@courtjester, there's some heavy stuff in here? and I can say that I have also experienced derealization and depersonalization and a psychotic break from reality. This tells me that perhaps you are on the path of spiritual awakening, as described in this article. I didn't find this article until after my transformation, but the stages described there match my experience broadly, especially the author's description of the "Dark Night of the Soul." I will post the stages from the article here for now (and you can check whether it relates to your experience/where you are in the process) and I'll explain to you my experience whenever we have time to talk again?.
 
7 Spiritual Awakening Stages
The spiritual awakening process is complex, multi-layered, and different for everyone. In reality, it cannot be fit into neat categories.
However, with that being said it is helpful to have a kind of “map” to locate where you’re at right now. The following stages are general. They define the overall flow of the spiritual awakening process:
Stage 1 – Unhappiness, despondency, and feeling lost
In this stage, you experience the aforementioned Dark Night of the Soul. This is a time of confusion, disconnection, alienation, depression, and great unhappiness with life. You are searching for something, but you don’t quite know what. There is a great looming emptiness inside of you. This stage either emerges spontaneously or due to a life crisis (e.g. breakup, divorce, death, trauma, illness, major life change).
Stage 2 – Shifting perspectives
You start to perceive reality in a totally different way. In this stage, you start seeing through the lies and delusions propagated by society. You feel unhappy with life, disturbed by the suffering you see and hopeless to the ills of the world. You no longer see life as you once did in your previous state of complacent unawareness.
Stage 3 – Seeking answers and meaning
There must be a point to all this, right? In this stage, you’re asking all the deep questions. You are in search of your life purpose, spiritual destiny, and the meaning of life itself. You will start dabbling in different metaphysical, self-help, and esoteric fields in search for answers and truth.
Stage 4 – Finding answers and experiencing breakthroughs
After a lot of soul searching, you’ll find a few teachers, practices, or belief systems that ease your existential suffering.(Beware: a lot of spiritual bypassing can occur in this stage.) You will feel a sense of expansion as old patterns dissolve and your true self (soul) begins to emerge. You may have a number of mystical experiences or brief moments of satori (enlightenment) that give you a glimpse into the ultimate nature of reality. This is a time of joy, hope, connection, and awe.
Stage 5 – Disillusionment and feeling lost again
Life is about movement. With the spiritual awakening process, there is always an ebb and a flow. In this stage, you become bored and tired of your spiritual teachers or practices. You may become disillusioned by the faux spiritual BS out there and crave for something deeper. You may have even experienced long periods of connection with the Divine, only to become separated again (this is normal). Understandably, you’ll feel disturbed and deeply upset by this experience. Additionally, while you may have experienced many mental/emotional/spiritual breakthroughs, they might feel superficial. You crave for authenticity and for deep spirituality that permeates your life and transforms every part of you. The unhappiness and stagnation you feel will motivate you to go in search for more.
Stage 6 – Deeper inner work
In this stage, you’re not interested in dabbling in feel-good spiritual philosophies or surface practices anymore. The abiding pain you feel inside motivates you to do deep inner work. You may become a serious student of meditation, mindfulness, ritual, inner child work, shadow work, body work or various other transpersonal philosophies.
Stage 7 – Integration, expansion, joy
Integration means taking the spiritual lessons you’ve learned from your inner work and applying them to your daily life. Integration happens both naturally and consciously as a habit in deep spiritual practice. In this stage, you’ll experience the most profound and long-lasting changes deep within. Many people experience prolonged mystical experiences and periods of unity with the Divine in the integration phase. Remember that enlightenment, or full self-realization, is never guaranteed: we can strive for it, but it is ultimately a gift from Life. Nevertheless, profound peace, love, and joy emerge and are felt in this stage. You may feel ready to be a spiritual mentor or role model in your community and pass on your insight to others. Life will become less about you and more about We. Your perspective will expand and you will start seeing things from the big picture. Above all else, you will feel connected, at peace with yourself, and deeply aligned with life.
Note: it is common to move back and forth between these spiritual awakening stages. Remember that this is not a linear process – you cannot just move from A to B to C. This is a complex and messy path, so it’s perfectly fine if it doesn’t look like what I’ve described. Your spiritual awakening process is unique to you. But I do hope this analysis has helped (in some way) you to ‘gain your bearings.’

