo is a law unto itself. Just hope it is a good one.