@courtjester - This talk is amazing !
First I want to tell you I am sorry for what you experienced. 🙁
Now... regarding what you said about synchronicity - I never thought it could be a way for our unconscious to talk to us. I always thought it's some kind of mirroring between the inner and the outer world, like @scientiam also mentioned in his talk about his breakthrough.
But...inner world actually means to us our conscious inner world (since we can see mirroring between what is inside and what we perceive as being outside, the things we see inside are necessarily inside our consciousness and the things we see as being outside are outside of our conscious inner world, at least until the moment we see them, when they also get assimilated into the conscious inner world 🙂 ).
So maybe everything that exists is just content of one mind, let's say the Mind. And then the conscious part of the Mind is the inner experience of every person, what we see, what we think, what we believe etc. and the unconscious part of the Mind is everything else...like literally everything else, the whole Universe. And all unknown things also become parts of our consciousness and hence of the conscious part of the Mind when we see or otherwise experience them. So, there might be no "mirroring". There might just be things happening at the same time in the same place/mind...place-mind actually because it's just one thing :)). But we don't see them this way, for us they look like external things and internal things and synchronicity seems to happen when something external is mirroring something internal. We say "as above so below" but there is no above and below, no duality.
I'm not sure if this makes any sense, I keep re-reading it and it sounds hardly intelligible to me and I wrote it. :)) But I don't know how to explain it another way. I never believed that all is one. I never thought that a far away planet somewhere in the Universe can just be seen as unconscious content. But if this is the case, synchronicity IS a way of the unconscious to communicate to the conscious. I can't even see how it could work in another way, it seems...like a necessity for things to be this way for synchronicity to exist.
Speaking of synchronicity, I recently thought of Ni being similar to suffering. Not necessarily PTSD, I was rather thinking of depression and anxiety but still it's a strange coincidence, I guess.
And another one, while I was watching your video, a friend just asked me who you are. 🙂 Without knowing I was watching you right now.
About the connection between seeing a significant other and rain... This actually gave me goosebumps because not only this happened to me with the last person I dated but when you started talking about it I was thinking of that same scene before you even mentioned the rain ! It was indeed pouring and we were talking about some complicated theories he has about time. I am pretty sure he is not my soul mate though, but I think meeting him really meant something at that time, he had something to teach me.
With my first boyfriend it was snow. The first snow. When it started snowing, I realized he would play an important role in my life. Which he did !
Regarding the white doves...my thought when you started talking about them was exactly that they are a sign to forgive yourself. I don't know how you feel about tarot cards...but in my deck there is a white dove on card XX - Judgement - that is also called Forgiveness. I think the fact 2 of them appeared on a street is a strong indicator of this meaning too. I can't possibly put myself in your shoes, I have never gone through something similar. But I completely agree with your interpretation.
Oh, dear, I have to show you the card and the description. But for some reason I can't post them here, so another time.
Also about the dove representing Se. I think this is a very good interpretation too. Doves are the birds of Venus. Also they represent innocence...which is something we can associate with Pe. You also mentioned how they are not very good flyers. They tend to go up and then down again. A bit like Se motions, I think. 🙂

@bera, yes there is a sort of non0duality in the inner and the outer. I have tried to understand my experience and give intelligibility to what I saw (the one Mind had been postulated by the ancients and I think modern mystics). I myself don’t know what is going on (that is the delicious mystery in it), but definitely, once I started seeing the mystery and the pervading spirit in my conscious world/universe, I felt and saw that it was concurrent with my Se development. Here are some unstructured thoughts I wrote down, just in case it sparks anything insightful in you.

I wonder why this happened while you were developing Se. I will think about it more but it seems like you might need Se and Ni to balance each other in order to see the world this way. The pervading spirit first sounds like something you would get to using Ni but my guess is you need a certain surge of vitality and intensity of energy to...see. 🙂 Also if we are thinking of Ni patterns, I think it might not be enough to spot them as existing in order to experience the mystery. Maybe you can experience the mystery only when your mind is in a certain state. A certain level of vibration. And usually people attain these states by using different types of substances, listening to meditation music, breathing exercises and other means that aim to bring the mind to a certain point from which "seeing" becomes more likely. When you say, oh ! there are patterns ! - the ! may hold as much importance as the realization that there are patterns. 🙂
But please tell me your opinion about this.
Yes...one Mind. But I have started seeing this clearer while talking to you guys. Before I was just seeing this as a possible theory, like any other. Now it seems like it somehow must be true. I will get back to this after I read a bit about it. I know very little about philosophy and this seems to be a certain monistic view. I don't even know exactly which one, so I need to check. 🙂
@courtjester - I completely agree with you but my question is - how did the doves appear and gave a message to you ? If this happened, and it sure looks like it did, reality must work exactly like the dream world, in which everything that happens has a meaning that can be decoded later with some analysis. So, the whole material of which the world is made seems to be the same type of material of which dream world is made. And I think this was an idea in some Australian myths. It also seems to be what maya is described as. I don't really think it can be majorly changed with let's say lucid dreaming. But I think if we can analyse events in our lives as having meaning to us, this outside is suspiciously dreamlike. And we can either dismiss it as our subjective perception about a concrete reality or we can see it as actually really being a dreamworld we are navigating and co-creating.
About as above so below...I didn't mention it because 2 tarot references in one post seemed too much :))) but the card that shows this is the Magician. In the RWS based decks at least the Magician points to the sky and to the earth (as above so below), suggesting a mirroring between these 2 worlds. But this is card number 1. And this is - I think - not a coincidence but really well thought. We get the themes of reflection, oneness, illusion and mind all in the same card. That comes right after the Fool - unconsciousness and before High Priestess which deals with duality and mystery. I think our talk somehow covers these cards.
And since I started with this, I will try to post the Judgement card in my deck again...


I thought this is somehow connected to your experience and it's strange that they chose a dove. Well, it is a deck based on nature imagery. 🙂

For example, movie scenes can trigger something similar to this third type. A good example might be, while watching “Invictus” during the prison visit scene. I felt my teeth chatter, my eyes burn and tear, tasted the salt, smelled this wet sea salt-aquarium mustiness and with it came elucidation of what he was feeling emotionally and physically.

Do you think in these cases we tap into the collective unconscious and somehow start to experience what people in this particular situation have experienced? Do we just have archetypes there or do we also have memories stored there? I read some of the collective experience of different animals seems to have a certain influence on patterns of behavior of future generations. I think it was an experiment done on mice but I have to check it when I have a little more time. It seems that after many mice had to do a certain thing...maybe it was going through a maze, not sure...:)...the next generations of mice started to do the same thing faster and more efficiently. Which was thought as a possible sign that there is experience that gets passed from generation to generation. There are, of course, also people who claim to remember past lives. Can this be because (some) memories are stored somewhere in the collective unconscious?
Oh, I think I found it :
https://www.nature.com/news/fearful-memories-haunt-mouse-descendants-1.14272
It was not a maze, it was an exposure to a substance correlated to giving the mice electric shocks. And the mice pups of mice parents who were traumatized by getting electric shocks while exposed to that substance were also anxious when exposed to it. They don't seem to correlate it to collective/generation (?) memories.

The pervading spirit first sounds like something you would get to using Ni but my guess is you need a certain surge of vitality and intensity of energy to…see.

@bera, Yes, energy and vitality to "see." I think you are right, the way I thought of it in my mind is that Ni makes you think you can control the pattern/s in some way and extend yourself into a virtual future (my experience). Thinking, therefore, that the more I know of how things change, the more I can control my life path was wrong, since like painting a painting, you never know what you end up with in the process of creation. But by noticing releasing/tapping one's own energy and vitality and instinct (as a human animal), then one notices concurrently the spirit/force/energy that pervades the flow of experience, the big and little mysteries to chase and follow (which sometimes can show up as in your face coincidences to act (synchronicity), which is what happened to me).  However, I think one needs a level or type of Ni/Se consciousness to see this, I think.
I think I've been getting little clues to understand my experience more as I go. One was recently learning of the "journey of the fool" in the major tarot card sequence (which matches my journey so far (and I assume others too) and seems like the individuation process that Jung was talking about) and another one was the power of suggestion/belief/placebo I saw in a Mindfield episode replay on Youtube (all of the episodes are free), where children were deceived to cure some of their illnesses just by making them believe they were getting better with fancy equipment/technology.